22. Living in the Gap: Rethinking Perfectionism
What’s new: The word "perfectionism" might not be the right diagnosis, and that's why the advice has never quite worked.
Why it matters: What many high-achievers are actually living isn't fear-driven perfectionism. It's fidelity to potential - a vivid, almost painful sensitivity to the gap between what is and what could be. When you can name it accurately, you stop making yourself wrong for not being able to fix it.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why "lower your standards" has never been the right advice for you
The difference between fear-driven perfectionism and fidelity to potential (4:10)
How the Enneagram frustration triad (1s, 4s, and 7s) experiences this pattern at a structural level (14:49)
Why understanding the pattern doesn't automatically make it stop + what to do instead (19:11)
How to tell the difference between work that moves you toward your own life and faux productivity that just keeps you feeling useful
Try this week:
Pause before you act on the urge to fix or improve something. Ask: is this gap actually mine to close?
Notice one thing you're carrying that you didn't consciously agree to take on, and try, just for a day, putting it down
Find one small thing you can do badly on purpose, with nothing to show for it, and notice what the gap-sensing voice does when you don't obey it
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Transcript
You know that feeling: when you can see exactly what something could/should be, and the gap between where we are and where we could be feels physically uncomfortable? Like an itchiness. A dissatisfaction with the way things were. Like you're right on the edge of something. You feel it in your neck, your shoulders. There's this focus that won't let you go - you can't not attend to it, because you're so close to making it better.
Sometimes it's a project. Sometimes it's a meeting you're running. Sometimes it's your own house. Sometimes (and this one's harder to admit) it's a person you love.
If that landed anywhere in your body just now, stay with me. Because I want to suggest something today that might feel a little disorienting at first: what you just recognized? That might not be perfectionism. Or at least, it's not the kind the books I’ve read are talking about. And I think that's why the advice has never quite worked for me and the clients I work with.
I'm Michelle Kay Anderson, executive coach and your guide to making work more human. Welcome back to Upleveling Work, where this season we're talking about the real things that get between us and the big, juicy, beautiful life we're trying to build. Today we're going there on perfectionism. Or whatever this actually is.
Why This Episode Took Me a Year
I want to tell you a quick story, because I think it'll show you the thing I'm trying to name.
Last summer, I sat down to write this episode. Easy topic. I'm a coach. I've been studying perfectionism for years. I've trained with feminist master coach Kara Lowentheil. I've read all the perfectionism books - I can remember when the Gifts of Imperfection first came out and I felt so seen! I have notes from client sessions. I should have been able to bang out a script in an afternoon.
I couldn't do it. Every draft felt off. Not bad, just not precise or deep or true enough. I'd listen to a perfectionism podcast someone recommended, and the advice would feel a bit trite or shallow: lower your standards, embrace good enough, let go of the need to get it right. And I'd feel this little prick - like “you don’t get it, i would if I could! Do you think I’d choose this path where I seem to be working harder and taking things so much more seriously than others?”
Like there must be something I didn't understand about perfectionism, or something more broken about my brain than the average perfectionist's. So I'd try harder to let go, or to finish up the project so I could relax. Read more to find that missing piece or articulate it more precisely. Ask for more opinions to get perspective. Draft it again.
Then a few months ago I was walking the beach with my friend Kristi and I said, “The thing is, it doesn't feel like perfectionism the way they describe it when I’m inside it. It feels like quality. It feels like preparation. It feels like the next iteration of what we're building is with reach. Why not go for it?”
And I heard myself say it, and I thought: “oh. There’s something to this… That's what I've been trying to articulate this whole time.”
I'll tell you something: this is the episode I've been trying to write for half a year. Every draft felt off, not wrong, just not true. And I think I finally understand why.
The Reframe: It's Not Fear. It's Fidelity.
Here's what I've come to understand: Standard perfectionism content describes a fear-driven pattern. You're afraid of being wrong. Afraid of being judged. Afraid of failure. So you over-prepare, over-polish, over-research - and in a way you stay safe behind the wall of your unfinished work. But it feels like being productive and you are definitely busy.
And yes, some of that is real. Some of that is in all of us. Kara's teaching on perfectionism (the perfectionist fantasy, tomorrow thinking, the all-or-nothing brain), those are spot on. If you haven't come across her work, go find it, she has a podcast called Unfuck Your Brain that’s fantastic. It's some of the clearest coaching on this I've seen.
But for a particular kind of woman (and this might be you), fear isn't the main driver. The main driver is something I've started calling fidelity to potential.
What I mean by fidelity
I want to slow down and define this, because I don't think the word translates immediately. When most of us hear 'fidelity' we think of marriage vows, or maybe a high-end stereo system. But the original latin meaning is just faithfulness. Loyalty. Being true to something. Being trustworthy.
It could be a faithfulness to obligations or duties. To the way things are done or should be. To your spouse or loved ones. And it involves a type of exactness - an accuracy in the details.
So when I say fidelity to potential, here's what I mean. You're not running away from failure. You're being pulled toward what's possible. You can see it so vividly - what this project, this team, this relationship, this life could be - that the gap between what is and what could be registers in your body as almost painful.
Not because you're afraid. Because you're faithful. Because somewhere along the way, you became loyal to the version of this thing that you can sense is possible. And once you've seen that version, it's very hard to un-see it.
The seeing is the gift. The faithfulness is the cost. That’s what is a fast-track to burnout for many.
So, "It's not fear of getting it wrong. It's fidelity to what could be." That's the reframe. And it changes the whole conversation. Because if what you're living is fidelity rather than fear, then 'lower your standards' isn't bad advice - it's incoherent advice. You can't lower your fidelity. You can only re-direct it.
Right? Sometimes you are forced to choose between being loyal to your responsibilities or closing the gap. Or you can be loyal to yourself, your energy, your giftedness. It isn’t always this black-and-white, but I’m hoping you get what I’m talking about here.
Who This Is For
Before I go further, I want to be specific about who I'm talking to today, because this isn't everyone's experience.
This is for the person who was told early she was bright. She may have been pulled into honors classes, gifted programs, advanced trainings. Voted most likely to something. The one who's been told, in some form, since she was small, that she's exceptional — and who has spent decades living up to her potential.
If you're into the Enneagram, this episode is going to land especially hard if you're in what we call the frustration triad in object relations theory — ones, fours, and sevens. These are the types whose attention is naturally calibrated to the gap. To what's missing. To what could be better, more authentic, more interesting, more right, more accurate. It's not a flaw. It's a temperament - you are wired for this kind of sensing.
And for many of us, that temperament got noticed and even picked up early by communities or institutions that knew exactly what to do with it. And just like that, your gift is put in service of the whole before you even understand it or see that you have a choice.
Three Myths That Keep Us Stuck
Today I want to bust three myths about what most of us are calling perfectionism — because I think the way we talk about this in mainstream coaching or self-help content is keeping a lot of women stuck.
Myth 1: It's perfectionism, and you should lower your standards.
Here's the truth: what most of us are living isn't about high standards. It's about a deeply attuned sensitivity to the gap between what is and what could be. And telling someone with that wiring to 'lower her standards' is like telling someone with perfect pitch to stop hearing the off notes. It's not how the system works.
The work isn't to dull the seeing. The seeing is the gift. The work is to stop automatically acting on every single gap you sense, as if all of them are yours to close.
Reflection: When you feel that itchiness (that pull to fix or polish or improve) can you tell the difference between a gap that's genuinely yours to close, and one you're picking up because you can see it? Have you ever thought about it?
Myth 2: It's a personality flaw. Something we do to ourselves. As though you can move into recovery.
Here's a thing I've only recently let myself open up to and seen more clearly: a lot of what we're calling perfectionism is structural, not a personal defect.
Women are socialized from very early on to believe that our value lives in what we accomplish, how much we do for others, and what people think of us. Not intrinsically, more instrumentally. So the moment a sensitive, gap-noticing girl shows up in a culture that rewards her for closing every gap she sees, it stops being a choice and it becomes the only way she knows how to belong.
Reading some feminist theory for the first time recently (incl Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir), I've started seeing this as less my unique flaw and more the water I was swimming in. I'm less a special snowflake and more part of a generation of women who got the same instructions.
That doesn't mean we're off the hook - we still have to do something about the pattern. But it does mean we can stop being so hard on ourselves about the fact that the pattern formed. It was always going to form. The conditions were perfect for it.
Reflection: Where in your life are you treating something as a personal flaw that might actually be a culturally inherited pattern? What changes when you can see it that way?
Myth 3: If you understood it, you'd stop doing it.
This is the one that took me the longest to make peace with.
There's this Bob Newhart skit (maybe you've seen it, I'll link it in the show notes) where he plays a therapist whose only advice to a patient with debilitating fears and self-destructive patterns is just two words: 'Stop it!' It's funny because it's exactly how growth feels like it should work. You see the pattern, you understand the pattern, you stop doing the pattern. Done.
That is not, in my experience, how it works. I've known this pattern in myself for years. I have the books, the framework, the training. I'm a coach. And I still catch myself running it (sometimes daily).
The work is not stopping. The work is being with yourself when the pattern fires. Noticing the itchiness. Noticing the train coming. Noticing the urge to grab the rope of responsibility and start pulling. And, sometimes (not always, but sometimes) choosing to put the rope down instead of pulling harder.
Peace doesn't come from finally getting it all right. Peace comes from being with yourself in the middle of the pattern.
Three Flavors of the Same Pattern
If you know the Enneagram, you'll recognize this. The frustration triad (ones, fours, sevens) each runs a slightly different version of the gap-sensing temperament. Naming yours isn't about putting yourself in a box. It's about being able to recognize the move when it's happening.
If you're a One: The gap shows up as: this could be more right, more correct, more in line with how it should be. Your inner critic does most of the talking. You over-function on the things you can control because the world being out of order feels almost physically uncomfortable.
If you're a Four: The gap shows up as: this could be more authentic, more meaningful, more true, more special, more real. You feel the inadequacy of what is (especially the inadequacy of yourself). The version of you that finally arrives at the place you're trying to get to is just past where you are now (always).
If you're a Seven: The gap shows up as: this could be more interesting, more exciting, more alive. You feel the dullness or limitation of what is, and your mind races toward what else is possible here - the next idea, the next opportunity, the next pivot.
Different flavors. Same root. A vivid internal sense of what could be, in friction with what is, plus the trained instinct that the gap is yours to close.
Reflection: Can you relate? Do one of these resemble your own internal experience? What does the gap typically look like for you — more right, more true, or more alive? Maybe something else?
What This Has Been Costing Us
I want to name a few of the costs, briefly, because I think we don't talk about them enough.
The body. Tight neck, chronic back pain, exhaustion that doesn't track with what you're actually accomplishing. The body keeps a very accurate ledger of everything we've been overriding.
The relationships. When the gap-sensing energy aims at the people we love, they don't feel cared for. They feel managed. What we mean as helping can land as: you're not quite enough. That one hits. (I shared about how I can slip into lecture mode or be experienced as controlling or stubborn as a one when that is not my head or heart space...)
The present moment. I'll give you my smallest, most concrete example. I just packed for a trip to New Orleans and brought skincare I rarely used, exercise bands I barely touched, four books I didn't even open. I wasn't packing for the trip I was taking. I was packing for my ideal self, the version who finally has time to do all of it. The just in case or everything goes exactly right. The result of my preparation was that I had less space to go with the flow and be spontaneous. My past self was ‘shoulding’ on future myself. But in the moment it felt like I was being considerate or prepared.
None of these are catastrophic individually. But they accumulate. And at some point in midlife, or after a health scare, or in empty nest, or when a relationship strains, a lot of us start to add up the bill.
What I'm Actually Practicing
I want to be honest: I'm not on the other side of this. I’m questioning if there is even such a thing... I'm in it with you. This feels real for me. So instead of giving you five steps, I'm going to tell you the three small practices that have actually moved the needle for me.
Practice the pause.
When you feel the urge to fix, polish, prepare, or close the gap - take one breath before you act. Just one. Ask yourself: is this actually mine to close right now, or am I picking it up because I can see it? You'll be amazed how often the honest answer is the second one. This may require you trust the universe, or in the perfectly imperfect nature of things, or even that someone else will have the opportunity to step up or contribute.
Trust your knowing, even without a good excuse.
I joined the Rotary Club a couple of years ago in empty nest. Stayed for a year. They were great people and I could genuinely add value, and they started grooming me for leadership pretty fast. And my body knew, the whole time, that it wasn't mine. It wasn't my community. It wasn't what I needed in this phase of life. Not right now. And I felt guilty!
Leaving was actually really hard, because I didn't have a good excuse. No emergency, no scheduling conflict, no one telling me to. I just knew. And learning to trust that quiet knowing (without justifying it to anyone) has been some of the most important work of my last decade.
That's not a coaching technique. That's the actual practice: connecting to your inner authority, honoring what is true for me, being willing to be judged or misunderstood, and attuning when you really want to slip into people pleasing mode.
Be willing to make bad art for no reason.
This third one I'm still figuring out, so I'm going to think out loud with you for a minute.
In empty nest I started making art — collage, paint. I have no training. I don't consider myself an artist. And I want to be careful not to sell you the version of this where I tell you art makes the angst go away, because that's not what happens for me.
When I sit down to paint, I get really impatient. I feel the angst of how the thing in my head isn't translating to the paper. The gap-sensing instinct doesn't take a break just because I'm playing. It's right there with me, telling me the colors aren't right, the proportions are off, this isn't what I meant.
What I've noticed, and this is the part that's actually been teaching me something, is that there's a moment, if I stay with it, where I can let go. Where I stop trying to translate the specific image in my head and drop into something more intuitive. And on the other side of that letting-go, there's a flow state I almost never get to in my regular work. Relaxed. Present. Not closing any gaps.
But getting there requires me to be willing to make bad art for no reason. To sit with the self-judgment that says 'this is terrible, you're wasting paint, why are you even doing this.' To not obey that voice, even though it's loud.
That's the actual practice. Not play in the abstract. The willingness to do something badly, on purpose, with nothing to show for it. That's where the loosening is. And I think it's loosening something much bigger than my relationship to art.
The freedom isn't on the other side of getting good. The freedom is on the other side of being willing to be bad.
So I'm not telling you to take up collage. I'm saying: find one thing in your life where you let yourself do it badly, on purpose, for no reason. Where the seeing and the sensing and the striving isn't in service of anything. Even if it's small. Even if it's ten minutes a week. And notice what happens when the gap-sensing voice shows up (because it will) and you choose not to obey it.
Closing
Here's where I want to land us.
When I left the Rotary Club, I didn't have a good reason. No emergency, no scheduling conflict. I just knew. And it took me a long time to be okay with that, because for most of my life, 'I just know' was not a sufficient justification for letting people down or walking away from a place where I could add value.
What I've come to see is that the future I want — the big, juicy, beautiful life I'm trying to build in this second half, on my own terms, not the version someone else mapped out for me — that future requires my attention and my energy. Not 110%. Not all of it. But enough. And if I'm spending it on every gap that catches my eye -even the ones that earn me the gold star, even the ones that make people happy with me, even the ones an institution is actively grooming me to close — there's nothing left for the work that's actually mine.
So the practice is discernment: Learning to tell the difference between the work that moves me toward my own life on my own terms, and the faux productivity that just keeps me feeling busy and useful and recognized. Both feel like contribution. Only one of them is mine.
And the only instrument I have for telling them apart is that quiet knowing. The one I was trained, for decades, not to trust. The one that doesn't come with a good excuse.
So the question I want to leave you with isn't 'how do you stop being a perfectionist.' It's this: where in your life are you closing a gap that earned you a gold star, but isn't actually yours? And what would it cost you to put it down?
You were always going to see the gaps. The freedom is in choosing which ones to close.
Try This Week
Pause once a day before you act on the urge to fix. Ask: is this mine to close right now?
Notice one gap you're carrying that you didn't consciously agree to take on — and try, just for a day, putting it down.
Find one small thing this week where you let yourself do it badly. On purpose. With nothing to show for it.
If any of this lands hard, if you're recognizing yourself in it and feeling that mix of relief and grief that comes with finally being seen, that's the kind of conversation I love to have with clients. You can find me at michellekayanderson.com.
Until next time, friends, the seeing is the gift. The mandate to close every gap is the conditioning. You get to tell the difference.
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