Better Not Perfect. Why Perfectionism Is Holding Your Leadership Back.
Perfectionism sounds like a virtue. It isn’t.
Christy Pretzinger — founder of The Better Leader Project, CEO of WG Content, and author of the forthcoming book Better Not Perfect — said something to David on the show that stopped him cold. She described perfectionism not as a high standard, but as “a shame management strategy.” The logic is devastatingly simple: if you’re perfect, you think the shame won’t come. But it always does. Because perfect is unachievable.
So what are you actually chasing?
Perfection Is a Horizon You Never Reach
Think about that image for a second. A horizon. No matter how fast you run, how hard you work, how many times you polish that rock — you never get any closer to it.
“Better,” Christy says, is different. Better is a direction. You don’t need to reach a fixed point; you just need to keep moving. That reframe alone is worth sitting with.
David scored low on perfectionism during his Saboteur Assessment. He’s more of an experimentalist. He tries things. He lets them fail. But he’s been around enough leaders to know that perfectionism runs rampant in organizational cultures, quietly doing damage that nobody names until it’s too late.
What Perfectionism Actually Costs Your Team
Here’s the part leaders don’t want to hear. A perfectionist boss isn’t raising the bar — they’re crushing it.
Christy put it plainly: perfectionist leaders hold people to impossible standards, and criticism (not feedback) never brings out the best in anyone. What you get instead is fear. Silence. Overthinking. People are preparing for harsh judgment rather than doing their best creative work.
No vulnerability. No innovation. Higher turnover. Unhappier teams.
And the cruel irony? You don’t even get excellence. The creative process is imperfect by design. As Brené Brown has said — and Christy echoed — you cannot get to creativity except through vulnerability. You have to be willing to be wrong. A perfectionist leader makes that impossible.
David discussed how he spent 9 years training and 9,000 sparring rounds to earn his black belt in jiu-jitsu.
You know what that belt actually represents? Failure. Thousands of rounds with people bigger, faster, younger, and stronger than him — and tapping out, over and over again. Nobody gets to excellence without that. A perfectionist could never earn a black belt because they’d never tolerate the process.
The Inner Critic Is Louder Than Any Boss
Here’s what surprised David most in his conversation with Christy. She said her inner voice was harsher than most of the external criticism she had ever received.
Sound familiar?
We speak to ourselves in ways we would NEVER speak to another person. And yet, we let that voice run unchecked — beating us up for an awkward comment at a dinner party, a dismissive remark in a meeting, a missed target. Christy shared a story about an 80-year-old neighbor who sent an email the morning after a neighborhood dinner, devastated that she had told a long-winded story. Nobody else gave it a second thought. She was still at war with herself.
We never really outgrow it, do we?
The path forward isn’t self-flagellation. It isn’t ignoring mistakes either. It’s what Christy calls pause, anchor, choose.
Simple. Not easy.
Try This: Pause, Anchor, Choose
When you get triggered — and you will — here’s what Christy teaches:
- Pause. Just take a beat. That gap is your safety net.
- Anchor. Ask yourself: who do I want to be right now?
- Choose. Pick a better action — one that won’t require an apology later.
Christy learned this lesson from her father. She still practices it. Still gets it wrong sometimes. The point is not perfection (there it is again). The point is that you get better at it through practice. Every time you pause rather than react, you become a more skillful leader.
There Is No Accomplishment Without Failure
That’s not a motivational poster. That’s a fact.
You cannot learn to walk without falling. You cannot build something meaningful without making mistakes. As John Maxwell wrote in Failing Forward — a book Christy references often — the question isn’t whether you’ll fail. It’s whether you’ll fail forward.
So the next time your team makes a mistake, ask yourself: am I responding as a leader who uses this moment to help people grow? Or am I running a “righteousness racket” — making myself right and everyone else wrong?
Better is always available to you. Perfection never was.
Try the pause today. See what happens.
Christy Pretzinger can be found at christypretzinger.com and on LinkedIn. Keep an eye out for her forthcoming book, Better Not Perfect.
