Today is January 24 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often are you pursuing perfection in yourself, or in your children?”
Navigating the chaos requires many skills, traits, and habits. Being perfect is not one of them.
After studying hundreds of case studies of those who navigated the chaos, not one ever reached perfection. In fact, those who navigate the chaos seldom have the desire for perfection.
To successfully launch and navigate a career today one needs to maintain flexibility of mind, be comfortable with ambiguity, and quickly adapt to changing situations. Parents who demand perfection from a child are unrealistic.
As one researcher noted “Pressure on children to achieve is rampant, because parents now seek much of their status from the performance of their kids.”
Perfectionism lowers the ability to take calculated risks, reduces creativity and stifles innovation.
Therefore, a child pressured into achieving perfection is highly unlikely to be engaged in self-determination.
“Psychologists today differentiate between positive perfectionism, which is adaptive and healthy, and negative perfectionism, which is maladaptive and neurotic.”
In Tal Ben-Shahar's book The Pursuit of Perfect he refers to negative perfectionism simply as perfectionism and to positive perfectionism as optimalism.
For Ben-Shahar the optimist embraces the constraints of reality while a perfectionist rejects those constraints.
An adult, or child, engaged in self-determination learns to accept the constraints of reality, adjusts their goals and aspirations accordingly and demonstrates their commitment to discovering the self they would like to become.
Salvador Dali observed “Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it.”
As you go about your day consider asking yourself how often are you pursuing perfection from yourself or your child?