“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” – Salvador Dali “It is no sin to attempt and fail. The only sin is to not make the attempt.” – Suellen Fried PROBLEM: Many nurses hold themselves back, quite unintentionally. They fall prey to perfectionism, a dead-end path. I’m an enthusiastically anti-perfectionist nurse. I make mistakes, because I do complex and challenging work, often under adverse and unpredictable conditions. When circumstances demand it, I make quick decisions and act on them. I carefully look for any errors, address them, learn and move on. How about you? Are you perfect? MUST you be perfect? Be honest: as a nurse, what’s your gut reaction to these attacks on perfectionism? I ask because it’s a crucial point. Many nurses embrace perfectionism tightly, desperately: we must never make mistakes, do everything right and right on time, find a way regardless of work conditions. Otherwise, we fail: we become ‘bad nurses.’ Surely such nurses must be superhuman: how else to explain such clearly impossible expectations? In psychiatric practice, we call this cognitive error black and white thinking: in this case “perfect” versus “bad” with nothing in between. Such thinking badly distorts reality, often leading to [...]![]()
