Ever feel like you are never fully satisfied with your performance? Like the minute you achieve a performance goal, your mind has already moved on to the next career milestone? That restless, never-enough feeling has a name: perfectionism in athletes.
If so, you’re not alone. Perfectionism has a way of disguising itself as high standards. Perfectionism is characterized by unrealistically high expectations of self and a tendency to be over critical of one’s performance. To put it more simply, perfectionism is the tendency to hold and pursue dangerous and unrealistically high goals. Within the last decade, the number of research studies conducted on perfectionism in athletes has increased significantly to address this widespread threat to athletes. Perfectionism among young people has become so common that researchers are starting to refer to it as the “Perfectionism Pandemic”.
Here’s the part that most athletes and performers don’t understand about perfectionism: it isn’t inherently good or bad. It’s complex and nuanced. There are benefits and consequences. There’s a healthy version that motivates and fuels competitors, and a maladaptive version that wears away your confidence and causes burnout. The real problem is that most athletes don’t have enough self-compassion to balance it out.
The Two Faces of Perfectionism in Athletes: Strivings vs. Concerns
Researchers break perfectionism into two distinct dimensions, and they tend to produce almost opposite results (Madigan, Stoeber, & Passfield, 2016).
Perfectionist strivings are the healthy version, sometimes called self-oriented perfectionism. This is holding yourself to exceedingly high personal standards because you want to learn and improve. Athletes with strong perfectionist strivings tend to show up with intrinsic motivation, adaptive coping skills, a growth mindset, grit, and resilience.
Perfectionist concerns are the version that is lethal to athletes. This is a chronic fear of making mistakes, driven by worry about how you’ll be judged or rejected by coaches and teammates (Madigan et al., 2016), paired with harsh, constant self-scrutiny and negative self-talk (Moore et al., 2018).
In practice, perfectionist concerns show up for athletes as:
- Playing tentatively and avoiding risk taking;
- Hesitancy or refusal to try new techniques or skills under pressure due to fear of making mistakes;
- Constant bracing for judgment from teammates and coaches;
- A running internal monologue that’s more critical of self than you ever would be towards a teammate.
What the Research Shows About Perfectionism in Athletes
A 2016 longitudinal study of 141 junior athletes found that perfectionist strivings were linked to higher intrinsic motivation and lower burnout, while perfectionist concerns were linked to external motivation and higher burnout (Madigan et al., 2016). In other words, the type of perfectionism you carry doesn’t just affect how you feel in practice, it predicts the length of your athletic career.
A separate 2017 study of 140 college athletes found something just as telling: athletes with higher perfectionist concerns reacted far more negatively to poor performances, while athletes with stronger perfectionist strivings showed more self-compassion and optimism, and less pessimism, in the face of the exact same kind of setback (Lizmore, Dunn, & Causgrove Dunn, 2017). Same bad game. Very different internal experience, depending on which version of perfectionism you’re running.
And it’s not just athletes. A 2020 study of 311 high school and collegiate coaches found that maladaptive perfectionism was the single greatest predictor of emotional exhaustion, reduced motivation, and burnout among coaches (Vealey, Coppola, Martin, Ward, & Chamberlin, 2020). If you’re a coach reading this and recognizing yourself, that pressure you’re carrying has a name too.
Mistakes are necessary to growth and learning
Making mistakes in sports is human and natural. You get to the next level without making them. And yet perfectionism convinces us that errors are evidence we don’t belong, instead of proof that we’re learning and improving.
Look at the numbers behind two of the greatest athletes to ever compete. In his 2024 Dartmouth commencement speech, Roger Federer told graduates that perfection in tennis simply doesn’t exist. Over 1,526 career singles matches, he won close to 80% of them, and yet he won only 54% of the individual points along the way. In other words, Federer lost nearly every other rally he played.
The stats of Michael Jordan are just as enlightening. The GOAT missed more than 9,000 shots during his career. Twenty-six times he missed the game winning shot.
Neither of them got there by playing perfect games. They got there by learning from their mistakes and recovering from their losses. That reframe matters, because zero mistakes is not a realistic goal. The real skill worth building is how quickly you can recover from a mistake and get ready for the next play.
The Solution
Deconstructing perfectionism doesn’t mean lowering your standards. That drive is part of what makes you good. It’s about letting go of self judgment, so you are not held back by fear when you compete. The goal is to recover faster so you’re ready for what comes next. Here are three ways to start.
1. Replace the inner critic with the voice you’d use for a teammate.
Increasing one’s self-compassion means replacing the merciless judgment and negative self-talk from your inner critic with an internal voice of kindness, understanding, and encouragement. Most athletes would never say to a teammate what they say to themselves after a mistake. Things like, “You’re not good enough to be here. You don’t belong in the starting lineup.” Say that sentence out loud and notice how harsh it sounds, then notice how often a version of it runs through your own head during competition. Try swapping it for something you’d actually say to teammate you respect: “You got the next one. I trust you. You belong here.” This isn’t about empty or toxic positivity, it’s about applying the same support and belief to yourself that already give to your teammates.
2. Build self-compassion with gratitude.
Self-compassion is the antidote to harmful perfectionism. It sounds simple, but intentionally practicing compassion toward yourself first is often the missing piece for athletes who are only ever coached to be tougher on themselves. Take a minute or two to bring to mind how hard you’ve worked at your sport and all you’ve sacrificed in your personal life to get to where you now are in your athletic career. Thank that younger version of yourself.
3. Learn to catch and replace negative thoughts when the pressure is on.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is built on a simple premise: your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are all connected, which means changing the thought can change the outcome. Negative-thought replacement is one example of a CBT technique that is very effective in sports and widely used in sport psychology. The mental skill of learning to catch a catastrophic or irrational thought in real time, name it, and swap it out before it dictates how you play. This technique is trainable, the same way physical skills are trainable.
Are You Ready to Let Go of the Fear Without Letting Go of Your Standards?
The Headstrong sport psychology workbook contains several exercises and worksheets to help athletes deconstruct maladaptive perfectionism that impacts performance. If you want to dive deeper, I also recommend checking out The CBT Workbook for Perfectionism.
Maybe as you read this, you recognized yourself somewhere in these pages, the inner critic, the fear of judgment from your teammates, or the sense that no performance is ever quite good enough. If so, know that recognizing it is the first step. You don’t have to choose between having high standards and having peace of mind. You can hold onto the drive that has propelled you throughout your career without carrying the fear of failure.
Here at Headstrong Mindset, Dr. Brooke Rundle specializes in helping athletes and coaches untangle perfectionism from performance. As an AASP Certified Mental Performance Consultant and licensed sports counselor in Denver, Colorado, Dr. Rundle is dually trained in both clinical mental health counseling and sport performance psychology, an approach built specifically to help you keep your ambition while letting go of the fear underneath it.
- Schedule your complimentary 15-minute consultation today.
- Learn more about how mental performance coaching or sports counseling can help you compete with confidence instead of fear.
- Start the next chapter of your career: one where your standards fuel you instead of wearing you down.
References
Flett, G.L. & Hewitt, P.L. (2005). The perils of perfectionism in sports and exercise. Current Directions Psychological Science, 14(1),14-18.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2005.00326.x
Lizmore, M.R., Dunn, J.G.H., & Causgrove Dunn, J. (2017). Perfectionist strivings, perfectionistic concerns, and reactions to poor personal performances among intercollegiate athletes. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 33(2017)75-84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2017.07.010
Madigan, D. J., Stoeber, J., & Passfield, L. (2016). Motivation mediates the perfectionism-burnout relationship: A three-wave longitudinal study with junior athletes. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 38(4), 341–354.
Moore, E., Holding, A. C., Moore, A., Levine, S. L., Powers, T. A., Zuroff, D. C., & Koestner, R. (2021). The role of goal-related autonomy: A self-determination theory analysis of perfectionism, poor goal progress, and depressive symptoms. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 68(1), 88–97. https://doi-org.uws.idm.oclc.org/10.1037/cou0000438
Vealey, R. S., Coppola, A., Martin, E., Ward, R. M., & Chamberlin, J. (2020). The Slippery Slope: Can Motivation and Perfectionism Lead to Burnout in Coaches? International Sport Coaching Journal, 7(1), 1–10.
Vicent, M., Sanmartín, R., Vásconez-Rubio, O., & García-Fernández, J. M. (2020). Perfectionism Profiles and Motivation to Exercise Based on Self-Determination Theory. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9). https://doi-org.uws.idm.oclc.org/10.3390/ijerph17093206