Posted on August 5, 2013

Stress and time management

If you are a perfectionist, your (excessively?) High level of demands is probably one of the important causes of your stress, the one you generate around you and your difficulty balancing your family and professional life.

We describe hereafter this existential imperfection test to which you are perhaps confronted and propose some ways for a better management of the time.

Perfection – Imperfection

The feeling of imperfection is an existential test manifested from the painful awareness of the gap between what seems possible and objectively assessing their own abilities. It is a feeling of limiting its own power. Etymologically speaking, imperfect is all that is not complete.

Any continuous improvement process such as the “PDCA” or “DEMING” wheel any performance research, any quality approach would be impossible without the desire for perfection for a job well done, effective and irreproachable.

This existential test therefore has a stimulating facet. But be careful, it can also be very unpleasant. This is particularly true when its opposite face, that of imperfection, begins to unfold.

In organizations, one characterizes imperfectly any person or thing that presents defects, shortcomings, deficiencies, failings. For example, an incomplete or incomplete job, a product that does not meet customer expectations, a unit that does not respect the processes describing the internal functioning, a hierarchical manager who makes a mistake … The frustration caused by the confrontation more Or less obvious with its own imperfection can become unsustainable for those who are not capable of assuming the reality of their human limitations. To mitigate the effects of this confrontation, we often implement the following parades:

– the denial of its limits and imperfections (megalomania, contempt for others, prejudices, fatuity …);

– the search for total certitudes, absolute understanding, infallibility. The development of arrogant relationships with others. Development of a “vertical” mode of thinking;

– taking inordinate risks taking no account of available resources and capacities;

– the setting of disproportionately high objectives (which can be forgiven for non-realization);

– the search for scapegoats, the displacement of responsibility: “customers do not understand the concept”, “sales forces do not know how to highlight this product”;

– non-decision to avoid error, difficulties in identifying and expressing one’s will.

While a certain amount of perfectionism can be stimulating for individual and collective performance, we all know its detrimental effects. An exaggerated emphasis on this existential orientation leads those who are victims to the loss of discernment of the essential, drowning in details and expenditure of energy and resources disproportionate to the results obtained. 80% of efforts to get 20% of the results. Perfectionists confuse precision and performance.

How can we help companies and people who “get bogged down” in perfectionism? Here are some avenues.

– work mourning his ideal image … Learning to assume his imperfections and let go;

– work of reappropriation of introjections (“You must be the best!”);

– work on accepting its own limits;

– positive evaluation work (learning to practice appreciative investigation of the phenomena that surround us).