The right way to approach exposure to anxiety is with curiosity, compassion, and patience. Trying to be perfectly curious and compassionate is the opposite of curiosity and compassion. Getting back to the basics of developing a curious and compassionate attitude, your path is through observing what’s happening.

Productive work sounds like, “I’m going to prioritize based on my values and accept that I have limitations. Just because my mind thinks I can do something better doesn’t mean I have to do it. In fact, it definitely doesn’t mean I have to do it. If my perfectionism makes it hard for me to know when to stop, I’m going to use a conscientious model, which is a person who I respect doing the same type of task. I’m going to use what I know about how they behave as an example for deciding when it’s okay for me to stop. I’m willing to experiment and take risks knowing that I have to accept where I am to get where I’m going next. Rather than avoiding or bracing against feedback, I want collaboration so that I can grow.”

We are challenging the strategies you use to strive for excellence. We are not challenging the idea that you should strive for excellence.

Sometimes clinical perfectionism will drive you to avoid and sometimes it will drive you to over-compensate and work too hard. Your all-or-nothing thinking drives all-or-nothing behavior. If you have a habit of all-or-nothing thinking and behaving, you might not trust when to do what. You might be looking for a set strategy where you can feel in control of your clinical perfectionism. The reality is that responding well to the thinking patterns and behavioral urges that clinical perfectionism triggers requires that you are flexible and your responses are dynamic.