When You Don't Think Your Content Is Good Enough: Dealing with Perfectionism As A Creator
Strategies for overcoming perfectionist tendencies (with a little Notion template) + an end of year invitation.
An End Of Year Invitation
Before we dive in, I just wanted to extend an end of year invite.
This year has been a lot, at least for me. For the last few years I’ve hosted a small circle of friends to reflect on the prior year and think forward to the next one. This time, I wanted to open it up to you, wonderful newsletter readers!
This year, in addition to questions reflecting on 2021, I’m guiding us through identity-based goal setting for 2022.
What Are Identity-based Goals?
I’ve written about identity-based goals in the past, here, but the following are a few quick examples.
Let’s say we’re talking about your personal life and friendships. An identity-based goal would be: “I am a responsive friend” and the practices to put in place for next year might be to “spend an hour every Sunday texting to check in on friends.”
Or let’s say you create a creator goal such as: “I am a professional writer,” the practices might include “carving out 30 minutes every day to write and 30 minutes to contact editorial outlets.”
Details & RSVP
Reflections On Perfectionism
This week I was having a conversation with a friend about his fear of publishing content. He felt that whatever he wrote wasn’t going to be a good reflection of him or offer the same value he brings to 1-on-1 conversations. In other words, he was scared that his content wasn’t going to be good or perfect enough.
And it got me thinking about perfectionism in all its forms. So much of this newsletter focuses on the pursuit of excellence & on iteratively getting better, but what happens when pursuing excellence becomes a compulsion?1
This issue covers how perfectionism works, strategies for tamping down on perfectionist tendencies (with a fun little notion activities), and ways to build anti-perfectionist patterns into your courses, content and materials.
What is perfectionism?
This shouldn’t be a hard question, but the more I read, the more clear it’s become that there isn’t a huge amount of agreement over the scientific definition of perfectionism.
Perfectionism can be irrational, crippling, restrictive and much more. But, it can also be associated with positive behaviors, like being detail-oriented, meticulous, driven. One of the reasons people struggle to let go of perfectionist tendencies - even when they come at a high cost - is because they imagine it will mean letting go of positive qualities like being driven. It also can mean releasing the feelings of safety that can accompany a tendency not to take risks as a perfectionist or issues like indecision. As researcher Dina Nir suggests, to work on perfectionism, you have to unbundle the positive and negative aspects and see what parts you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. 2
Qualities of a Perfectionist
In Tal Ben-Shahar’s book The Pursuit of Perfect, he helps outline some of the qualities of being a perfectionist and sets them on a continuum with what he calls being an “optimalist.” If perfectionists are grounded in black and white ideals, optimalists are grounded in a more nuanced reality.
These terms don’t necessarily apply evenly across your life and not every quality is expressed in the same degree in each situation or part of your life: you can be a perfectionist at work and closer to an optimalist in your family life, for example.3
Consequences of Perfectionism
The problem is that perfectionism actually makes you more susceptible to a whole range of mental health challenges, from low self esteem to depression, disordered eating, anxiety and much more.4
I won’t go too deep into it, but perfectionism itself is also often a symptom of issues like insecurity, inferiority complex, discontentment and more. 5
But having identified it as a problem, how do you start chipping away at your perfectionist tendencies?
Anti-perfectionist Strategies
The antidote to perfectionism, and the prescription for optimal-ism is acceptance of reality, of what is, be it failures, emotions, or success. When we do not accept failure, we avoid challenge and effort and deprive ourselves of the opportunity to learn and develop; when we do not accept painful emotions, we end up ruminating on them obsessively—we magnify them and deny ourselves the possibility of serenity; and when we fail to accept, embrace, and appreciate success, then nothing we do has real meaning. 6
Unbundling and unraveling perfectionism takes practice. It takes reframing events and ideals and slowly creating a more realistic picture of what you can do. I’ve added a few example activities for practice here, but you can see a more complete list below.
Activity 1: Reframing perfectionist interpretations
Take an event, identify the perfectionist (all or nothing) interpretation you associated with it, pinpoint the underlying emotion, and then rewrite an interpretation based on the qualities and emotions of an optimalist.
Activity 2: Reframing how you measure success
Perfectionists often don’t celebrate successes because they can’t meet their ideal, unrealistic expectations.
Take a part of your life and identify your expected ideal. For example, your ideal might be to work 80 hours a week. Then consider a realistic assessment of all your obligations to set a new “good enough” target.
More activities can be found here:
So what does this all have to do with being a creator? Well, being a creator is often a long slog - it is creating content consistently, sometimes without much feedback, over a period of time. Being paralyzed by the feeling that something isn’t good enough, obsessively researching content until you run out of time, deeming launches to be failures rather than lessons - these are all hallmarks of perfectionist thinking that make being a creator nearly impossible.
But even outside of perfectionism as a creator roadblock, there are ways to think about how to incorporate the psychology and lessons of perfectionism into the experiences you design for your audience.
Building Anti-Perfectionist Patterns into your Creator Products
Finally, a few principles for building anti-perfectionist patterns into your creator products.
Indie Courses
Help students better accept reality
At the start of a course, help students create more realistic assessments of what success would look like given their own, individual constraints (aka it may not be completing 100% of a course for example)
Deemphasize generic goals and celebrate specific practices that a student implements in line with their realistic assessment
Help students better recognize and accept success
Celebrate interim successes and call out improvements rather than outcomes
Help students better accept failure
Create opportunities to reframe or examine perceived failures (such as not completing assigned work) and the emotions behind these failures
Info Products
Help audience better accept failure & recognize success
Honestly share and model the ups and downs of your journey creating your product (even if it’s just a component of your landing page) to help model the reality of a successful journey for your audience
Any thoughts on this section? I'd like to start regularly indicating ways that these psychology concepts relate to designing your creator products. If you have any thoughts, ideas, suggestions, feel free to comment below!
End of Year Note
Finally, I’m taking a few weeks off of publishing the podcast and newsletter so I can rest, plan, and work on some exciting content for January. So, I’ll see you back here on Thursday January 13th!
Have a happy holiday season and wonderful start to your new year!
-Alina
Smith, Ann. Overcoming Perfectionism: Finding the Key to Balance and Self-Acceptance. Revised, Updated, Health Communications Inc, 2013.
Ben-Shahar, Tal. The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life. 1st ed., McGraw Hill, 2009.
Ben-Shahar, Tal. The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life. 1st ed., McGraw Hill, 2009.
Ben-Shahar, Tal. The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life. 1st ed., McGraw Hill, 2009.
Guise, Stephen. How to Be an Imperfectionist: The New Way to Self-Acceptance, Fearless Living, and Freedom from Perfectionism. 1st ed., Selective Entertainment LLC, 2015.
Ben-Shahar, Tal. The Pursuit of Perfect: How to Stop Chasing Perfection and Start Living a Richer, Happier Life. 1st ed., McGraw Hill, 2009.