Growing up, I was good at everything. Well, almost everything. Because why would I try something if I knew I wouldn’t be good at it? Why risk being bad at something and letting everyone see me fail?

That pretty much sums up the first 25 years of my life. When it came to trying something new, I’d first calculate my chances of “getting it right”. If it didn’t look like something I could master quickly, I’d talk myself out of it. I was already great at many things, so why stress over something that might expose me as average? I had built an identity around being exceptional and getting it right the first time. I’d learned not to put myself out there and risk failure, or worse, mediocrity.

For many of us, perfectionism is actually a survival strategy. We’ve learned that being twice as good keeps us safe and mistakes are proof to others that we don’t belong, so we overprepare, overperform, overdeliver and call it ‘excellence’. But when we actually think about it, whose standards are we performing to? Why did we learn to protect ourselves like that? Where did we learn that this was the cost of our survival?