Excellence is the practice of doing your best, all the time.
Excellence is pushing yourself to the brink and beyond, in the name of your great work.
Excellence means tying up the loose ends, following the trail your customers take to be sure they won’t get lost.
Excellence means thinking about and speaking about your process and your work in holistic language. Language that uses grace, compassion, empathy, and forgiveness as its mode of speech.
Perfectionism is the practice of never being happy with what you have done.
Perfectionism masquerades as excellence, up until you feel beaten down and so unhappy with yourself that you want to give up altogether.
Perfectionism means that, instead of looking at your work holistically, you look for ways to tear it down, to believe it will fail. It uses the language of disappointment and unworthiness. It cannot see potential, because all it knows is the unhappy striving toward a goal that can never be reached.
Many of us are perfectionists.
The problem with perfectionism is not that it compels us to do marvelous work; the problem with perfectionism is that it blinds us to what we have done, and what we are capable of.
Perfectionism steals away your joy in creating, because it assumes things must be a certain way. It leaves no room for the beautiful mess of life, or the truest truth that things will never go the way you have them planned.
Be excellent in your work.
Be excellent to yourself as you strive for greatness. Thank perfectionism for showing you how beautifully and completely you can make something, and then wave it goodbye.
The world needs your excellence, not your perfection.
I'm Rhiannon,
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Rhiannon,
Thanks for the reminder. It is important to remember perfectionism takes away our potential because we only focus on what’s lacking. I needed to hear this moving into the holidays!
You’re welcome, Carrie! :)
I LOVE this post, being a perfectionist and starting to understand what is behind, what my patterns are. Thank you Rhiannon!
Patterns are a powerful way to understand how to shift things in ourselves – I’m glad you are seeing them. :)
You make amazing points here… and all wonderful reminders. Time to be excellent!
Hooray, Robyn! :)
Great Rhi!
I have felt that perfectionism hitting me these last weeks.
It’s paralyzing.
I used to think that one of the meanings of perfectionism, the reason why it happens; is the fear from becoming totally great, reaching excellence and meeting success.
But thanks to your beautiful writing, I’m seeing that it is not really perfectionism, or at least not totally, It’s symptoms may have been there.
but it is not really it, in my case at least.
If it was simply perfectionism, everything would have ended there: no advancement, no continuing the work in progress, and not keeping that vision that you want to reach for the project you’d be working on.
But what’s really happening is a search for excellence; you are totally right, and you express it brilliantly in your writing.
Thank you for your beautiful writing Rhi : )
K’
Wonderful piece x
This is my first time here and I have to say how beautifully elegant your site is. I LOVE it! ?
Rhi, what a fantastic gift this post is!
I spent most of my teenage years as a perfectionist. Then I went the other way and decided I only needed to do the minimums to get by.
Now I live in the comfortable space between laziness and perfectionism called excellence.
And that has made all the difference in my life. :-)
I love this post, perfectionism & excellence may look similiar but it’s so crucial to draw a clear line between them.