It’s Time to Attack Perfectionism

By Kevin Housley

In emergency services there is very little room for errors and mistakes can be costly to say the least on actual calls. This pressure is real and we feel it just as much as you do on a daily basis. Have you considered your relationship with perfectionism and tried to break down what it actually means? What different masks it wears to disguise itself, and how you personally react to the never ending drive to achieve it? How can we reframe perfectionism and use what’s helpful within it and throw the rest to the curb?

If we take a good hard look at perfectionism from a human performance perspective we see that typically the negatives far outweigh the positive motivation it creates. The key to ultimate performance is intrinsic motivation. That means it comes from a place within and is tied to personal ideals and beliefs. “Your Why” is an easy way to process this concept. What is it that gets you out of bed in the morning everyday? Even when it’s really hard to throw the warm covers off and face that cold blowing storm out there? When you ID what drives you this is intrinsic motivation and can be used as an internal hack to commit even when you’re neck deep in the suck and lonely as hell.

A lot of perfectionistic ideals come from external motivational sources. Meaning outside of your control which absolutely have an impact on you and your performance. Fear of other peoples opinions, frustrations with upper level management, and money are all examples of extrinsic factors that can play into the perfectionism drive. Other factors that play into the drive for perfection are the imposter syndrome, and growth vs fixed mindset.

Establish a healthy relationship with Perfectionism 

At this stage in my career I think one of the most important questions we can attempt to answer is: How can we work together as a crew to empower everyone to strive for greatness, eliminate as many mistakes as possibly in training and on the emergency scene, and also have real, raw and honest dialogue that promotes a culture where not being perfect is ok.

While this takes an external focus it also allows us to do some serious internal reflection and have others be an integral part of the process and assessment of our relationship with perfectionism. Once we start to have the conversation about how we train, how we perform on emergency scenes, and how we deal with failures in both of these environments we can start to change the internal narrative and give ourselves permission to have a healthy relationship with failure. All of us will fail on real calls and that completely sucks. There are calls that I can pull up from memory that still make me extremely frustrated on how they turned out. The fact is that I cannot do anything to change what happened but I can learn from them, share my mistakes and failures with my crew and identify the warning signs that lead to failure. We can then attack these in training and notice them much quicker on the next response. This is a positive spin even though the failure remains on that specific call.

Go out there. Write down what perfectionism means to you and then compare notes with the rest of the crew. I think you’ll learn a whole lot about yourself and the other members on your company. This is a great exercise to use if a member of your team seems to always get sick when there are major trainings happening aka “the Blue Flu.” We’ll write more about this in a future post as it deserves its own airtime!

Stay Smart and never stop driving towards the ultimate goal.