My work focuses on helping people with anxiety and depression. For many of these people, the bias is reversed – they are more likely to blame themselves when things go wrong, focus on what they view as personal flaws, consider those shortcomings as deeply entrenched, and consider the situation as permanent.  In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy we help people with social anxiety problems examine their own tendency to create excessively high standards and their inclination to declare it a disaster if they don’t live up to those standards.

In the first post in this series I mentioned that perfectionism can be a problem for many people.  Sometimes people with very high standards will compare their lives to a composite of the best qualities and accomplishments of the people around them.  They may believe that they should excel professionally at the level of their very-successful relative, have children who excel at athletics as much as the children of their most-athletic friend, have a home as clean as their tidiest neighbor, and be as socially skilled as their most poised acquaintance.  All those accomplishments and attributes are seldom found in one person, but some driven or anxious people put pressure on themselves to achieve all of them.

Many of us do ourselves great harm by aiming for an idealized version of every part of our lives, rather than realistic goals of the things that are most important to us.  If we have set a New Year’s resolution to complete our education this year, then we may want to ignore whether or not our house or apartment is as clean as we would like. By setting small, realistic goals, we are able to build our sense of accomplishment and our confidence heading into the next goal.