Why "Lower Your Standards" Is the Wrong Advice for High Achievers

The advice to embrace good enough may work if perfectionism is the problem, but many high-achieving women aren't running on fear - they're running on something else entirely.

If you have spent any time in productivity or self-development spaces, you have heard advice on beating perfectionism:

Lower your standards. Done is better than perfect. Stop getting in your own way. Embrace good enough.

And maybe, like a lot of the high-achieving women I work with, you have tried to take that advice. You have told yourself to let it go. You have shipped the thing before you felt ready. And somewhere underneath the attempt to comply, there was a small, nagging sense that this advice was not quite right. Not for you. Not for this.

The thing is, you were right.

The problem with how we talk about perfectionism

Perfectionism, as it is typically defined in psychology, is rooted in fear. Setting excessively high standards in order to avoid negative evaluation, harsh self-criticism when those standards are not met, a deep coupling of worth and output. That is a real thing. It affects a lot of people. The advice to practice self-compassion, to separate your identity from your work, to get more comfortable with imperfection, that advice is appropriate for that problem.

But it is not the only thing that looks like perfectionism from the outside.

Many high-achieving leaders, creatives, and coaches have a different experience underneath the same surface behavior. Not fear of failure. Not dread of judgment. Something closer to: I can see what this could be, and it is not there yet. A sensitivity to the gap between what exists and what is possible, and a deep loyalty to the version they can already sense.

That is not a fear problem. That is a discernment problem. And those require completely different responses.

Fidelity to potential

The reframe I keep coming back to is this: what looks like perfectionism in many high-achieving people is actually fidelity to potential.

Fidelity is a loyalty word. It implies relationship, commitment, a refusal to betray something you value. And that is much closer to what is actually happening when a highly capable person cannot release work they know is not yet at its best. They are not necessarily feeling afraid, it is more accurate to say they are faithful. Faithful to the version they can already see.

That fidelity is a real strength. It is what makes these women's work worth paying attention to. It is the thing that drives the quality of the room up, that catches the thing everyone else missed, that holds the standard when the environment is pressuring everyone to cut corners.

The problem is not the fidelity. The problem is what got welded to it: the belief that you are responsible for closing every gap you sense, in every context, regardless of what it costs you. 😰

That is the conditioning. And separating the two, keeping the sensitivity while releasing the mandate, is the actual work.

Why this distinction matters in practice

If the root of the problem is fear, self-compassion is the right medicine. Practice tolerating imperfection. Separate your worth from your output. Do the nervous system work.

If the root is fidelity, you need something different: discernment. The capacity to see the gap between what is and what could be, and then make a conscious, deliberate choice about which gaps are yours to close right now - in this context, for this purpose, with this level of resource available.

That is judgment, not softening. And it is a much more useful skill for the women I work with than learning to accept mediocrity.

The Enneagram connection

If you are familiar with the Enneagram, this pattern maps clearly onto what the system calls the frustration triad: types 1, 4, and 7. These three types share a structural experience of reaching for an idealized version of reality, feeling the gap between what is and what should be, and developing coping strategies around that gap. For each type, those strategies look different. But the underlying engine, the sensitivity to potential and the frustration when it goes unrealized, is the same.

If you are a 1, 4, or 7 and you have spent years trying to "lower your standards," the advice probably never quite fit. This is why.

What to do instead

The practice is not to stop caring about quality. It is to build the discernment to know which gaps are yours to close.

A few questions that help:

• What is this for? Who is it serving, and what do they actually need from it at this stage?

• What would "good enough for this purpose" actually look like? Not as a way to excuse low standards, but as a way to identify when the fidelity is being applied appropriately versus when it has overshot the context.

• Whose standard am I trying to meet? Sometimes the gap we are trying to close is not even our own standard. It is an imagined external one, absorbed so long ago we stopped noticing it is not ours.

These are not easy questions. But they are the right ones.

If you want to go deeper, I made an episode of Upleveling Work specifically about this distinction. It is Episode 22, "Living in the Gap: Rethinking Perfectionism." Thirty minutes on fidelity to potential, the frustration triad, and three practices that have actually moved the needle.

—

Michelle Kay Anderson is an executive coach and Enneagram practitioner who works with leaders in mission-driven organizations. The Upleveling Work podcast is at uplevelingwork.com or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify..