Escaping The Perfection Trap With Dr. Thomas Curran

3 Nov , 2025 podcasts

 

Perfectionism can never lead you to a life of satisfaction and enjoyment. If you find yourself in the perfection trap, your performance, perspectives, and relationships will suffer. Dr. Thomas Curran, the world’s leading expert on perfectionism, joins Katherine Twells to discuss how you can escape this personality that could take over your entire life. He breaks down the different types of perfectionism, how to find genuine joy, and the best way to reduce tension in your everyday routine. Dr. Curran also explains how perfectionists can take the first step towards a healthier inner self by embracing the power of good enough.

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Escaping The Perfection Trap With Dr. Thomas Curran

Embracing The Power Of Good Enough

Welcome to The Lab. We are talking about perfectionism, something that people may take lightly or think leads to success, but has real implications on performance and, more importantly, on life satisfaction and enjoyment. My guest is Dr. Thomas Curran, who is the world’s leading expert on perfectionism, author of the bestselling book, The Perfection Trap, and acclaimed Associate Professor of Psychology at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

His TED Talk on perfectionism received over three million views. He has written for major publications like Time Magazine and the Harvard Business Review. His work has been featured in the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, CNN, and Wall Street Journal. Through extensive research, public speaking, consulting, and academic instruction, Dr. Curran is not just participating in but leading the global conversation on perfectionism. His mission is clear. It is to uncover the root of this dynamic, its effects on us, the reason for its rise, and most importantly, what we can do to stop it.

As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, Dr. Curran challenges the modern-day imperative to do more, have more, and instead offers realism, teaching us that the unrelenting treadmill of perfection is exhausting, compromising our mental health, impacting our relationships, and blocking progress towards our goals. We talk about all of this in our conversation. I truly believe that this dynamic is one to understand and to change to live better lives. Sit back, relax, take a breath from the never-ending need to perform and produce, and enjoy the conversation with Dr. Thomas Curran.

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Thomas, it’s so lovely to see you again. I know you were with us in The Compassion Lab. You had an amazing presentation to our team. I want to thank you for that and also thank you for your time. I appreciate it.

No problem. It’s great to be with you.

We should be totally vulnerable and open and share with our audience. We were recording. You hopped on. There’s a major outage. You are improvising in getting on a mobile internet to make this happen. It’s a double thank you for your effort to show up even though there is a massive outage going on right now.

It’s crazy. It is a bit mad. The internet is down. It has been for quite a few hours. I am not sure when it’s going to come back up. Thankfully, my phone is working, so that’s how I’m able to speak with you. It is a crazy day.

As we were saying, maybe it would be better if your phone didn’t, so you could take a day, relax, and be away from the internet, but you’re not. You’re here with me, but we’ll try to make this fun.

We could have phoned on the landline. How about that? That would have been very old-fashioned, but maybe as good a conversation.

There’s a movie out. It’s called The Life of Chuck. Have you seen that movie?

I haven’t.

It’s a Stephen King movie. It’s fascinating. I won’t take up our time going into it in detail, but at the beginning, the world is ending, and all the internet. You see people adapting to everything going away. The phone doesn’t work anymore. It was going back into people walking outside of their houses, bewildered. Check it out. It’s a very interesting movie.

It seems to be happening a lot more regularly. Maybe this is a movie to watch for both entertainment and preparation purposes.

Maybe these days, one does not know. Let’s get into the topic at hand. I would have introduced you and given your whole bio before this conversation began, so people will know your amazing background and the work that you do. I feel like you’re the absolute expert, if there is such a thing, on perfectionism and what it means. The research you’ve done goes so deep and is so informative. You know the story of how I came to find you.

Dr. Thomas Curran’s Educational And Career Background

I saw your book in an airport, read it the entire way home on the plane, and found the information so important and compelling. We’re going to dig into that. Before we get into the content of that, I want to ground everyone on you. Who is Thomas Curran? A little bit about your background, your origin story. What are some of the things that made you who you are, doing what you’re doing? I know it’s hard to do that in like a few minutes, but maybe the highlight reel. It’s a big question, so just the big things.

The short answer to that question is that there are a lot of things that have gone on in my life. I didn’t expect when I was younger to even be anywhere near where I am. I’m a product of the British state. I’m what’s called a welfare kid. A lot of my youth was spent with my parents in and out of employment. They worked hard, but it was a difficult time. There was a recession in the early ’90s. That hit hard. I spent a lot of my early days coming to terms with not quite feeling a bit less than or a bit inferior to others, because a lot of people that I socialize with, friends and all the rest of it, had a lot more than I did.

It was very formative in terms of my inferiority complex that would start to creep into my life as an adult. There were two routes out. You can go the educational route, or you can be a premiership footballer. That’s the option when you’re from the UK and you’re poor. I chose to be a premiership footballer because I was doing quite well, as I was in a couple of academies, Nottingham Forest and Aston Villa, for those who know anything about premiership football. That went up to fourteen. That’s what I thought I was going to do.

I had intense growing pains that made me cry with pain when I was playing. My dad was pushing me, but my mom was seeing me every week in excruciating pain. She actually pulled me out of the academy. She rang the coach. The coach was so amazed that one of the parents would ring to pull their kids out of the academy. There were so many kids who wanted to be in the academy. Here, my mom was pulling me out. As it turned out, that was the best thing that she ever did.

She did many great things in my life, but that was one of the best things she did because I wasn’t going to make it as a premiership footballer. The odds were stacked against me. What I needed to do was focus my energies on the academic route. After I was sixteen, I decided to work hard at school and then go to university. I did a Sports Science degree because I was interested in sport. Through that, I became interested in Psychology. I got a PhD scholarship to study Psychology.

I got interested in perfectionism because perfectionism began to take over my life as I was going through the academic system. That inferiority came back in. I started worrying about how I was performing relative to others. I was putting pressure on myself. I thought, “If I feel this, I’m going to try and study it.” That’s what I did. There wasn’t much out there. For the last several years, that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing, trying to understand myself and the world around me through the lens of perfectionism. Here I am talking to you.

First of all, you did an amazing job in encapsulating what I know has been a journey of many more twists and turns than you can share. As a mom, I can understand and respect your mother’s decision if you see your child in pain like that. Maybe at the moment, you weren’t sure it was the right thing. I imagine when you’re on a path to say, “This is what I’m going to do,” and that changes, you can look back and say it was the best thing. At the moment, it might not have felt that way. I can tell you from so many different conversations about origin story pathways, and I see it in my own, that you can look back and be like, “Wow.”

What Causes Perfectionism To Take Over Your Life

At the moment, it might not have made sense. In hindsight, and you look back, it does make sense. It’s so fascinating that you’re doing what you’re doing. I loved what you said in another interview. You called it me search, instead of research. We tend to want to understand ourselves. It will often lead us into places of doing the work that we need. It gets to benefit everyone else, which is pretty amazing. You mentioned perfectionism was starting to take over your life. Maybe you can talk a little bit about what that was like. Where does that come from? Were your parents that way? Was it because of the childhood and those challenges? What causes that?

My research, and my reading of the literature as it is at the moment, suggests that about 50/50, nature-nurture is very much consistent in terms of the science on that. Half of the way we turn out is typically determined by genes. The other half is determined by the environments we grew up in, early life experiences, with the countries that we are socialized into, socioeconomic conditions, the peer groups, etc. There are loads of social factors you can throw into the mix. There’s a big component of genetics.

Particularly, my mother and I are very similar in a lot of respects. We have similar tendencies. Our exactitude is one of them. My parents were cleaners at one stage. They used to clean new build estates. They would sometimes take me around. Her attention to detail was something that, from the vantage point of a child, was incredible. She didn’t need to care that much, but she couldn’t help it. I definitely see a lot of that in myself.

I’ve been working on a research paper that is going to be hopefully published soon. Because it’s going to be published and going into the world, here I have been for four hours, dotting every I, crossing every T, and making sure everything is watertight. I’m sure that’s way too much effort, but I can’t help it. It’s just in me. That’s part of it.

The other part is, together with those preborn tendencies, when you interact in an environment where you feel inferior in some way, or where there have been disappointments and setbacks. They have had a profound impact on your sense of self-esteem, shame, guilt, and all those things. They become repeated instances that can also impact your sense of needing to overcompensate for those things through more perfectionism.

That was very much what happened to me when I became an academic. I was in a new world. I could never orbit in a middle-class environment in my life. It’s threatening because you don’t know. You think that everybody is crushing it effortlessly. You don’t realize that behind closed doors, there’s a lot of stress and perfectionism there, too. You think that they’re doing this easily, and you’re not. That must be because in some way, you are inferior.

Again, it’s all compensation. It’s all trying to compensate for these feelings of being less than, of being inferior, that intensify that perfectionism. The perfectionism sits there, but it can be intensified by the environment. That was certainly my experience. What we’re seeing in the data among more recent generations is that it seems to be happening to a lot more young people, too. There must be something going on in our social world that’s exacerbating perfectionism.

We’re going to dig a little bit deeper into that because I’m very fascinated by that dynamic, but sticking with causal factors. I even want to get into defining it a little bit more. I don’t know if the 50/50 makes me feel as a parent better or worse about the amount of control. I’m happy sometimes. I don’t have total control of the outcome, but it’s interesting to watch that. That’s why I even think that as we become more consciously aware of ourselves and do our own work, that can help our children because they can watch us still learn, still grow, and still be vulnerable.

I remember when I first learned about parenting, let them see your challenges and let them see the things that are tough for you, so that they don’t think it’s all perfect. You mentioned this external thing that everyone shares. Social media makes you think that you’re the only one having these challenges. If the curtains were pulled back, we would know that everyone is having these challenges.

Breaking Down Different Types Of Perfectionism

There have been so many conversations in The Compassion Lab where people are sharing their sense of not enough, unworthy. It’s crazy how rampant this inner critic dialogue is for us. I want to back up for a minute because as people are reading, they’re like, “I know what perfectionism is,” but I wanted to find it in this conversation. Even in the book, you talk about different kinds. You mentioned self-oriented, other, and socially. Can you reground us in what it is and some of the types of it?

There are loads of different facets and faces of perfectionism, but they all start from that inner sense of deficit and lack. That’s the starting point. We have to start there because otherwise, we confuse perfectionism with conscientiousness, diligence, perseverance, and all of these good traits to possess. Perfectionism looks like conscientiousness, perseverance, and diligence, but fused to it or underneath it is an insecurity about not being enough.

Perfectionism looks like conscientious and diligent. But when you dig underneath, you will find insecurity and the feeling of not being enough. Share on X

You have to start there with perfectionism because otherwise, you’ll see perfectionism in conscientiousness, high performance, or whatever it might be. That’s crucial. From there, perfectionism can take on certain faces. This sense of never enough builds in as a sense that I need to be perfect. I’d say that I have to set myself excessive standards. I need to reach for the stars. I’m going to be very self-critical when I haven’t met those standards because that’s the standard I hold myself to. Every time I hit a setback, that’s my fault. I’m going to go in on myself.

This isn’t just a sense or a feeling that originates from within. There’s also a sense in perfectionistic people that if I’m pushing myself this hard, then other people must also expect me to do those things, too. There’s a social element to this whereby people perceive that others expect perfection, just as I expect perfection of myself. This is called socially prescribed perfectionism. You have self-oriented from within, socially prescribed from outside.

There’s a third aspect to perfectionism, which doesn’t get talked about a lot but is quite common, particularly in an organizational and occupational context. This is called over-oriented perfectionism. You see this a lot in expectations that are turned on other people. The self-oriented perfectionist who has goals for themselves and is harshly self-critical when they haven’t met those goals will project those insecurities outward as well onto other people under certain circumstances.

They expect high performance and will let people know when they haven’t met those performance standards. Those are the three elements of perfectionism. Everyone has a different constellation. Not everybody is high on all of them. Some are high on self. Some are higher on social. Some are higher than others. Generally speaking, if you’re highly perfectionistic, you will subscribe to these tendencies much higher than somebody who is not perfectionistic.

How To Balance The Scales Of Tension

As you’re talking about this, working in a corporate environment and being a parent, there’s a balance and a tension that I feel I’m always traversing. I would love your thoughts on this. On one end of the scale is how to encourage high performance, high standards, and reaching for the stars. As a leader, you want to motivate and inspire your team. As a parent, you want to help your children realize their potential, see what they can create, and push them to be everything they can be. That’s one end.

The other end of that continuum is the more nurturing and the more compassionate. I see you. I value you. You have your own intrinsic motivation. You will rise as needed. I’m going to create the space for you to rise in. The actions on that continuum can be very different. I find myself sometimes moving up and down that line. I would love your thoughts on that balance and that tension.

First thing to say, one of the things that often I get questioned about when I talk about perfectionism, whether it’s interviews or giving talks, there’s invariably a question around, “Are you advocating then that we stop, we settle, we’re happy, we’re good enough, and we pootle along essentially, for want of a better word?” That’s not the case. That misses the point. The key difference between high performance and perfectionism is that high performance has an outcome. There’s an endpoint. There’s a definitive goal that we meet. We can find satisfaction in its accomplishment.

The problem with perfectionism is that it sits on a completely different spectrum. Essentially, as leaders or parents, we’re keeping our kids or employees on their tiptoes, constantly reaching for more. Whenever they’ve been successful, we give them praise. “Sure, but now, the next goal. You got an A. That’s great. Make sure you get an A-plus in the next one.” There’s a subtle qualification to our approval or to our praise or rewards that we dish out, predicated on the understanding that we keep doing more. For me, that is the line as a leader or parent.

It’s universal. It doesn’t matter whether we’re parenting or whether we’re in a leadership context. It’s important for high-performance climates that you emphasise excellence being something with an endpoint. You make sure that there isn’t any space in your organization or parenting for perfection, because you’re going to burn people out. You’re going to create more perfectionism in those contexts if you don’t have an endpoint, if you don’t allow satisfaction and success. If you have excellence and you reward successes, you push for high standards. You make sure people know about it when they’ve done well.

Inner Dialogue Of A Perfectionist And A Healthy Performer

That’s a great distinction. Not being a perfectionist doesn’t mean that you’re hanging out on the couch eating bonbons, saying it doesn’t matter. There’s a difference in our orientation and even self-talk of someone who has high standards and a vision for creating something. We are creators as humans. Their inner talk, if they may miss the mark, might be more like, “I need to go a little bit more to the left next time. I need to do this a little bit differently. I’m going to shore up. We’re going to go at this again.” Perfectionists might be like, “How could you do this? What’s wrong with you?” Talk a little bit about the inner dialogue going on with a perfectionist versus maybe a healthy performer.

That’s even if the perfectionist allows themselves to let the project go in the first place, to be able to receive the feedback, which means that they engage in that self-criticism. It’s not always guaranteed. You’re absolutely right. There’s the big distinction that people who strive for excellence can let things go, full in the knowledge that maybe this iteration isn’t going to be the one that we go to market with, but the next one or two certainly will be close. That’s the aim of it. We’re making progress.

They’re able to do that very simply because they don’t have the same hangups as perfectionistic people. Remember, perfectionism is driven by the sense of deficit and lack. It means that they’re constantly trying to conceal from other people in the world around them any vulnerability or sign of weakness. When they encounter setbacks and challenges, they are unable to deal with them as healthily as other people. It is because the weakness or challenges reveal the imperfection that they feel so self-conscious about, which they go into themselves.

There’s a lot of guilt. There’s a lot of shame. We see that time and time again in lab studies. When you put them in a challenge, they respond with a lot of shame and a lot of guilt. That’s problematic for their mental health. Of course, it is, but it also has implications for their behavior because it’s not just the emotions that they experience. It’s also what they do next time around. We also show in lab-based studies that if you ask them, “Don’t worry. You made a mistake, but that’s fine. Do it again. Have another go,” perfectionistic people will actually withhold their effort because they can’t fail at something they didn’t try out.

They anticipate shame and guilt so intense that they want to remove themselves from the situation. This is the paradox of perfectionism. Perfectionists do work too hard, but only on things that they can reasonably control. When it gets tough, they start to remove their efforts. They’re no more likely to succeed than non-perfectionistic people. If anything, they’re likely to do worse because of these self-sabotaging behaviors that they engage in.

 

How Perfectionism Stops You From Getting Your Desired Life

So many people before this conversation might wear it a little bit as a badge of honor. It’s just like when you’re talking to people. It’s like, “I’m working hard. I’m working 24/7. Somehow, that makes me a good person because I drive myself to that level.” What you’re starting to dig into is the barriers that this dynamic creates and how it stops you from getting to where you want to be and steals the joy of even the process of going out there and trying things. You’ve started on this, but let’s go a little bit deeper on what perfectionism can do as far as stopping you from having the life that you want to have.

There’s a famous Vince Lombardi quote. He said, “If you shoot for perfection, you’ll hit excellence,” or something like that. It’s very famous. It’s quoted a lot. It’s simply not true. It makes for good locker room motivational mottos, but if you look at the data, it’s simply not the case. You’re going to find yourself falling way harder to shoot for perfection, particularly when things don’t go quite so well because you can’t control the outcome.

You’re going to fail way more times than you succeed. That’s life. That’s what it means to work, essentially. It’s regression to the mean. If you’re not able to adequately bounce back from those setbacks and difficulties, then you are going to find yourself falling behind and burning out. I don’t know whether that directly answers your question. I feel like I’ve gone off on a tangent now. I’m not going at it directly.

We’ve talked about the self-talk and a little bit about, “If I’m not going to be good at this, I’m not even going to play. I’m going to withdraw.” People can think that perfectionism is a badge of honor or a good thing because it’s making me work harder. It’s pushing me to success. There are actually a lot of costs that are hidden that are stopping you.

There is. It’s often glamorized, isn’t it?

Yes.

It’s glamorized for a couple of reasons. One, because it’s very much part of the culture or a zeitgeist, but also because we tend to, in modern culture, look up to the people who have done well, the CEOs, the sports stars, the people who have done fantastically well with startups, and all the rest of it. We’ll put them on a pedestal. We’ll interview them and ask them, “What’s the secret to your success?” Invariably, a lot of them will say, “I was dedicated. I was a perfectionist. I pushed myself beyond comfort.” This lures us into this false sense that if they were perfectionists and they were successful, then that’s what it must take in this world.

It’s a competitive world, so it must take perfectionism to get ahead. The data doesn’t support that. There’s some survivorship bias. When you only see the people at the top, you don’t see the same people with the same traits who have done the same things, but didn’t quite have the same luck, happenstance, genes, or whatever it might be to help them reach the top. It’s a problem of our culture. We celebrate it. We put people who have perfectionism on a pedestal. As I say, when you dive into the data, you see a very different story. One of the reasons why I wrote the book and did the TED Talk is to try to help us think a little differently about perfectionism and see some of its more challenging characteristics.

Society tends to put successful people on a pedestal. But when you actually dive into the data, you will find a very different story. Share on X

You’re doing such important work in creating the dimensions of this conversation because, without this type of conversation, it is very easy to be like, “I’m a perfectionist,” and treat it lightly. So much of this comes back to our beliefs. It’s like, “No pain, no gain.” It has to be difficult. Sometimes, there’s some truth to that we go through challenges and they make us stronger. That’s all good.

Finding Genuine Joy In The Difficult Things

We were talking before we hit record. You were so kind and were asking about the show. I was telling you, so much of doing this is around the joy of doing it, not in subscriber count or what it has to be like, like it has to achieve some scoreboard. It’s the joy of that. I do wonder how we can change our paradigms into doing work projects and things that bring us joy, versus it has to be difficult or it’s not worth doing.

Whenever you begin anything, it’s always difficult. The difference between taking a healthy mindset to that approach and the perfectionist approach is that you know it’s going to be difficult, and you allow that difficulty in as part and parcel of the process. A perfectionist finds that almost the hardest thing to deal with, because essentially, it’s an indictment on them. Everything is personal. There’s a very narcissistic self-reference that goes on underneath perfectionism because everything is an indictment of their sense of self and competency.

If they pick up a guitar and, within a couple of months, still suck, there must be something wrong with me, when actually, this is part and parcel of a learning process. It is never easy. If you want to learn something from the ground up, it’s going to mean a lot of hours of struggle. As you said, what you’re doing is you’re developing yourself. You’re growing in a certain area. The focus should be on the enjoyment of progress. Making those baby steps at the very beginning is something that should be a joyous reminder that we are able to master quite complex things. It doesn’t matter what it is, cooking, a sport that you want to play, setting up a YouTube channel, or whatever it might be. It’s always going to be difficult at first.

It’s about throwing yourself into that difficulty in a weird way and enjoying it. You also said we are born to be creative. We’re born to work. That’s exactly right. George always said that work is life. To be productive is part of our human nature. Perfectionism robs us of that beautiful part of us, because it turns it into a transaction. It turns it into an instrumental activity that has to be done to show some output. Actually, our tendency for productivity is completely the opposite. It’s about joy. It’s about learning. It’s about experience. It’s about making a difference in the world. I totally agree with you. We need to try to turn towards that joy if we possibly can because that’s how we grow.

I love that. There has been a lot of talk out there about the growth mindset. The idea of that is a fundamental acceptance that we are all becoming. We are all growing. This is a learning process. It’s why we call The Compassion Lab a lab, because this is a learning process. We’re trying to figure out how to get better and how to do it together. That is so much more freeing than the constricted way of always having to perform to earn love or to be good enough and have to satisfy this inner critic that we carry around.

Focus Not On Outcomes But On Intrinsic Motivations

The last interview I did was with David Gerard. He’s a mentalist and magician. He talked about the time that his performance turned from “I have to be a guy doing cool tricks. It’s all about me,” into “I’m here to create these moments and to be absolutely present with my audience.” When you come out of yourself into the service of others and the joy of the interaction of others, it’s the energy changes and what you do. You can feel that difference between someone who is just trying to make it about them versus someone who is in it to grow.

My grandfather was a master craftsman. I loved going to his house because it was crazy what he could make. It’s only when I was writing the book that I started to reflect on how there is something that isn’t talked about enough in modern society that is important in that experience. That’s the vocation. As you said, it is getting out of yourself and creating things that need to be in the world, way more than you need to be loved, appreciated, or valued. There’s a longevity to that as well.

None of his fixtures, crafts, window frames, staircases that he made, or bar tops that he installed has his name on it. Hundreds of thousands of probably millions of people have drunk beer off his bar or gone up his stairs across all the pubs that he’s worked on in the local area every single day. If you think about it, that’s crazy. The pride that he took in knowing that those things needed to exist was such a powerful reminder to me.

All of this worry that I had in my own mind about whether I was good enough, what I was going to produce in this book was going to be respected, valued, or whatever, or all those external things that I needed to prop up my own self-esteem. He sat back with a scotch every night, content that he had left something in the world. As you mentioned with the previous interviewee, it seems as though that is exactly the epiphany that they had had. When you have it, you can’t unsee it again. You start to then lean into that. You see your purpose in such a more joyous term. That certainly made me more creative.

I’ve definitely thought bigger about the types of things I research and the studies that I do. I would say it has made me more successful as well. Since being able to make that switch, I’ve started to ignore the external validation markers and start to lean into the impact. Here I am, TED Talk, book, and all the rest of it. It’s one of those things where it doesn’t just make you a more rounded human being, but it also makes you more successful if you can get out of that ego. I strongly believe that anyway.

That was so beautifully said and so true. When we understand that it is about the process of creation and not just about our own neurosis and what’s going on inside our heads. It was interesting. As you were talking about your grandfather, I was thinking about how he created things that lasted, these tangible, beautiful things that are still being used.

I remember having a conversation with my stepfather, who worked for IBM for 35 years. He was an engineer. He built a lot of buildings and facilities. He said, “A lot of the things that I built are gone,” because in his case, they were repurposed or torn down. What lasted were the moments, how he led, how he worked with the team, and the relationships. I read his retirement book and what people wrote about those interactions. Sometimes, it’s a tangible thing that you leave. Sometimes, it’s something you said to someone on a Tuesday afternoon in a conversation that changed the way they think. It is a legacy you may not hold in your hand, but you still made it because you were focused on them, on serving.

It’s a huge switch-up. You would think it would be self-evident that this should be the way that we would work and find purpose and productivity in our lives. Unfortunately, we live inside an economy that will constantly tell us that we aren’t good enough. You need to find meaning in artificial sources of happiness and well-being, the material solutions. Even though we want to move it in the direction that we’re talking about, our compass has constantly moved in the other direction through an onslaught of messaging, PR, and all the rest of it.

The reason we have a lot of material prosperity is because of that system. It does create jobs. It does drive economic growth, prosperity, and all the rest of it. At some level, we also have to recognise that we have to move against that to find that fulfilment. That’s definitely what I struggled with. The more conversations that we can have about how it’s incredibly fulfilling, it’s incredibly motivating to not focus on outcomes, but focus on those intrinsic desires and motivations, having our purpose being embedded in what we’re living in the world, or how we’re affecting other people.

Sometimes, it feels like I’m going in the wrong direction or that I’m compromising my bottom line by not marketing myself or not being transactional in the way that I interact with others. I’ve made a decision now. I’m not going to do that anymore. Yes, it’s difficult because modern society will try to move you in a different direction. The challenge is to stay steadfast, hold those values, and make sure that you live them every day. As I say, it doesn’t preclude happiness and success. If anything, it makes you happier and more successful if you can do that.

The world will try to move you in a different direction. Do your best to remain steadfast and stay true to the core values you live by every day. Share on X

The Concerning Rise Of Socially Prescribed Perfectionism

Steadfastness and knowing who you are, what you’re doing, and how you serve is so huge. I want to dig back into some of the research because we’ve mentioned the 50/50 genetic versus environmental. We’ve talked about some of the voices of the social culture that are driving perfectionism. We haven’t dug into it, but social media, to me, clearly is an issue. We’ve seen it affect depression in young people because of what is shown on social media versus the reality of what people are living. You do a lot in the book about what’s happening with younger generations, college students, and how this is increasing. Can you talk a little bit about what your research has shown and what’s causing it with the changes?

Our research is showing quite clearly that all three of those aspects of perfectionism, and I mentioned self, social, and other increasing, but one of the things that’s concerning is that socially prescribed perfectionism and also allied attitudinal traits. These are things like concern over mistakes because we’re concerned about what others will think, and doubts about actions, worrying if we’re doing things correctly, or that we would be seen to do things incorrectly. We doubt our actions. We become very indecisive.

A lot of these other tendencies, alongside socially prescribed perfectionism, are increasing exponentially among younger generations. That’s concerning because those that we call perfectionistic concerns are what drive the correlations between perfectionism and mental health issues like depression and anxiety. They also complicate the relationship between perfectionism and success because they drive relations between perfectionism and things like procrastination and indecisiveness.

It’s a challenging picture that we’re seeing. Younger people definitely have more perfectionistic concerns than our generation. Why is that happening? Yes, social media is part of the picture. It has become so ubiquitous and so inescapable that when you’re bombarded with images of perfection 24/7 and you see on an almost minute-by-minute basis other people living perfect lives or even people in your local area living lives that you think you should be living, it makes you question the adequacy of your own life.

I don’t doubt that there’s a problem with social media, but I don’t think it’s the only cause. It’s quite reductive to simply say social media is the problem when social media is also an advertising device. That’s how the execs at Instagram described their platform. It’s not a social media network. It’s an advertising device. It’s a very effective one. It’s probably the most effective one we’ve ever devised because you don’t need to do anything.

 

It’s the users who are creating their own disaffection within that system. Essentially, you need to position yourself in a targeted way. It’s one of the most powerful tools. It’s an evolution of an existing trend where advertising has been around for years. It has been preying on our insecurities. I don’t think it’s new in that respect. It’s more ubiquitous and makes it a bigger problem. We also have things like college competition, which is intense. The Ivy League acceptance rate has gone down to half in the last several years. The amount of pressure on young people in schools is insane.

It’s bad in the UK. I can’t imagine what it must be like in the US. I can only look at the data. It doesn’t look good. You have this intense competition that’s going on in schools and colleges. Parents are responding to that competition quite spontaneously and quite naturally with subtle pushing behaviors. It’s very understandable, but it can also create perfectionistic tendencies. We’ve had GDP decline or stagnate since the financial crisis.

That’s created a dwindling of opportunities, which has also not helped. Inequality has increased as well, which creates a lot of fear about where we sit on the social hierarchy. We’re worried about falling backwards. What I’m trying to say here is that there are so many factors that are having an impact on young people’s perceptions. They need to work harder, do more, and be perfect. Social media is one of them, but there are all others.

How To Get Healthier Within

We’ve talked about the fact that some of this is genetic. What we’re talking about are some of the environmental factors. It’s true. One of my boys is nineteen and has a different career, looking at flight, but one is in college. When we were going through the process, I remember thinking, “If it was like this when I graduated, I don’t know if I would’ve gotten in.” College counselors, how your essay is done, and you have to have done all these service things. You have to be an unbelievable person to get into school. I don’t remember any of that pressure when I was going through it.

The world is what it is right now. The environment is more constricted. We have crazy stuff going on, internet outages, job changes, and AI. You’re not going to have jobs anymore. Robots are going to have it. All the stuff you hear in the world is coming at you. What do you do if you’re a parent? Maybe you’re tuning in to this as a young person. What do I do? How do I get healthier on the inside, knowing that I can’t change what’s happening on the outside?

You have to be brave. It’s not easy. The advice that I would give depends on how fortunate or privileged you are in the moment. If you have the privilege, then I would say you can afford to be brave. Don’t try not to lean into those pressures to perform. Try to focus on what you enjoy and the intrinsic desires that you have, whether it be creative or whether it be desires to learn math or become proficient at engineering. I would definitely encourage you to lean into those passions and see your work and your study as a vocation, as an opportunity for growth, because you can afford to be so.

Fully in the knowledge that’s going to be a more sustainable way to pursue your goals in the long term than it would be to focus on the very hard-nosed transaction or what’s going to make me the most amount of money. That’s not going to be a sustainable way to pursue a career in the long run. For people who come from backgrounds like mine, it is becoming a lot more difficult. That advice might not necessarily be the same.

You might need to have to look at what is in your best interest transactionally, at least at the beginning. You may need to work hard to get yourself over the finishing line when it comes to school and college. That might mean a little bit of perfectionism when you’re younger. That might mean a little bit of discomfort. You also have to remember that the payoff for that is to be in a position where you can stop doing those things. You can actually focus and turn your compass in a slightly different direction as you get into the workforce and become more stable.

I don’t have a one-size-fits-all piece of advice in navigating this world. It definitely will change depending on where you come from. The biggest one is that you have to recognize that at some point in your career, there is going to come a point where you have to pivot to be more sustainable, to make sure that you enjoy life for what it is supposed to be enjoyable. Spending time in your community with your family and friends and having a sense of purpose and meaning from it are the most important things. It’s tough. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not easy these days. Young people do face a lot of pressures. It’s up to us to be empathetic and compassionate as much as it’s up to them to also be compassionate to themselves.

At some point in your career, there will come a point where you have to pivot to be more sustainable and enjoy life to the fullest. Share on X

How Well-Established Perfectionists Can Live Less Intense Lives

That’s great advice. It’s never a one-size-fits-all because everyone is in their own situational dynamic. What if you’re tuning in to this conversation and you are a well-established perfectionist? You’re older. You’ve been in the workforce. You’ve been dealing with that inner critic, that driving force of perfectionism, for a long time. You’ve pivoted in dealing with your own. What would you tell those people about how I can exhale a little bit more and live a life of a bit less intensity to people who are living that way now?

The first thing I would say is that you might think that you need to continue to work at 100 miles an hour, but try working at 80 miles an hour and see what happens. I guarantee you nothing will change because you are established. You can take your foot off the gas. There will be no long-term implications or consequences. I’ll tell you why, because I’ve done it. I used to think I had to work evenings or weekends, and then kids came along. I couldn’t do that anymore. I thought first that that was going to be a mortal threat to my career aspirations, but it hasn’t. Nothing has changed.

I’m maybe a little less productive, but what I do with the time that I have available is much more focused. The ideas that I have are grounded in a lot more experience. It hasn’t been the case that it’s a straight transaction between what you put in and what you get out. I would encourage you, if you are in that position, to test it. Give yourself the permission to take your foot off the gas a little bit. Maybe go on a break, spend more time with your family or friends, or do something for yourself. I promise you. It’s not the end of the world.

Even in the most high-performing jobs, like law, medical, or whatever it might be, where there are intense pressures, I guarantee you it won’t be as catastrophic as you think it is. The more you get used to giving yourself permission to do those things, the easier it becomes. The more vitality you have when you come to work, the more energized and focused you are. A lot of it is about giving yourself permission. Perfectionism will never give you permission because you always think the worst. Try it. Give it a go.

Get In Touch With Dr. Curran And Buy His Book

That’s beautiful advice, Thomas. Maybe for a change, start understanding that you are enough. It is enough. Find some space. Find some breath and some enjoyment in the journey, even in the times when it doesn’t work out, knowing that sometimes, it will, and sometimes, it won’t. There’s beauty in all of that. I’m watching our clock. I want to be very mindful of your generosity of time. How can people find you? The book is The Perfection Trap. It’s an amazing read. It was the initiation of all of our conversations. I loved it. Where can people find out more about you?

I’m not overly active on social media. I do have a LinkedIn account, though. If you type in Thomas Curran LSE or Thomas Curran Perfectionism, that’ll be the first account to come up. Do connect. It would be great to do so. As I say, the book is out. It’d be of great interest in this topic. If you want to learn more, do go ahead and buy it. My website is ThomasCurran.co.uk. I have all media snippets and all the rest of it on there if you want to learn more.

Why We Should Embrace Our Fundamental Humanity

Before we go, we’ve talked about a lot. If you think back to the journey, the writing of the book, what would you leave people with? What would be some parting words of wisdom that you would want to say to everyone about this conversation, or anything that you would want to share with people?

We’re all human beings at the end of the day. We’re all fallible. We’re all exhaustible creatures. If you struggle with perfectionism, being human is almost the hardest thing to possibly accept, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Starting from tomorrow, accept that we’re all human beings. That helps us be a little bit compassionate to ourselves when things have gone wrong and to other people when things have gone wrong. Accepting our common humanity would be the biggest word of wisdom I would probably give.

I love that you brought up compassion because this show, being The Compassion Lab, I do believe that embracing our fundamental humanity first and having compassion for others’ humanity is always the best place to start. Thomas, thank you for everything, for your courage to write the book, do the TED Talk, have this conversation, and come share this with everyone. I know it has a ripple effect, much as your grandfather’s creations live on. The ripple effect of these conversations lives on. I want to thank you so much.

No worries. It has been great to chat.

Hopefully, let’s keep talking. There is more to be discovered on this, so maybe we can do a part two one of these days.

That would be great. That would be wonderful. Thanks, Katherine. I appreciate it. Lovely conversation.

Thank you, Thomas.

 

 

Important Links

• Dr. Thomas Curran’s Website
• The Perfection Trap
• Dr. Thomas Curran on LinkedIn
• Dr. Thomas Curran – World-Leading Expert on Perfectionism
• Our dangerous obsession with perfectionism is getting worse – TED Talk
• The Illusion of Reality with Mentalist David Gerard – past episode

 

About Dr. Thomas Curran

Dr. Thomas Curran is the world’s leading expert on perfectionism, author of the best-selling book The Perfection Trap, and acclaimed Associate Professor of Psychology at The London School of Economics and Political Science.

His TED Talk on perfectionism received over three million views, he has written for major international publications such as TIME magazine and the Harvard Business Review, and his work has been featured in the BBC, New Scientist, New York Times, CNN, and Wall Street Journal.

Through extensive research, public speaking, consulting services, and academic instruction, Dr. Curran is not just participating in but leading the global conversation on perfectionism. His mission is clear: to uncover the root of perfectionism, its effects on us, the reasons for its rise, and most importantly, what we can do to stop it.

As a self-proclaimed perfectionist, Dr. Curran challenges the modern-day imperative to do more and have more and instead offers realism, teaching us that the unrelenting treadmill of perfectionism is exhausting, compromising our mental health, impacting our relationships, and blocking progress toward our goals.

 

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College Competitions, Inner Dialogue, Intrinsic Motivation, Mental Health Issues, Social Media, Survivorship Bias

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