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Why is this an important value?  I have often worked with clients on the theme of self-reliance and how this, at times, deceptively limiting value can hold us back.  Take a plant in an ecosystem.  It doesn’t decide to reject the sun, and the rain and the soil because it needs to be self-reliant, it leans into the sun, it soaks up the rain and nutrients in the soil, and if it doesn’t it dies.

I was vaguely irritated to discover yet another book pushing the power of positive thinking recently.  In many ways there is much to commend it, but in others the concept and its application can cause more harm than good.   Inevitably it can whip up immature and dichotomous notions that positive thinking is good and negative thinking is bad.  An addiction to positivity can engender an extreme negativity to negativity!

I have had this discussion with many perfectionists, who recognise that they have a problem with time-keeping but struggle to see it as a feature of perfectionism.  Poor time-keeping might be associated with laziness and sloppiness but in perfectionists this couldn’t be further than the truth.  Perfectionists tend to set rigidly high standards for themselves which are extremely difficult to meet.  Such standards can frequently be expressed in the lead up towards leaving the house...

It’s not enough to understand when we are placing too much emphasis on ‘perfect’.  We need to look at what it means to us not to be - normally that we have failed - and then what failure means to us and about us.  Perfectionism escalates the pressure to do well and the paradox is we are then met with a shaky hand and a quivery breath.   This reminds me of the Zen story of an expert archer who is asked to shoot a bulls-eye; as usual, he raises his bow, aims and shoots perfectly.  He is then offered an obscene amount of money to shoot the same target.  His hand is shaking uncontrollably, the