Why doesn't trying to avoid mistakes work?

Because a goal made of things to avoid has no destination in it. You can't reach Niagara Falls by telling your GPS everywhere you don't want to go; you could list places to avoid for the rest of your life and never take the first step toward the one you want. Arriving anywhere good becomes an accident. A 1997 study by Andrew Elliot and Kennon Sheldon found that people whose personal goals were framed as avoidance reported lower well-being over the following months than people pursuing something.

Why am I a perfectionist?

Usually because the goal got defined by what to steer clear of rather than what to arrive at. Everyday thoughts like 'I don't want to be disliked,' 'I don't want to be a burden,' or 'I don't want to be rejected' put caution tape around where not to go, and enough of it covers the sidewalk entirely, which is where the stuck feeling and the anxiety come from. Schema therapy also looks at whether the pattern was carried forward from an overly critical childhood or from one where nobody modeled how to set a goal in the first place.

What kind of therapy helps with perfectionism?

Several approaches are commonly used and they come at it from different angles. CBT and REBT can work down to what actually matters to you, so you are solving for that instead of for the absence of mistakes. Solution focused therapy may make the goal measurable and accountable. Schema therapy looks at where the pattern was learned. Internal Family Systems offers a way to work with the protective part that second guesses you. ACT treats the second guessing thoughts as objects you can decline to engage. DBT works on balance between emotional presence and rational deduction. Which one fits is worth exploring with a clinician rather than picking off a list.

What Is Perfectionism? Why You Have It

Q: What is perfectionism?

Perfectionism is a bit of a misnomer. It isn't the presence of everything going perfectly, it's the absence of mistakes: don't come in second, don't make a math error, don't make the mistake that other person made. The research frames it as a set of standards rather than a destination. Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett's 1991 model in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology sorts perfectionism by whose standards a person believes they are answering to: their own, the ones they hold others to, or the ones they believe others hold for them.

By Carl Chinn, LMHC/LPC · Licensed therapist since 2012 · Reviewed September 2026

You want to click send on this email you’ve been writing but you’re not sure if it’s perfect yet. You want to ask someone out, or just say hello, but you’re not sure if you’ll do it perfectly. You want to try something new in your life, but if you can’t guarantee success, why even try? The stakes feel high, in fact the highest, but we don’t recognize that we’ve got control of the bet we’re making.

Perfectionism, because of its name, is often taken to mean trying to be perfect. But what does that mean? Is there anyone who’s ever lived who was perfect, someone we could use as an example?

No, it’s not trying to be a particular someone…

Is there an equation that we can fill in where 1+1=2 that works out perfectly each time, a kind of certainty that everything is accounted for? No… that doesn’t work for our experience either. There are no 1s or 2s in a way that a person would empathize with. Is it running faster than anyone else in the race and setting a record? No, next year someone just sets a new record…

So what the heck? What is it!?

Perfectionism is a bit of a misnomer. Perfectionism is not the presence of everything going perfectly, it’s the absence of mistakes. Don’t come in second place. Don’t make a math error. Don’t make the mistakes that other person did. If you succeed in making no mistakes, ever (good luck), you get to be perfect. This fictional ending state is indeed fictional. Aspiring to get as close to perfect as possible falls into the same issue, which is avoiding the most mistakes.

The research doesn’t hand us a destination either. Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett’s 1991 model, still the standard one, sorts perfectionism by whose standards you think you’re answering to: your own, the ones you hold other people to, or the ones you believe other people hold for you. Three scorecards. Not one of them is a place you arrive.

Can you get there by naming where you don’t want to go?

When your goal is to avoid something, you never actually arrive where you want to be. If you’re trying to drive to Niagara Falls, can you get there by telling your GPS where you don’t want to go?

Sit with that for a moment and run the experiment in your head. “I don’t want to go to San Fran, Beijing, Paris,” and so on. You could spend the rest of your life counting places to avoid and never take the first step toward Niagara Falls. This also doesn’t count the countless number of places you didn’t think of, the ones you didn’t want to go to that could surprise you by accident. Amongst that huge list you could create, you likely didn’t write “don’t go to the moon, the center of the earth, Alpha Centauri,” or any number of other places you’d be petrified to go to.

If you ever do make it to Niagara Falls, it’s an utter accident if you plan this way. You experiment thousands of times, getting close but never quite getting there.

What’s this look like when it’s not geography? It looks like this:

I don’t want to be disliked
I don’t want to be a burden
I don’t want to be rejected
I don’t want to be trapped
I don’t want to miss out
I don’t want things to be unfair
I don’t want things to be uncomfortable
I don’t want what I don’t want

And it goes on. We have these thoughts every day and they put caution tape around where not to go, but they can cover the sidewalk so thoroughly that there’s nowhere to go from here, and we get stuck trying to think of what to do. The anxiety of it eats us up. Unintentionally, we created a trap for ourselves.

This isn’t only a logic problem, either. When Andrew Elliot and Kennon Sheldon tracked people’s personal goals in 1997, the ones who had framed their goals as things to avoid reported lower well-being over the months that followed than the ones moving toward something. Same effort, worse result, because of how the goal was phrased.

It goes by other names

Here’s what makes this hard to spot in yourself: almost nobody who has it calls it perfectionism. The word sounds like a humble brag, the thing you say in an interview when they ask about your weaknesses. So people show up using other words. Same machine, different clothes:

Imposter syndrome. You did the thing, it worked, and you still feel like a fraud, because you never wrote down what doing it well would have looked like.
Analysis paralysis. You can’t start because you can’t guarantee the ending.
Procrastination. Same as above, except you found something else to do while you weren’t starting.
People pleasing. The caution tape is around other people’s reactions instead of your own results.
Fear of failure. The most honest name of the bunch, and the closest to the actual mechanism. It’s the same fear that can turn an ordinary trip to the grocery store into a performance.
Overpreparing. The 40th hour on a presentation that was ready at hour 6, spent buying insurance against a criticism nobody was going to make.
Never finishing. The draft has been at 90% for a year, because 90% can still be improved and 100% can be judged.
Burnout. Sometimes. Not always, and the ordinary causes are worth ruling out first, because too much work and not enough sleep will do it on their own. But someone who can only rest once everything is beyond criticism never actually gets to rest.

And it goes on. Every one of those is a goal defined by what a person is trying not to have happen. Which is why they all respond to the same move: decide what you actually want, out loud, before you start.

What helps

What’s the solution? Different therapeutic interventions list different options. Each school of therapy has a different recipe to try, and surprisingly, they all tend to help, though any progress toward cutting down caution tape is going to be better than putting more of it up. That’s the same reason focusing on the process rather than the result does as much work as it does. Here are a few schools of thought:

Cognitive therapies, CBT and REBT: can help you drill down to the thing that matters to you, to solve for that instead of for the absence of mistakes.
Solution Focused Therapy: may help you cleverly measure how to get close to what you want instead of dodging what you don’t, so that you actually arrive at your goals and know what they are in an accountable way.
Schema Therapy: might show you that dodging mistakes may be a pattern you pulled forward from an overly critical childhood, or from a neglecting one where you weren’t shown how to make goals.
Internal Family Systems: offers a way to recognize that there is a part of your personality, a manager, who rides shotgun in your head at all times to protect you from yourself, and negotiating with them can get them to let you drive the car with less input.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: works on the idea that the thoughts that bubble up and keep second guessing us are objects we can choose to interact with, or just as easily toss out in favor of something better.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy: tries to unite the powers of both emotional presence and rational deduction into a wise, balanced, holistically present sense of self that can handle adversity and light the way to being more real.

If you want the clinical version of this, perfectionism is a focus area in its own right. A lot of it also overlaps with what people come in calling anxiety, which is usually the feeling the caution tape produces rather than a separate problem.

Each of these approaches is practiced by therapists who list in the Become The Way directory. If you’d like to learn more about any of them, you can browse and book a consultation directly.

About the author
Carl Chinn, LMHC, LPC is a licensed therapist who has practiced since 2012. He writes about therapy, attention, and decision-making at Become The Way. Read Carl’s full bio.

This article is for general information and educational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional mental health care, and reading it does not establish a therapist-client relationship. If you are in crisis or having thoughts of harming yourself, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (US, 24/7 by call or text), your local crisis line if outside the US, or call 911 if in immediate danger.