Growing up, I always admired (read) envied the girls and women who seemed to have it all together. They seemed perfect and did everything perfectly. In school they were the girls that were always appointed as prefects. They were always, neat and tidy. Not a speck of dust on their clothes, not a strand of hair out of place. They wrote like they’d taken calligraphy lessons, their desks and lockers looked like shop display windows, they had the best manners and to crown it all, they achieved top grades. I grew up to hate these girls because society compared us, mere mortals, to them.
Sadly such standards of perfection are what a lot of girls
and women measure themselves against. We
berate ourselves for not being good enough.
Our homes have to super clean and tidy, we have to look like we walked
out of a fashion magazine, our children have to have perfect manners and our
families have to be picture perfect. It
is no surprise that our perfectionist tendencies are carried over to our
workplaces. Every assignment that we
carry out has to be flawless. We create
a work plan that is supposed flow without any hitches to achieve the perfect
results. This pursuit of perfection at
work is costly to women. It discourages
women from taking risks or getting out of their comfort zones. Most women will not undertake a project
unless they are certain that the end product is guaranteed to be perfect. The reality however is that most first
attempts at anything will be riddled with errors, disruptions and challenges. You have to work through challenges and
improvise to find solutions that will achieve results. The results might also turn out to be above
or below expectation.
Venturing into the unknown is repulsive to women who are
perfectionists. More often than not high
risk projects are the ones that generate visibility and attract staff
promotions within the company. Women
tend to gravitate towards fields that mostly have predictable results such as
operations, teaching, nursing etc. Sadly
they are also the careers that do not have as much upward mobility. Their pay is also not as high as the riskier
jobs such as CEO, Architect, Pilot, Entrepreneur etc. which tend to attract
more men than women.
Women also struggle with imposter syndrome. A person with imposter syndrome feels like a
fraud. She feels that she does not
deserve the accolades or accomplishments that she has achieved. This results in the fear that one day she
will be discovered as not being good enough.
The top performer that excelled at past projects will feel that she got
lucky and will be fearful of taking on new assignments because she may not
perform as well as before. This is
prevalent among high achieving women who will credit luck rather than their hard
work to their success. They may harbor
feelings of inferiority and feel that they do not match up to their high
achieving colleagues. This is a sign of
perfectionism. A person who believes in
growth, will see new assignments as an opportunity to learn new things and not
as a chance to be judged negatively by colleagues.
Girls need to be taught how to be brave instead of how to be
perfect. They need to be encouraged to
explore, attempt new things, make mistakes and learn from failure. This is how they will inculcate a growth
mindset. We also need to shed the weight
of societal expectations of looking, acting, behaving and believing that we
have to do everything perfectly. Having
a growth mindset will help us to accomplish much more than perfection ever will,
because perfection is a fallacy.
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