LibraryPatternsLet Go of PerfectionismI hold myself to a standard of near-perfection and wh…
Problem
Toward Craftsmanship

I hold myself to a standard of near-perfection and when I fall short I do not admit it clearly. I reframe, minimise, or redirect. My team watches this and learns from it.

Part of the pattern: Let Go of Perfectionism
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How Aurelius might see it
One way to read this — take what fits, leave what doesn’t.
You've built an identity around being the one who doesn't slip up. So when you do slip up, admitting it feels like a threat to who you are — not just a mistake to fix. The reframing isn't dishonesty. It's self-protection. But your team sees it, and they learn that mistakes here get hidden.
The short answer
Your team learns how to handle failure by watching you. Right now they're learning to hide it. One honest 'I got that wrong' from you — said plainly, in the room — teaches more than any feedback policy ever could. That's the move.
You set a high bar, and that's not the problem. The problem is that the bar has quietly become about appearance, not growth. Research on feedback culture shows that how a leader receives and acknowledges failure shapes how the whole team treats feedback — whether people seek it out or dodge it. When the person at the top deflects, everyone downstream learns to deflect too. The standard you hold yourself to is real. What's missing is the safety valve: the honest moment where you say 'I missed that.' Marcus Aurelius put it simply: if it is not true, do not speak it. The reframes, the minimising — they are small untruths. Not malicious, but still untruths. And they cost you something. They break the link between what you claim to value and what you actually model. Your purpose, as he'd say, should not bend under the pressure of looking good in the moment. This week, find one recent moment where you fell short and didn't say so clearly. Name it to your team — not as a confession, just as a plain fact: 'I handled that poorly, here's what I'd do differently.' Short. No spin. Then stop talking. That single act will do more for your team's willingness to seek and act on feedback than anything else you could try.
The path forward
  1. 1Notice the reframing reflex
  2. 2Admit one mistake plainly
  3. 3Notice the team respects it
One thing to try this week
Acknowledge one mistake clearly to your team this week — what happened, what you would do differently. Name it without softening.
Related problems
A single typo or tiny error can consume me — I will fixate on it long after it is fixed, certain everyone noticed and judged. Trivial mistakes that others would shrug off feel, to me, like glaring proof of carelessness.Accepting good-enough work from myself or my team feels like a concession — a failure to care enough. The identification of good enough with not caring has made adequate work feel like a moral failure.Every sentence I write is edited before the next one appears. I cannot produce a rough draft because editing is embedded in the first pass. The writing is slow and the output is polished from the start but minimal.Every time I get close to my standard, the standard moves higher, so I never actually arrive. What looked like the goal becomes the new baseline the moment I reach it, and I am running on a track that extends itself with every step.Everything has to pass through me before it goes out. I have become the bottleneck in my own organisation because I cannot trust work I have not personally reviewed.I apply the same exacting standard to a quick internal email as I do to a public report. The standard does not scale with context and I am exhausting myself and my team with inappropriately high bars.
Sources
  1. 1. ‘It'd be useful, but I wouldn't use it’: barriers to university students’ feedback seeking and recipience — Naomi Winstone; Robert A. Nash; James Rowntree, Studies in Higher Education (2016)
  2. 2. Conceptualizing feedback literacy: knowing, being, and acting — Paul Sutton, Innovations in Education and Teaching International (2012)
  3. 3. Feedback orientation, feedback culture, and the longitudinal performance management process — Manuel London; James W. Smither, Human Resource Management Review (2002)
  4. 4. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.13 — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (180)

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