There are two sides to just about everything in life and perfectionism isn’t any different. Most perfectionists care so much about the things that are important to them and care about how they do these things. We want our projects, our homes, relationships, and lives to be the best they can be.

We’re often the visionaries who can find solutions to just about anything in life. We don’t mind investing the energy needed to make things better and right in our world and for those we care about. We also see possibilities where others don’t and always see room for improvement. If we use our time wisely we can bring into reality–through effort or ingenuity–all of the potential we envision.

Okay, so we tend to be tough on ourselves and/or others. We’re often filled with stress and anxiety. We can procrastinate, big-time. And far too often we feel we’ve fallen short of our idealized goals. We also suffer from a need to constantly fix things and people, even if something isn’t broken. This hyper-focus keeps us staring closely at everything we believe is wrong rather than seeing what’s right. This is especially true when it comes to our self-perception where we measure our accomplishments, our looks, finances, education, career, or anything else against others. And, for most perfectionists, we find that we need to do better. We should do better. We must do better!

This inner critic then turns a heartfelt and genuine desire to improve themselves and their environment into a need for absolute control and utter perfection. But guess what? Nothing and nobody is ever good enough. We’re never good enough. We become over-achievers and over-thinkers and over-controlling and lose all sense of flexibility and happiness. Life soon becomes a strait-jacket we can never free ourselves from.

I’m not here to tell you that you can quickly and easily shed that heavy armor of perfectionism. After all, I’m sure that it has sometimes, or often, helped you in life. It has for me. What I want to show you is how to recognize when your perfectionism is hurting you and your relationships then rein it in. You want to get your perfectionism to work for you rather than against you, and by getting it to take a backseat at times, you’ll find that you’re more productive, there’s more time in your days, you feel more relaxed, more comfortable, and a lot happier.