The Flexible Profile: High Standards Without Perfectionism's Rigidity

The flexible profile: exigency that drives you instead of paralyzing you

The flexible profile is the fourth possible result of our perfectionism test. It doesn’t mean an absence of exigency, but high standards combined with the ability to adjust them to what’s really at stake in each situation.

Its origin is worth clarifying. Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett’s model (1991), on which the other three profiles are based, has three dimensions: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially prescribed. The flexible profile isn’t part of that model. It’s a category of the test, designed for people who score higher on the statements about high standards without rigidity than on any of the three directions of perfectionism.

That category isn’t an invention without support: it draws on a line of research that has spent two decades separating healthy exigency from the kind that wears you down.

Healthy perfectionists: Stoeber and Otto’s distinction

In 2006, Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto reviewed the research on positive forms of perfectionism and proposed distinguishing three groups:

• Healthy perfectionists: high standards and little concern about mistakes or other people’s judgment.
• Unhealthy perfectionists: high standards and a lot of concern about mistakes.
• Non-perfectionists: moderate standards.

Their conclusion was that the first group showed, overall, better indicators than the other two: more satisfaction, more positive emotions, better coping. The flexible profile in our test is close to that group.

The 2×2 model: not all perfectionism is the same

Patrick Gaudreau and Amanda Thompson went a step further in 2010 with a two-by-two model. Instead of classifying people along a single axis, they crossed two dimensions: high personal standards and evaluative concerns (fear of error, of other people’s judgment). The result is four combinations:

	Low concern over mistakes	High concern over mistakes
High standards	”Pure” personal standards	Mixed perfectionism
Moderate standards	Non-perfectionism	”Pure” evaluative concerns

The top-left combination, high standards with little concern, is the one closest to this profile. Studies that have applied the model to students and workers tend to find that this combination comes with more satisfaction and engagement than the ones involving high evaluative concerns, although not every replication confirms the full model.

Excellence instead of perfection

In 2019, Gaudreau proposed a name for this form of exigency: excellencism. He defined it as the tendency to pursue very high but attainable standards, flexibly, as opposed to perfectionism, which relentlessly pursues idealized, flawless standards.

His argument draws on the law of diminishing returns: beyond a certain point, moving from demanding excellence to demanding perfection adds almost nothing to the result, but it does add cost. The extra time, the fear of failure and the endless revising are paid for without a proportional benefit.

How it shows up day to day

A typical scene: someone prepares a proposal for an important client and reviews it thoroughly. For the internal summary of the weekly meeting, on the other hand, they settle for a clear draft and send it in ten minutes. They haven’t lowered their standards: they’ve decided where it makes sense to invest them.

Other traits that tend to come with this profile:

• Enjoying the process: the focus isn’t only on the final result, but also on doing the journey well.
• Responding well to criticism: a constructive remark is received as useful information, not as a threat.
• Relative ease delegating: even with tasks that matter, without needing to control every detail.
• Adjusting to context: the level of exigency goes up or down deliberately.

A balance that isn’t fixed

People with a flexible profile aren’t immune to pressure: under stress, evaluation or fatigue, the same standard can feel very different.

That’s why it makes sense to understand this profile as a habitual tendency, not as a state achieved once and for all. What defines it is the relationship with error: a one-off mistake is read as information about the task, not as a verdict on the person.

What this result doesn’t say

The test is a short, informational self-report, not a clinical scale. Getting the flexible profile doesn’t mean you lack perfectionistic traits, but that your answers are dominated by high standards without rigidity rather than by the other three directions.

Sources

• Gaudreau, P. (2019). On the distinction between personal standards perfectionism and excellencism: A theory elaboration and research agenda. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14(2), 197-215. doi:10.1177/1745691618797940
• Gaudreau, P. and Thompson, A. (2010). Testing a 2×2 model of dispositional perfectionism. Personality and Individual Differences, 48(5), 532-537. doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.11.031
• Hewitt, P. L. and Flett, G. L. (1991). Perfectionism in the self and social contexts: Conceptualization, assessment, and association with psychopathology. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60(3), 456-470.
• Stoeber, J. and Otto, K. (2006). Positive conceptions of perfectionism: Approaches, evidence, challenges. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(4), 295-319. doi:10.1207/s15327957pspr1004_2