By Amy King
Our innate human drive for improvement, competition, and mastery is
useful to unlocking athletic performance… if harnessed properly.
Regardless, of where you are on the spectrum from recreational exerciser to elite athlete, elements of perfectionism can have an impact on your overall well-being, needs and programming.
Hence, in this article, we’ll unpack the role of perfectionism in athletic performance and how to harness it to your advantage.
Athletes, like everyday exercisers grapple with many emotional health challenges. One such challenge that impacts an athlete’s needs and programming is perfectionism.
Regardless of the chosen sport, athletes are scrutinized. This is the case especially for professional or elite athletes who are constantly judged by coaches, the public, commentators, family, the press, social media and others on their bodies, performances, speed, style, the last event they either won or messed up, and so on.
Numbers, pictures, and reels are shared. Benchmarks are given. Podcasts are aired and athletes are constantly reminded of whether they have improved on a time, or a number, or a technique, or against a fellow athlete or a competitor.
And this constant focus can be motivational for everyone, heighten healthy competitiveness, can be good for creating a brand or promoting a sport.
It also, means striving for improvement and meeting a certain standard becomes a way of life for many athletes.
Athletic pursuits usually arise from individuals who have a drive to win, or to get better, and often build their life around their chosen sport. They set standards and strive to meet those standards every day.
When this striving is combined with the athlete’s innate love of their sport, and their drive for excellence and skill mastery, this approach can become a path to a fulfilling, even joyful obsession for them.
In these conditions perfectionistic tendencies can be helpful as it pushes an athlete to do better, to learn, to grow, and to show up for practice.
Athletes with adaptive perfectionistic tendencies tend to set ambitious, inspiring goals and strive for personal bests. Which helps them stay highly motivated to improve, and able to focus on process over results.
That means these athletes are often very willing to “put in the reps” of practicing core skills with anything that will help give them the edge.
That means:
These types of athletes tend to think bigger picture as well, so they think about:
The good news is well, that regardless of whether you feel you have perfectionistic tendencies or not, there is nothing stopping you from developing the attention to skill develop and vision that successful athletes have.
Perfectionism can be debilitating, especially if it stems from a deeply embedded belief about being “defective” or not good enough. Or if athletic pursuits were pushed onto someone from an early age.
Perfectionism and procrastination can also become closely linked... and there is a whole bunch of super interesting psychological insights on “perfectionism” and how it can arise from childhood trauma and so on.
And of course, there is a whole other topic on regulating our nervous system and emotional state to overcome maladaptive perfectionism.
That will not be covered in this article; however, I do encourage you to engage a suitably qualified expert or practitioner such as a psychologist, if you feel that perfectionism is showing up in a dysfunctional way for you.
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As I mentioned before athletic pursuits usually arise from individuals who have a drive to win, or to get better, and often build their life around their chosen sport. They set standards and strive to meet those standards every day.
When this way of living is combined with harsh self-criticism and zero tolerance for perceived “failure”, it can lead to anxiety, depression, and burnout.
Perfectionistic tendencies under these conditions, fosters the “not-good-enough-itis” mentality that sometimes goes along with wanting to be the best. This typically involves:
Athletes suffering from maladaptive perfectionistic tendencies may appear to be the hardest trainers in the pack, but often they end up burning out or losing, because they’re so preoccupied with the fear of failing.
These athletes tend to punish themselves harshly for “failures” and “mistakes” and tend to have a “f*Ck it” mentality, as in: I ate too much chocolate, so f*Ck it — I’m just going to eat the rest of the block!
They’re also often immobilized by errors and can’t easily adapt to changes. Even in the absence of coaches pressuring them, these athletes readily pressure themselves – but usually not in a way that is helpful.
At some point most athletes would likely find themselves experiencing both useful and less useful impacts from perfectionistic tendencies. Speaking from personal experience, perfectionism has been both a blessing and a curse.
On one hand, it complements my personal growth agenda and helps me deliver what I want at a high standard. On the other hand, the need to get things “right” gets in the way and can stop me from getting things I need to do, before I even start. Sound familiar?
And of course, like many other things in life… how you go about things in one area of your life often shows up in how you do everything in your life.
So, outside of suitably qualified professional help, other coaches and mentors, here are some of the things I undertake to help overcome less helpful impacts, of perfectionism. I’ll also share a practical 5-minute exercise you can take to help you harness your perfectionistic tendencies.
The key to mental reframing is to first become aware of how perfectionism is showing up in your life. What behaviour patterns are you noticing around how you go about your training, nutrition and recovery that are enhancing, supporting, or hindering your goals?
Step 1
Building self-awareness around what we are thinking, what we are doing and how we are feeling will help us identify unhelpful thoughts and potentially give us a choice to reframe our thinking. A good way to do this is through mindfulness and self-reflection activities such as journalling, breathwork or meditation.
Step 2
Once you become aware of potentially unhelpful patterns and behaviours, I have found it helpful to remind myself of what I can practice, to build better skills.
For example, reminding myself to embrace errors as learning opportunities and useful information.
I then look for opportunities when I can take a calm, analytical approach, and model an objective, “it’s just data that helps us improve” growth mindset.
Sometimes, I can do this within the moment of catching myself ruminating over a “perceived failure” and other times, such as post comp, I need a bit more time until I am ready to do this.
Critically evaluating the internal standards. Personally, my most common frustrations arise from where I have fallen short of a standard that I have set myself or even a long-established base standard.
For example, where I have let a boundary slip that has caused me to skip a baseline habit that helps me towards a goal. Other times its unrealistic expectations and not enough flexibility in balancing my capacity and demand.
Recently, I found myself working all weekend, because I had set an unrealistic standard of what I could get done before Friday based on old information. Once I completed the task, I basically did an autopsy, shared the learnings, and set up a plan to communicate with myself and others the parameters of what was reasonably doable. In other words, I set a reasonable standard, tested the logic, set up a boundary and solicited both support and 2-way accountability from my bosses.
When I haven’t quite nailed something and especially when I have perceived that I have f*Cked up…
I take the same approach I would with one of my clients, and that is to show compassion and curiosity.
For instance, when an athlete doesn’t stick to their plan, I show compassionate curiosity: That’s interesting; what do you make of that?
For example, after months of a high workload across training, work, and life I slept in recently and missed a training session with my coach.
When I approached this incident with curiosity by asking “I wonder why that happened?”, I realised I hadn’t set myself up for success and something was going to give.
The key to note here, is I haven’t beaten myself (too much) up and I haven’t given myself a free pass. I’ve since put things in place to prevent the likelihood of this happening again anytime soon!
In this simple 5-minute exercise, we are simply going to play with the two types of thoughts and beliefs of perfectionism we discussed in this article.
Step 1: To do this, practice holding one thought at a time in your mind – or read them out loud to yourself in the 1st person:
Thought 1: I want to be and do my best, and if I keep practicing, I’ll get there.
Thought 2: If I make any mistake at all, even a tiny one, I am a terrible failure. I am never good enough.
Step 2: Journal or make a mental note of:
I cannot express the irony surrounding my efforts to write this blog. For context, it’s Monday morning and this article was due, at the latest, by 12pm last Friday so that my team could help publish it for last week.
I managed to write all but my final thoughts by Friday but could not overcome the resistance I felt to review and “perfect” this article…
This morning, I haven’t even read the rest of the article – I have put on the proverbial horse blinkers and just set out to write this section… and it’s taken almost not time.
To be fair, I did do some work on the weekend to resource myself and work through some mental and emotional blocks – using the 5-step process I included in the article. (Hopefully, that’ll help keep me productive for the rest of this week!)
I also stumbled across a great 9-minute Win Hot breathwork exercise that really helped. It’s a little different to the type of breathwork I normally engage in, so it made for a nice change.
Here’s the link if you’d like to check it out yourself: https://youtu.be/tybOi4hjZFQ
So, my final thoughts are Perfectionism can be useful for athletes and high performers… it can help give you the motivation and direction to accomplish some great things.
It can also become your biggest roadblock. Things get left at 95% but not distributed. Perfectionism morphs into procrastination almost instantly.
The trick to harnessing perfectionism involves building self-awareness, setting realistic standards and expectations and releasing any underlying mental and emotional blocks that are preventing you from progressing.
Progress Over Perfection
Did this article resonate with you or remind you of someone you know? Let us know in the comments and feel free to share the article.
Amy King is the founder of AKE Fitness & Nutrition. When she’s not serving her clients, she is pursuing her corporate career in mining, bodybuilding and spending time with loved ones. She calls Perth, Western Australia home.
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