Looking for a Perfect World

Book excerpt: The vision of perfectionism as a multidimensional variable has gained weight in scientific evidence as social functioning sets more rigorous performance standards of an individual or group differentiation in any field (e.g., academic, sports, work, social, religious...). There is a need to establish how we achieve the goals we set ourselves in any field of action, thanks mainly to the creation of valid and reliable instruments to measure it. In today's societies, there is an increasing emphasis on how to respond to the demands of the environment as quickly as possible, being effective and achieving the best results. The demands of the environment make it possible to stimulate contextually (if they are seen as traits) and to construct perfectionist patterns and attitudes (if they are understood as learned cognitions or behaviors), which are usually associated with agonizing feelings of devaluation, incapacity or psychological vulnerability. Perfectionists are characterized by setting their goals too high as they are always on a quest to do things perfectly. In cases where they cannot do something perfectly, they do not even try, or they live with significant suffering that floods their lives, causing feelings of dissatisfaction and affecting their self-esteem, mainly because their attention is reduced to focusing only on the end of the tasks they perform, leaving the development of the task in the background. People who seek to do things perfectly are rigid when it comes to carrying them out, causing difficulty in adapting to changes, and preventing them from enjoying the present moment or taking advantage of their mistakes to improve themselves. In the same way, we can say that they reject reality, or at least they are reluctant to experience it in a way that is very different from the way they shape it. It is impossible to make everything perfect, as all people make mistakes, but perfectionists conceive failure as an expression of their maladjustment and for this reason, they generate high levels of anxiety, becoming people who try to control everything around them.