The Perfectionist

Excerpted from
Between Trapezes; Flying Into a New Life with the Greatest of Ease
By Gail Blanke

I gave a luncheon speech not long ago in Philadelphia, and after the question-and-answer period, a striking-looking young woman with ash blond hair and a fierce, piercing intelligence in her eyes came up to me as I was standing at the podium. She didn't say anything but slipped me a note with her card, then rushed away. The note said, "Gail, I need you to make me a more powerful speaker."

I decided to give Anne Stanton's office number a try, since I was staying over in Philadelphia that night and returning to New York the following afternoon. We agreed to meet at my hotel for breakfast, and she arrived precisely on time, elegantly turned out, ready to get down to business and eager to seize the day.

Practically before she'd sat down and laid a smooth leather briefcase on the seat beside her, she cut straight to the chase. "Gail," she confessed, "I'm really worried. I've just gotten an enormous promotion to become chief marketing officer for my company, and it's going to involve a lot of public speaking and a lot of internal presentations, and I'm really worried I don't come across as a strong enough leader."

We talked casually about the difference between external and internal presentations. Externally you can do the Full Monty. Internally, if you come on as too much of a star, they may end up thinking you think it's all about you.

When she told me the name of the company she worked for, I was impressed. If I told you, you'd be impressed too. I could tell from the troubled expression on her face that it had been agony for her to say that she was worried, and that she was-despite her cool, calm, crisp demeanor-genuinely suffering under the surface.

Here was an interesting situation for me. A woman not hoping and dreaming to get something she'd fantasized about all her life, but one who had just gotten her dream job handed to her on a silver platter, feeling as if she'd seen a ghost or a mouse. "You know," I said, taking out a notepad, "you are not alone." She shot me a startled look, which gradually transformed into a wan smile of relief. "In fact," I said, "many people, and in particular women, experience difficulty moving into the next challenge in their lives from their highest point. Instead, they instinctively tend to lead from their lowest point."

To show her what I was talking about, I drew a diagram composed mainly of a line that peaked and ebbed, like an EKG chart. "People with confidence," I said, "when faced with a challenge, instinctively think back to those defining moments when they faced something like it and got through it with flying colors and were stronger for the struggle." I drew an arrow sticking straight out from a peak, pushing assertively forward. "They lead from the peaks, not from the troughs. But what happens to us when our confidence lags, which happens to just about every one of us at some point, is that, instinctively, we lead from our troughs, not our peaks. What that means, as a practical matter, is that every time we get up to make a speech or a presentation, we assume the worst is going to happen, not the best. We get no extra juice or wind in our sails from all the successful things we've done before."

In times of transition, when we're flying through the air from one trapeze to the next, we all tend to forget under stress that we've pulled it out before and we can pull it out again. "It's so easy to forget," I continued, "when we're one of those electrons making the quantum leap to the next phase that we've done this time and again in our lives.

The Unimportance
of Being Perfect

Think of the business person who makes all the right moves and goes to the right schools and takes all the right risks, or no risks, and ends up in all the right jobs, until she or he ends up in the right nursing home before heading for the right graveyard. Think of the perfect hostess who knows all the right things to say to all the right people who think the right thoughts and share all the right prejudices. The narrow idea of what constitutes success is something that we tend to buy into, which leaves us very vulnerable to despair when and if someone ever pulls the plug on us.

There is a common term for people like this. They are known as perfectionists. Taken to a certain degree of moderation - although by definition, this is hard to do-perfectionism can be a positive trait. Most of the world's top film directors, art directors, museum directors, and financial and corporate directors tend to be perfectionists, and they pride themselves on their perfectionism. I am a bit of a perfectionist myself, and I recognized the trait immediately in Anne. But it can also be a dangerous trait, because it can suck a lot of fun and joy out of life. The true perfectionist is never satisfied, never content, either with her own performance, or with others'.

Anne had grown up, as many of us do, believing that if she didn't explicitly please her parents, that they wouldn't respect her or love her. She, like many of us, had grown up with high expectations, expectations of being just about perfect. Now, she had to learn to abandon that perfectionist approach in dealing with her own peers and subordinates, her own children and loved ones, and-above all-herself. Because one very real problem with perfectionism is that the main victims aren't only the people whom perfectionists feels compelled to hold up to their exacting standards. The perfectionist's primary victim is often herself.

When our daughter Kate was still little and our daughter Abigail had not yet been born, every morning before work I would take Kate to a little nursery school in our neighborhood. I would dread running into all the other mothers in their casual clothes, because I would be in my corporate suit carrying my briefcase and feeling terribly guilty about not being the one who would be picking her up later.

I would always see a woman there whom I began to refer to as "the perfect mother." I knew she would pick up her perfect little boy and take him to the park for perfect little picnics. Her family photo albums, I also knew, were all perfectly updated and labeled with every year in perfect gold leaf. Our family photograph, representing years and years of family vacations and "priceless moments," are right now stuffed into at least five drawers.

All I wanted was to be like her. I was dying to be like her. I wanted her perfect, wonderful life. I wanted the serenity, the tidiness. It would never have occurred to me that it was perfectly plausible that she considered me the perfect woman-and I had no reason to think that she didn't.

The quest for perfection can be paralyzing. One of my college roommates was an excellent artist. She knew so much about classical music and art, and I was very impressed by her. One weekend her mother came to visit, and she proudly showed her mother her latest painting. "Well, it's pretty good," her mother said, "but you'll never be Renoir." My roommate put down her paint brushes and never picked them up again. She, you see, wasn't perfect. She had absorbed this dangerous notion-I had a pretty fair idea of who from-that if she couldn't be Renoir, what was the point? You may remember that Peter Mazza had pretty much concluded before coming to see me that if he weren't good enough to win the Thelonious Monk competition, what was the point? Being a semi-finalist wasn't good enough. We all pay a very high price for our obsession with perfection and our need for approval. We douse our own fires so that no one else has to.

So here we had a portrait of a perfectionist at a crossroads. The main issue with perfectionists is that in the midst of their brilliance and their achievement, there is often a missing ingredient: trust-by which I mean trust in other people, as well as trust in ourselves. This trust also involves trusting our instincts to identify the right people to be part of our team and then trusting them to do the very best job that they can. Anne's skills, which were really quite stunning, as stunning as she was, had brought her this far-very far. But in order to make it to the next level, to grasp her next trapeze, to fly into her next great life, she was going to have to evolve into a more multidimensional personality. She was going to have to take a leap from her old trapeze of obsessive perfectionism into the vast unknown of possible imperfection.