Goal Setting is hard for perfectionists.
Now don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about perfectionists. You have high standards, and you like to push yourself to get everything finished.
You see, goal setting has more to do with perseverance than perfection.
In fact one of the greatest things needed when setting goals, is the ability to recommit to your goal again and again after falling short.
The average person who sets a goal, which resulted in long-term change in their life, failed on average of 14 times before they finally reached it. The challenge for perfectionists is that you hate failing. Although this is a great quality, it can severely undermine your long-term growth when it comes to goal setting.
Perfectionists hate when they are not perfect, hence the title. But in order to reach many of our goals there is a lot of failure along the way. If your not careful as a perfectionist, all of this falling short can wear you out to the point where you give up on your goal setting to pursue something else that you can be a bit closer to perfect in.
If you struggle with perfectionism, here are a few goal setting tips for perfectionists to help you out in the goal setting process.
- Break your goals down into smaller weekly units. It is easier to have a higher degree of success when our unit of measurement is smaller.
- Make sure all of your goals are measurable. As a perfectionist you like to measure things anyways so this should not be a problem.
- Aim for an A- or an A but not perfection.
What do I mean by an A- or an A? Imagine that you are in college. Unless you are extremely brilliant there is no way you are going to get 100% in every class. Because perfection in school is pretty hard to reach you set your sights on the next highest standard, which is usually an A- or an A. If you reach these grades, though not perfect you will feel pretty good about yourself.
I want you to carry that same mindset over to your goal setting process. Each week shoot to get 85-95% of your goals completed. Although you will not be perfect, you will achieve a high level of success. In fact most people do not even come close to that kind of percentage in their goal setting. This allows for a few setbacks and yet still lets you feel good about the high standards you place on yourself and the goal setting process.