Perfectionism or High Standards

Perfectionism loves to call itself “high standards,” but your body knows the difference. Feeling drained, contantly overthinking and still not producing are some of the telltale signs of perfectionism.

 I’m breaking down how perfectionism keeps Muslim women stuck even when we have big goals, strong values, and a real desire to put high quality work into the world.

We walk through clear, practical contrasts you can use immediately: high standards move while perfectionism stalls, quantity builds quality, and “ready” is not a real finish line. I talk about why perfectionism is obsessed with control and certainty, why it burns energy and triggers rumination loops, and how it turns work into a constant search for validation. Then we talk about the shifts you need to make.

We also tackle how perfectionism destroys prioritisation by demanding mastery of everything, while high standards stay selective and intentional so your excellence is sustainable. 

If you’re tired of polishing the blank page, this is your permission to create, refine, and grow without losing yourself in the process. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s stuck, and leave a review with the biggest “I needed that” moment you heard.

I invite you to join The Ummi Collective. It is a weekly coaching program for Muslim mothers raising children on the autism spectrum.

Inside, you learn how to support your child’s development in a way that builds independence, confidence, and long-term success... without losing yourself in the process.

Apply for a Commitment Rate today

https://www.islamiclifecoachschool.com/offers/RRn2EBEC/chec

Transcript

Welcome And Why You’re Stuck

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to Islamic Life Coach School Podcast. Apply tools that you learn in this podcast and your life will be unrecognizably successful. Now your host, Dr. Kamal Akhtar. Hello, hello, hello everyone. Peace and blessings be upon all of you. Today I'm going to be expanding on the topic of perfectionism. I've spoken about this before, but this is something that keeps coming up. And a lot of women come to me and tell me that all of these goals and visions that they have and they're working towards them, yet they're nowhere near accomplishing them. They put in a lot of hard work and they have all the right values. What ends up happening is that in these coaching sessions we end up discovering a lot of perfectionistic tendencies, and these tendencies hold them back. In their minds the topic is overrated and it sounds cliched and it's been talked about before and they know logically that perfectionism isn't good, but they still continue to do it, and they do it in the name of pursuit of high quality. They say they don't want to do things just willy nilly and mediocre standards. They want to put high quality work out in the world. And for myself, as a recovering perfectionist, I did this all at one point in my life as well. So now, in this journey towards your mental health as a Muslim woman, not only identifying and healing from perfectionism is an absolute must, you must be able to separate it from high standards. So let's get started. First of all, perfectionism is not the same thing as excellence. You think you're being intentional and precise, and then you tell yourself that you care about quality, but what you're actually doing is rehearsing failure in your mind before you give yourself a chance to succeed. Perfectionism seduces you into believing that continuing to improve will produce outcomes, when in reality the urge to improve never comes to a conclusion, and that over time produces no results. You sit there constantly editing, refining, reconsidering, reworking, and you call all of that effort, and it does require effort and drains your energy because it is work, but it becomes emotionally draining, and that physical labor produces no tangible output. You are never producing less because your standards are high. You're producing less because your nervous system is trying to avoid exposure, judgment, and vulnerability of being judged. Meaning once you host a party and decide to serve two dishes once you turn an assignment in or once you sign up for a workout class, to make these outcomes possible, you would have to allow other people to judge you once you go through with your goal. Perfectionism hates that. It hates exposure. It will tell you that two dishes isn't enough. You have to do ten. It will tell you workout once or twice a week is not enough. You have to do more. It will tell you that you have to have the perfect assignment in place written out before you can submit it. So what I'm saying is go ahead and insist on high standards. I insist on high standards, I consider that a very high value of mine. But also don't disillusion yourself that you're not falling into perfectionism. And this is the difference that we're talking about today. So I'm going to give you a side by side comparison of the two so that you can easily tell them apart. High standards move while perfectionism stalls. High standards have momentum, they have energy, they push you into action even when the outcome is uncertain. When you operate from high standards, you're willing to produce something today that your future self might even outgrow one day, and that does not threaten you. That excites you. Perfectionism, on the other hand, is obsessed with control. It needs guarantees, it demands certainty before you produce anything. And because a lot of times certainty does not exist in creative work, you end up frozen. High standards say work must be excellent, so let me build it. Perfectionism says it must be excellent, so I cannot risk building it until I know how perfect it will be. Number two is quantity is the only pathway to quality, and your perfectionistic ego hates that. What perfectionism wants is for you to produce something great without producing anything mediocre first, and that is a lie. Every piece of exceptional work you admire is built on a graveyard of average attempts that nobody else sees. Quantity is not the opposite of quality. Quantity is the training ground that makes quality inevitable. When you produce more, you gather data, you refine, you sharpen your instincts, the quality of the outcome is much higher. This is because you're becoming less and less emotionally attached to each individual output, which ironically improves the quality of the final output. Perfectionism resists quantity because it attaches your worth to each mediocre piece. High standards detach your identity from the output and attach it to the process where it belongs. Number three is perfectionism burns energy, while high quality multiplies it, it feeds you, it fuels you. And you have felt this difference in your body. Perfectionism feels heavy, draining, you move slow. When you sit down to do any work, with perfectionism you will feel immediate resistance, there's overthinking, there's constant mental fatigue and dialogue, which is a fast track way to burn out. This is because you're trying to control too many variables at once, while trying to manage or suppress your internal fear response. On the other hand, high standards feel sharp, they feel focused and surprisingly light while they're producing amazing results. Here you enter a state of creation where effort produces momentum. And you might feel tired and exhausted after a full day of high standard work, which is human, but that comes with the celebration of your accomplishment and recognition of your humanity. The same hour of work produces exponentially more output because your brain with high standards is not stuck in rumination loops. Number four is that you let go of perfectionism in the moment you decide that exposure is the goal. And there is no magical threshold where your work becomes ready. That moment does not exist. If your definition of success is flawlessness, you might as well just stay stuck forever. If your definition of success is exposure, iteration, refinement, continuation, you will move and you will produce. When you're working on your value of high standards, the difference will be that it will lower the barrier to action without lowering your standards. Perfectionism says standards are high, but in that case, the barriers to action always stay high as well. Number five, perfectionism is a dysregulated state, while high standards comes from regulated power and emotional control. Perfectionism is your nervous system scanning for threat and trying to eliminate it through control. With high standards, you're grounded enough to tolerate imperfection in the short term because you trust your ability to improve over time. And that trust is what allows you to move without burning out. six, your output ratio reveals your operating state. Meaning look at your actual results, not just your intentions and your actions. If you're putting in massive effort and producing very little, you're in perfectionism. There is a 5% return on your energy. If you're producing constantly and your work is improving over time, you're operating from high standards. That's where your output starts to exceed your input because your systems and your skills and your confidence compounds. Number seven, perfectionism edits and keeps editing before it creates. High standards create so that there's something worth editing. When you're sitting with perfectionism, you're already in correction mode, already constantly second guessing the words and the work that doesn't even exist yet. It forces you to critique a blank page. This is why it feels so heavy because it's filled with criticism. But in the meanwhile, there's really nothing to respond to, only imagine judgment. With high standards, you create first and you create fast, and then you refine something that exists without judgment. You give yourself material to improve on. eight. Perfectionism personalizes every output. High standards systemize the output. Under perfectionism, each decision feels loaded. With high standards you remove this emotional charge, you treat work like a system as it is supposed to be. You produce, you evaluate, improve, you lather, rinse, and repeat. In this case, systems are built, which make the efficiency of the task much better for the next time. nine. Perfectionism waits for the right state. High standards build the state through actions. You tell yourself that you will start when you feel some clarity, when you're a little more focused, when you have attention, when you have time, when you feel inspired. And that moment never really arrives because excellence is a byproduct of movement, not a prerequisite. With perfectionism you'll be waiting for some sort of alignment, some sort of feeling of readiness. With high standards you act in order to create alignment. You produce your own alignment. You might start messy, you might start with uncertainty, but somewhere along the process your thinking sharpens because of your experience, because of your flexibility, and because of your ability to gauge and adjust. Your nervous system enjoys the whole process because it has something to engage with. ten. Perfectionism constantly seeks validation before any release of output. High standard come with internal validation, something that you've already approved of. With perfectionism you want reassurance before you put something out. You want to know it will land well and it will be received well and it won't be criticized, and that delays everything. Perfectionism tries to secure approval in advance, which is really technically impossible. High standards release the work and allow reality to respond. Any kind of feedback is data, and instead of trying to predict the responses and bracing for them, you start learning from them. This is how your work improves faster than your thinking alone could do. eleven. Perfectionism is linear. High standards are iterative. Perfectionism wants to get it right in one attempt, treats creation like a straight line between idea and perfection. That is why it feels so high stake. High standards understand that excellence is built in layers. Version one is not supposed to be the final version. If it is great, if it is not, it continues to build on it. Version one is supposed to exist, while all the rest of the versions continue to sharpen your output. And all of this process removes the pressure to be perfect and replaces it with the expectation to improve, which in a bodily state of things is a much lighter state to exist in. It's much more enjoyable, much more fun. twelve. Perfectionism makes time feel scarce. High standards make time work for you. When you spend so much time perfecting a single piece that you have no capacity left to produce more, time becomes your enemy. You're always feeling behind, overwhelmed, running after something, constantly trying to catch up. High standards use time very differently, because then you are producing constantly, which allows your body of work to compound. One piece of work informs the next, and time becomes an ally, because your output accumulates. thirteen. High standards let you win even when you don't win. Perfectionism only lets you win or lose. With high standards you can miss the outcome completely and still walk away calm and grounded, because you are extracting value from the process itself. You've collected insight, maybe you've gathered pattern recognition, or you've sharpened your decision making skills. Those are all strategic byproducts. Those are all something that you can bank on even though you didn't get the outcome at all as you expected. And these byproducts compound over time. They keep moving you closer to the goal each time. Perfectionism does not allow for that experience to exist at all. In perfectionism, if your outcome is not met, the entire effort feels invalidated. And the reason in this case you walk away depleted is not because you failed, but because perfectionism insists on painting everything as a failure and you not learning anything from the process. And even when if you've created work that is perfect from your current standards, meaning you're operating from perfectionism and you produce something that is actually acceptable from those standards, as soon as you arrive at the product, your brain will move the goalpost five feet further. It will tell you, oh yeah, this was good enough yesterday, but today not so much. So you never really arrive at the perfect product. What your brain might have considered perfect previously, it stops considering it that as soon as you present it with something, something that you think might be good enough for it. So never fall into the illusion of perfectionism telling you that it's for your benefit. It's not. It never is. And the next one is that perfectionism makes self sabotage sound intelligent. Perfectionism will give you very convincing arguments. It will tell you that you're just being thorough, and you care more than others. It will tell you that it's helping you separate excellence from mediocrity. But as you've learned from the items I've listed in this podcast, you will look at your results and your internal state and the truth will become obvious. If you're stuck, overworked and underproducing, you are in perfectionism. Because high standards make self leadership and self acceptance much easier. The next point is that perfectionism does not know how to prioritize. If something enters your awareness, it becomes something you feel pressure to master right away. When you try to be perfect in everything, you dilute your capacity across too many domains, and nothing really gets your full attention. Everything feels important, justified, and at the same time it feels incomplete, because you cannot give everything your absolute complete attention at all times. On the other hand, high standards are selective. You recognize that your energy is finite and your excellence must be directed. High standards gather your energy and direct it with intention. You consciously decide where you want to invest with depth, where you want to put your time and effort and attention for refinement. And because you're not wasting energy over polishing everything else, you actually have the capacity to reach a level of quality that perfectionism alone could never sustain, which produces a high standard result. If you notice something new, something even mildly interesting, and perfectionism immediately turns it into something that you should master, then be vigilant about it and be careful not to fall into that trap. High standards will allow you the enjoyment of exploration without strong commitment. You can try things, you can play with ideas, you can engage with them lightly, and only deepen your investment when something genuinely resonates. What you're doing in each of these cases is that you're not choosing between quality and quantity. You're actually choosing between two nervous system states. And the real decision here is that you're choosing between a contracted, threat-based state that disguises itself as discipline, or you're choosing between an open, regulated state that allows you to pursue excellence without losing yourself in the process. One will keep you small while convincing you that you're aiming high. The other one will actually expand your capacity to create, deliver, and enjoy the process. When you've put these steps into practice in your life, you will know the true difference between perfectionism and high standards. And you will know that in your gut, that you're not lowering the bar. You're only finally putting the bar in the right place. With that I pray to Allah Subhanahu wa Ta'ala, O Allah, remove from my heart the need to be perfect and replace it with the courage to act. Allow me to remember that perfectionism is a quality that only belongs to you. Allow me to create with presence and to improve with my wisdom. Ya Allah, make my efforts a source of growth and anchor me in a state of peace. Amin Yarabul Alameen. Please treat me in your draas. I will talk to you guys next time.