Yasmine Dawood. A finance graduate working as a writer, a life coach, and an NLP practitioner. She also studied fashion designing, jewelry designing, photography, and flower designing, since she is a firm believer that life is all about the journey and she wanted to make the most out of it. She calls her blog boomingsighs her baby. May you all stay persistent and never lose sight of your dreams.
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Close Privacy Overview This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. These insecurities are well-documented in the world of work: in , the Institute of Leadership and Management found half of female managers, compared with fewer than a third of the male ones, reported self-doubt in their performance.
The desire to be perfect seems to influence thinking from a young age: research by Girlguiding UK found that a quarter of seven- to year-old girls felt the need to be perfect. In fact a NHS study found We received responses — with an average age of The pressure to be perfect also extended to the workplace, withmany respondents talking about feeling inadequate at their jobs or experiencing impostor syndrome.
They also complained of feeling the pressure to have it all: juggling being a mother with career and other personal pressures. Social media is the main culprit. I had to delete my Instagram account because it would actually make me cry. I am a mature person with a firm grip on reality, but I have so many peers whose lives seem so perfect and sociable that it left me feeling worthless and lonely. We approached five women to find out more.
Here are their stories:. As a child I felt pressure to be a certain kind of perfect, so I wanted to look pretty and nice while my male cousins were running riot, that sort of nonsense. I wanted to marry a man and get a job. Now I am an adult my aspirations have changed and I am a lot more confident about who I am. I am one of few black working-class women in my industry, which is dominated by white men.
Most of the black women I see in the arts are personal assistants; none of them are working in a position that gives them autonomy — although they usually end up running a lot of things anyway.
I sometimes suffer so much anxiety about sending an email, worrying about whether I will phrase it correctly. The pressure to be perfect feels heightened to me as a black woman because my mum always told me I would have to work harder than a white person to get ahead.
Perfection, or what society deems perfect, is not attainable for everyone, but it feels even further away for a woman of colour. The image of perfection is a certain physical type: a skinny woman with blond hair etc. Those things are not even half attainable to you, and you sometimes feel you were born imperfect. I feel the need to look perfect all the time. I am not sure where this obsession comes from but social media definitely makes it worse.
I got Instagram when I was 14 and growing up with it has really affected me. I spend ages scrolling through the site and seeing images of women with perfect hair and makeup, thinking I should look like them — even though a lot of the time the pictures have been altered. They will have the bravery to take risks and try and fail if they feel competent in their ability to problem solve. Make your family a shame free zone.
Are we unwittingly contributing to the embarrassment or shame the self-critical can feel over the smallest mistakes? Are we over invested in our children's success? Children take on our values when they see them in action. We can model using mistakes and failures as a learning opportunity. Walk the talk by showing them that what they put in is more important than the outcome.
I am taking up French again and it gives me ample opportunity to model making mistakes and showing the frustrations that come with improving or learning a new skill. I am also always 'misplacing' my car keys. Talk about your mistakes, how you coped and focus on the positive: there is always a silver lining. This teaches girls that they are not defined by their mistakes and it is liberating.
Help them develop a Growth Mindset and see themselves as a work in progress. We can help them focus on the attitude, the effort and the striving to do their best rather than focusing on the achievement or outcome or indeed the performance of others. This is a growth mindset approach as developed by Carol Dweck of Stanford University.
Dweck found that trying to be perfect stops us from reaching our potential. How are they going to enjoy the struggle that is a key part of learning if they are not willing to be brave and take the risk? If we communicate and positively reinforce this growth mind-set skill through noticing and mentioning the struggle, the input and the effort we can help reinforce this approach.
Help them understand the impact of social media. Girls are increasingly influenced by a bombardment of images and messages on social media - and the influence is to be perfect. We need to get involved in the conversation and work with our daughters to limit the time they spend on social media, keep an eye on what they are experiencing on-line and coach them to understand that what people do and say on line can be very false: it is a manifestation of what they think the world wants of them, what they want to portray which is often very different from reality.
We can also teach them how social media works - it is not weakness on their part that they are feel distracted or in extreme cases addicted to social media, but rather it is the design of the apps and the nature of the interaction that pulls them in and keeps them there.
Awareness, limits and communication are the key. Understanding the agony of perfectionism — striving for the perfect life, the perfect marks, the perfect relationships helps us appreciate the importance of helping our daughters to develop a healthy mind-set around their own self-worth and endeavour.
However, we want them to do so believing that they are capable and good enough and that they should not define themselves by what they achieve but rather how they travel along the road to self-satisfaction all the while knowing that they are loved and accepted for being brave, courageous and not perfect. By checking, I agree to share my form responses.
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