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This blog is my reflections on a panel event held by Science Gallery Melbourne as part of their Perfection exhibition in 2018.
“The need for perfectionism leads to anxiety and dysfunction” – Professor Shitij Kapur, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences at The University of Melbourne.
I thought I had given up trying to be perfect a long time ago, but that doesn’t stop the pressure I constantly put on myself to perform well, or the disappointment when I don’t. Professor Kapur opened Perfectionisms, a panel event run by Science Gallery Melbourne discussing the positivity and negativity of perfection that pervade multiple industries, mentioning that 352 medical students at The University of Melbourne each year face the transition of being top of the class to being one of many top students of which there can only be one top – we all have that moment when we realise we can’t always be the best. I faced that transition myself even earlier when I started at the Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School in year 9 – the duxes of schools across Victoria were congregated in one cohort, again, of which only one could be the dux while the rest were spread out. It’s not just academically that I strive for perfection – I’m constantly trying to attain that scholarship, or write the perfect article or paper, or singing the right notes in a solo at choir. Sometimes this need for perfectionism drives us, but at other times, it can hold us back. The discussion between hosts Dr David Irving, musicologist and cultural historian at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and Dr Margaret Osborne, lecturer in music (Performance Science) in the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and teaching specialist in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, and their guest panellists very much hit close to home and resonated with myself and other audience members.
As musicians, Margaret and David both understand the psychology of perfectionism in performances, and how it can lead to anxiety and even avoidance. As much as a we can prepare for events and hope that things go right, due to emotion and adrenaline being added to the mix, it will unfold “the way it does”, which can mean that all preparation is “obliterated”. AFLW player Emma King confessed that the better prepared she feels, the less she feels as though a game she plays is perfect. As much as she and her team can train, prepare, and run through game plans, there are always so many invariables during the game.
Opera singer Jeremey Kleeman spoke about the influence of audience’s expectations of a beautiful, unwavering tone to a performer. Singers have to surrender control rather than tensing, especially when trying to reach high notes – if you think about it too much, your throat closes over which makes it more difficult for the sound to come out, and “you’re not free”. I personally relate to pressure myself as a solo singer – singing in an environment like at karaoke with friends or within a choir is fine, however I become very tensed when I feel judged in an audition or solo in front of a congregation, and my voice audibly trembles because I’m concentrating so hard on sounding ‘right’. Jeremy’s way to overcome this is to “put the accelerator down” instead of the breaks, as we often do when nervous about getting something wrong. He likened singing a difficult high note losing control of a skidding car, when applying the breaks can only make the situation worse.
Ironically, Jeremy and other musicians can often find performing in a recording studio even more “crippling”, despite being able to record an infinite number of times. Most of the music we hear now is pre-recorded, which, unbeknown to us, creates a lot of anxiety for performers. With their voices permanently on a digital record, artists feel greater pressure and take fewer risks. For a classically trained musician like Jeremy, there are often many versions of any given song in existence, which adds an extra stress given that those who listen to it are more likely to compare the artist’s version and voice to others. When I listen to recordings of live performances I’ve been in and hear coughs coming from the audience, I admit it’s a little disheartening to know that blemishes will forever be there, no matter how hard to try to get it right. Margaret is concerned that “perfectionism drives avoidance” as we are too concerned about getting things wrong that we’re less willing to give things a go. Perhaps we should be forgetting about trying to be perfect, especially when it’s not completely within our control.
In a way, every one of us is a perfectionist, we simply have different ways of going about it. Actor Sophie Ross, is constantly examining human behaviour as she adopts each of the characters she plays, and believes that all humans seek perfection – to “gain control over the random”. Using her script as a toolbox, which tells her information about the characters, she tries to make sense of what they’re trying to control in their lives, how they’re doing it, and their motives. Every night she acts on stage, Sophie relinquishes her own perfectionisms and adopts a characters, and when this happens eight times a week during a standard theatre production run, she can begin to take on their characteristics.
While we’re searching for control and order in our lives as perfectionists, scientists search for an all-encompassing theories and answers to explain the Universe. Astronomer and science communicator, Professor Alan Duffy, described the quest of scientists throughout time – from the Ancient Greeks to Kepler and his laws of planetary motion, Newton with three laws of motion and now Einstein’s single equation (e=mc2) – who have strived to find “a theory to describe everything”, but there have always been exceptions to the rules. Scientists look for patterns and explanations, but so far they’ve not entirely fit with all of the imperfections of the Universe. Alan speculates that scientists will never find the “right, perfect answer” to propose a “Grand Universal Theory”, but he expects that we’ll never have it – which means that scientists won’t be out a job.
An occupational hazard to searching for the right answers can be perfectionism in the already high-pressure environment of academia, especially with the paranoia of being scooped if you ask the questions too late. With the current ‘publish or perish’ mentality among academics (publish papers or lose your funding), researchers strive to do better and get their research out quicker. Alan admitted that this mentality can therefore lead to an “insidious” conformation bias when it comes to dealing with data because the pressure can “really get to people”. When the points of a graph don’t align perfectly and there are outliers, the conformation bias can act as a voice in their head, providing excuses to exclude the outliers until everything lines up. I have seen published papers in prestigious journals that have data images that are obviously edited, and it adds to my concern for the unhealthy, stressful environment that I’m currently entrenched in in academia as a PhD student. I’ve given up on writing the ‘perfect’ thesis – some of my images have blotches, and countless experiments haven’t gone to plan – but in my experience, that’s the way science works because we’re “swimming in ambiguity”.
What is the perfect performance? For Emma, it’s a win, perhaps a premiership, and ideally no injuries among her team players throughout the season. For artists such as Jeremy and Sophie, the answer is less simple as they can’t get it “right or wrong like in maths”, or a obtain a win like in sports, but the answer lies in how they feel they’ve done in combination with feedback from their audiences. David commented that “we’re worried about what everyone else thinks is perfect” but perhaps we should be content with our own performance. I’m quite an insecure person, often feeling judged and putting blame on myself easily, but it’s a psychology that I need to change, and after this discussion, I feel a little more confident in finding perfection in myself without worrying about what others think. The pressure to be perfect is simply not worth the anxiety it generates – and if I’m not alone in this, it’s something that everyone should work on changing. To be perfect, we need to let go of our perfectionisms so that they don’t hold us back.
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