Pursuing Perfection Or Striving For Excellence? 5 Tips To Achieve Excellence
- Aug 31, 2021
- 5 min read
Written by: Adelina Stefan, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Why going for perfection?
Perfectionism is often admired by many, as we are putting lots of effort into achieving important goals; at the same time, we often demand impossible or excessively high standards from ourselves and others, without accepting anything else than “impeccable”, which can often lead to mental health problems, depression, and anxiety.
Perfectionism can often interfere with striving for excellence, and sometimes it can become self-sabotaging if we constantly try to overdeliver, overthink or overanalyze any decision we may need to make.
If you find yourself unwilling to delegate tasks easily, trying to manage everything on yourself, or feeling frustrated when you have to deliver a task and still find a lot of areas to improve, start asking yourself: How important and worthy of your full effort that task is? What possibilities do you have?
Do you often feel responsible for overdelivering and overperform? And if you cannot do that, would you feel that you are not productive or valued enough for your efforts? Do you feel that something catastrophic would happen if you don’t reply immediately to your client's requests or if you fail to over-deliver every single day? Are you annoyed when you don’t deliver 100% constantly on a project? Has this become a pattern? Last, how realistic are your expectations about yourself, whether this concerns your grades, relationships, work matters, or salary goals?
Understanding how important a task or an action that you want/need to complete is, plays a crucial role in determining your trajectory and creating a process to achieve excellence.
How is excellence different from perfectionism?
Excellence is the desire to become the best version of yourself, to strive for the better, and become a high achiever while delivering quality results and focusing on the process rather than merely on the outcome. Perfectionists often tend to focus on achievement, forgetting any major steps that they have taken to reach the top.
Excellence entails setting SMART goals, while perfection is about spotless results. Remember that as individuals, we do not have an innate capacity to excel. We cultivate excellence throughout their life through smart work, focusing on continuous development and growth.
Excellence is about continuous improvement, while perfection is something that cannot fail and doesn’t admit any mistakes. It restricts a growth mindset and hinders both innovation and your ability to learn and constantly improve.
Striving for excellence motivates you, while perfectionism affects your self-esteem and reduces your productivity, your efficiency, effectiveness, and peace of mind.
The pursuit of excellence keeps you focused on what really matters, a key concept in the Personal Agility System, created by Peter Stevens, which aims to help you align what you do with what is important for you. By constantly inspecting and adapting, applying a correction when you are drifting off, you will have a higher chance of success without requiring your focus on complex plans or perfect results.
5 Tips to Achieve Excellence
Develop a growth mindset. People with a growth mindset are more likely to embrace challenges, learn from mistakes, and develop new skills. Take time to reflect, acknowledge and accept all your failures. You will be more likely to admire others, learn from them, and be inspired by others’ success to persistently pursue your goals and solutions.
Be passionate. Do things that make you happy! What do you like to spend your time and energy on? By reflecting on your values and what makes you effective, you will become more confident in what makes you unique or at least unusual, in your own competencies, and hence, on what you need more.
Know your talents and strengths. Align your smart goals with your inner values. This will help you stand out and position yourself as an expert in these uncertain times. In this way, you will be able to show to your potential employer how you will bring values inside the organization, what makes you unique or at least unusual. Remember, though, that your unique characteristics, values, skills, and passions go beyond your job!
Work smart, not hard. Focus on quality rather than quantity. Create clear and realistic goals based on your passions and purpose. For instance, if you are a job seeker, aim to send few personalized applications per week and ensure you take the necessary steps to prepare for the roles you really want to get. A tailored job application will bring better results than several applications sent using ‘easy apply’ button on LinkedIn.
Ask for constructive feedback. Tracking your progress regularly will allow you to check where you are, celebrate small wins, or understand if you need to adjust before being too late. When asking for feedback, ensure you are open to hearing honest assessments with the intent to improve your performance and develop as an individual. Remember that you can always change something if you feel that it’s not going in your target direction or serving you anymore.
Understand the deeper root of perfectionism and where it has taken hold in your personal or professional life, and accept that nobody is perfect. Excellence is a process, a self-discovery journey, rather than a destination or an endpoint.
By focusing on excellence, your results will constantly be improving, and you will always be striving for the better!
Adelina Stefan, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Adelina Stefan is a Professional Certified Coach designated by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), Intercultural Trainer, Ignite Coach Training Facilitator, and Personal Agility Ambassador (PARA), with a deep expertise in International Human Resource Management (IHRM), and Expatriate & Career Transition Coaching.
Adelina is the Coaching Training Co-Facilitator of Ignite Global ’s Professional Coaching Mastery Certification (PCMC) as well as Program Director of Ignite Global Europe and the main facilitator of the PCMC training in Europe.
Greek-Romanian national, living in Switzerland, Adelina has worked for 12+ years across cultures. Her professional journey has enabled her to catalyze individuals’ potential, supporting expatriates integrate in a new cultural setting and creating alignment around what really matters.
Adelina specializes in working with senior-level executives dealing with challenging work environments that can affect both their performance and well-being. She supports organizations in building a corporate coaching culture by highlighting individuals’ maximum potential and engagement so that they become dedicated and highly successful employees.
She is also the author of two research books Global Strategies for Culturally Diverse Workforce: HR Agenda (2019) and Advancing Intercultural Perspectives through Corporate Training (2018).
Her practice includes Career, Life, Executive, and Personal Agility Coaching for individuals, as well as corporate training and executive coaching for improving intercultural relations.
