Making Life a Checklist
The pressure of turning your values into goals you must achieve
Welcome to a new blog series, Pitfalls of Perfectionism, exploring where perfectionism can hold you back rather than push you forward. Working hard toward goals and holding yourself to a high standard can lead to success and pride. However, it can also evoke difficult emotions, especially if you struggle or feel like you failed. Each article features practical strategies for managing each pitfall: ladders to help you get out of the pit, and bridges to help you avoid falling in.
If you are anything like me, you have big, long-term goals. And you like having these goals because they give you a sense of direction: you want to be the perfect parent, or the perfect child, or the perfect partner, or all of the above. You want to be a good friend, a good sibling, a good leader, a good team player, a good coworker… the list can be never-ending. It’s not wrong to want to be any and all of these things.
However, there is one big problem: these are not goals.
A goal is a desired result. It can be completed, like an item on a checklist. You can either achieve it or fail to achieve it.
Let’s test these qualities with one of the ‘goals’ above: being a good friend. If being a good friend were a goal, that would mean that it is a desired result — but a ‘desired result’ of what? And can the task of being a good friend truly be finished? Can you determine that you have achieved ‘good friend’ status at any point in time? And are you a ‘bad friend’ for so long as you have not attained that state?
Being a good friend, partner, parent, kid, sibling, leader, and coworker are not goals — they are collections of values.
Perfectionism can often pressure people to treat these values as concrete goals to either achieve or fail to complete.
What Are Values?
Unlike goals, values are not items to check off a to-do list. For better or for worse, values can never be ‘completed’ in the same way goals can, only maintained through behaviour each day. You can embody the value of kindness, for instance, but you will never ‘complete’ being kind.
In other words, values describe how you wish to act in your day-to-day life. If you hold the value of integrity, you behave in ways that demonstrate integrity: you aim to tell the truth, take accountability, and stand by what you believe is right.
As long as you behave with integrity, you signal that you value integrity. That's it.
Being a good parent, kid, and so on is each a collection of values. The particular values that each entails differ from person to person.
For example, being a good leader probably means something different to you than it does to someone else. Maybe you value fairness, confidence, or flexibility. Maybe you value all three. Either way, whether you are fair, confident, or flexible depends on whether you choose to behave in ways that embody those values. Therefore, being a ‘good leader’ is something you act on each day, not a title you earn on some future date.
Why Am I Like This?
So why do we so often turn our values into goals as perfectionists? For one, we like productivity, checking things off our to-do list. When we are young, especially in school, it can be adaptive to motivate ourselves in this way — to work toward becoming a ‘good student.’
“If I ace high-level classes and do all the right extracurriculars, I am a good student. If I fail to do these things, I am a bad student or, at the very least, not good enough.”
Even after schooling ends, it can be motivating to imagine an endpoint at which you can definitively say, “I am a good mom,” or “I am a competent coworker,” or “I am the perfect partner.” And you may put a lot of pressure on yourself to reach these ‘goals’ because you do not want to ‘fail.’
Of course, as we now know, there is no real endpoint. Instead, we often get stuck in a hamster wheel of self-doubt. We like certainty; we don't like doubting whether we are truly good or good enough for the people around us. Nevertheless, the goalposts continue to move.
“I thought if I got this promotion, I'd finally feel like a competent worker. So why do I still feel inadequate? Maybe I will feel more competent when I earn my next raise.”
“I thought if I sacrificed my career to raise my kids, I would feel like a good mom. So why do I still feel unfulfilled? Maybe I will feel like a good mom when my kids succeed in their sports and academics.”
And the wheel of self-doubt continues to spin. You may be attaching judgments to yourself for supposedly falling short without even realizing it. (And sometimes, what you perceive as “falling short” is actually something out of your control, such as the aforementioned raise and children’s successes.) As such, perfectionism can lead to imposter syndrome rearing its ugly head. You may question whether you were ever or can ever become a good partner, parent, friend, child, and so on, in the first place.
Here are a couple of ways you can step off the self-doubt hamster wheel.
Ladder: Find the specific values buried within your ‘goals’
It can be easy for a perfectionist to get caught up in being a good partner, friend, parent, kid, or coworker. However, in the process, you may forget what makes someone ‘good’ in the first place. Moreover, if you are not careful, you may find yourself relying on external indicators of ‘goodness,’ which can often have more to do with other people’s judgments or other factors out of your control than your actual competency.
If you are still trying to reach the big goals — that aren’t goals — we discussed at the beginning, you have probably been feeling a lot of pressure. The first step in turning those unreachable ‘goals’ into achievable actions is to identify the values you actually wish to have.
It can be hard to parse out the values buried within your desire to be a good friend, for instance, but you can start by asking yourself, “How do I want to be and act in friendships?” or, “What behaviours do I want to avoid if I want to be a good friend?”
If you are still unsure of where to start, Brené Brown has an extensive list of different values, and many other lists are available online. Values.guide adapts a list from The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris and has a quiz you can take that identifies values based on how you answer its questions.
Bridge: If you know what you value, start slow and small
Some people know their values, whether that is being authentic, responsible, fun-loving, compassionate, or whatever else. It can be overwhelming to figure out how to embody those values, so starting slow and small can help.
Try picking one value you wish to act on and find small ways throughout your day to behave in accordance with that value. For example, if you wish to embody the value of creativity, you may decide to spend 15 minutes per day following a creative pursuit, such as drawing, painting, engaging with music, dancing, or even daydreaming. Or you can choose to add creativity to an existing part of your routine. If you have a habit of reading a particular genre of books — like thrillers — try picking a completely different type of book to read, such as a nonfiction book or a romance.
The important thing is not to put pressure on yourself to overhaul your entire personality or way of living life. You are gradually reprogramming your brain with new habits — a nonlinear process rife with setbacks. Be patient and compassionate with yourself: no one is perfect, and living a value-led life is not about measuring success and failure. You are not a failure at kindness if you forget to thank someone who helped you once, and you are not a failure at assertiveness if you don’t speak up in a meeting. You were not kind or assertive in those specific moments, but you are still living life guided by those values.
If you are new here, my name is Diem Morriswala (they/he), and I am a therapist who works with perfectionists of all lived experiences and walks of life.
I would be honoured to sit with you through life as we know it and support you in working toward what life could be. Feel free to book a free 15-minute consultation with me by filling out my contact form here.
