Support4Change Blog

November 27, 2007

Categories: Lessons of a Recovering Perfectionist, Strengthening Friendship and Relationships

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT

RECOMMENDATION: Read to the bottom of this blog to find seventeen articles that can help you have a less stressful, more peaceful holiday season, whether you are a perfectionist or not. If you don’t have time to read all of them today, which I expect is the case, please come back and read more whenever things get a bit too frantic. I’m taking myself out of the holiday rush by going to Washington, DC, Egypt, and Kenya. But even if I were to stay home, I would also need to be reminded of the lessons I’ve learned through many years of putting more pressure on myself more than is necessary. You can stress less also.

When I went to bed last night, I had already written the following four paragraphs:

The bed in the guest room is piled with clothes, camera, and miscellaneous things I intend to pack today.  Although we don’t leave until Saturday, packing light is not my strength and it’s been a challenge to decide what to bring for a month-long trip requiring clothes for cold Washington, DC, moderate-weather Egypt, and Equatorial Kenya. It’s also a challenge to get packing done before the last minute.

Every vacation I swear I will be ready earlier and each time I stay up too late the night before an early-morning flight with things I should have done earlier. This time I’m doing much better. When I finish tonight, I’ll have been completely packed three days before we leave!

Then in the next three days I plan to create a series of blog entries that my part-time assistant can upload while I’m gone, giving you something new to read every few days. For each entry I’ll (1) tell you where we are supposed to be that day, (2) give you a link to an article that fits the atmosphere of the holidays, and (3) recommend a book I have enjoyed.

Then if you decided to buy the book from Amazon.com, you could help defray some of the cost of this blog and my websites. The percentage of each book that Amazon pays affiliates isn’t much. It certainly won’t underwrite a month-long trip, but it might help defray some of the cost of maintaining this blog.

With those ideas in my head, I fell into bed. Then sometime during the night I had a conversation with myself and concluded that perfectionists and recovering perfectionists have very different thought patterns:

This is how my perfectionist thinks

I have to create a series of blog entries so that anyone who comes to the blog while I’m on vacation will have something new to read, which is what I did last year when we went to Australia and New Zealand. This way, if first-time visitors find an entry they enjoy, they will want to come back. But if they return and find the old blog entry still there, they’ll stop coming. Soon I’ll lose all my readers and it will take months to entice them to return. And I need readers if I’m going to sell my products beginning January 15th.

This is how I think when my recovering perfectionist is in charge

If my goal is to leave for vacation without being exhausted, I have to decide what can be removed from the “to-do” list. When I look at all the things that must be done, I am left with a few that come under the heading of “desirable but not essential.” The latter should not be started until everything else is finished. And the reality is that there isn’t enough time to do the blog if the other things are to get finished on time.

Besides, when I look at how often I write in the blog when I’m not on vacation, it’s a great deal less often than I was planning to have available for when I was away. So I will make one entry today and let that be sufficient for the month. When I come back on Jan. 2, I can return to the blog with new ideas.

Telling my perfectionist to take a hike, I have made a decision that reduces much of the stress I was feeling in these last days before the vacation. If I can’t finish this by the end of the day, which includes a shopping trip to stores where you need two things here, two things there, and only one thing somewhere else, I will send it “as-is,” which perfectionists find extremely difficult to accept. But we “recovering perfectionists” are learning that good enough is good enough and usually all that is really required.

Here now are a few things I’d like to share with you.

The picture above comes from Katie’s Cards. I think it is one of the loveliest animated holiday cards you’ll find. It is my greeting to you this year for I imagine the scene could come from the places we will be visiting next month. If you go to Using the Internet for Creative Cards and click on Christmas peace cards, you can view the card and then go to Katie’s Cards when it is through playing. Perhaps you will want to send your own card from her site.

Incidentally, when I tried to see whether the link to the card worked, I discovered there wasn’t any music and tried several round-about ways to get it to function. Finally I discovered I had muted the volume on my computer so, of course, I couldn’t hear it. But this is the kind of thing that happens when you’re working on the web—or doing anything else in life. So let me tell all you perfectionists out there: if you think you can get things done on time perfectly without any glitches, you’re in for a surprise and a lot of frustration.

The following are links to articles that are appropriate for this season of friendship, love, and family. I recommend you read one today and then come back and check out others later. That way, you can pretend this blog is new each time you visit it!

Diagnosing Perfectionism
Since this blog discussed the role that perfectionism played in writing this, you may want to discover whether you’ve allowed this character trait to get in your way of living life with less self-imposed stress.

Gathering the Family for Love and Healing
What can you do when your family is less than perfect and a get-together is being planned?

Designing a Guilt-Free Holiday
If you tend to burden yourself by designing a holiday that requires more effort than you really want to expend, here are some tricks for getting out of the guilt-producing mode.

Holiday Energy Boosters and Drainers
Do the holidays add to your stress or boost your energy? Here are ways to let the light shine through with days that are pleasant, not stressed.

Celebrating the Year That’s Ending
If your energy is depleted by holiday festivities, you can still celebrate the year that’s coming to a close in a meaningful way without a fancy party.

Welcoming the Year That’s Beginning
While some things will be out of your control in the coming year, you can choose the attributes with which you will deal with what life brings you.

Easy Relaxation Techniques
Knowing how to relax is a skill that often must be learned in our over-anxious and busy world, where even taking time for meditation can seem to cut into the things we must do each day.

Preparing Dinner Can Actually be Enjoyable With This Approach
This “stress buster” helps you reduce tension when you are preparing dinner in the midst of shopping and wrapping presents.

Opening the Heart After You’ve Been Wounded PLUS Who Gives Us Freedom?
The ending of our first love can close the heart to future relationships if we don’t allow ourselves to be open to new relationships that can be even better for us than earlier ones.

Asking for Forgiveness
Forgiveness in relationships requires the willingness to ask for forgiveness.

Making Time for Zippers
In our activity-packed, over-busy lives, we all need ways to slow down, even if only a little, as this article points out.

Going Beyond Ordinary Listening: “Listening Plus” PLUS Friends Who Rekindle Your Inner Light
Learn how to communicate so fully that your partner can’t help but pay attention and listen to every word.

Love Risks Rejection PLUS Love is Willing to Plunge Into the Unknown
Discover how personal pain can cause people to reject love and how love is willing to plunge into the unknown.

Love is Patient With Life’s Difficulties PLUS Laughing at Life’s Absurdities
Learn how to laugh at the hardships that enter every life, and also at life’s absurdities in this crazy world.

Mr. Lincoln’s Rose PLUS Giving Our Loved Ones a Name
This sweet story demonstrates that love continues after death, at least in this case of a long-married couple.

The Heart of Love PLUS What Do Green Beans Have to Do With Love?
This is an amazing story of a special brother who dies in an accident and whose heart is transplanted into the lover of his sister.

True Love PLUS We Are the Love We Are Seeking
Two children who played together in nursery school and then are separated for 17 years discover love and understanding.

Finally, however you celebrate the holidays, I hope you will allow yourself the space to create love and forgiveness for yourself and for others.

There will be much to write about when I return. In the meantime, I hope these articles will give you something to read between preparing for holiday events and enjoying them.

If you’d like to contact me, please contact me through the contact form on Support4Change.