Self-Oriented Perfectionism: When You Set the Bar Yourself

Self-oriented perfectionism: exigency pointed inward

Self-oriented perfectionism describes people who set themselves a higher bar than they set for anyone else around them. It isn’t just about wanting to do things well: your own mistake weighs in a way someone else’s mistake never would.

It’s one of the four profiles our perfectionism test tells apart, a short questionnaire of 16 statements in which the profile with the highest accumulated score wins.

Where the concept comes from: Hewitt and Flett’s model

In 1991, Canadian psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett published the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, a 45-item scale that splits perfectionism into three dimensions depending on who the exigency is aimed at: yourself, others, or perceived as imposed from outside.

Self-oriented perfectionism is the first of the three: the person sets very high personal standards, judges themselves harshly and responds to falling short with a self-criticism they would rarely apply to someone else in their place.

The three dimensions aren’t watertight compartments. In Hewitt and Flett’s studies they appear correlated: many people score high on more than one. That’s why self-oriented perfectionism shouldn’t be read as the exact opposite of other-oriented perfectionism. Some people are understanding about other people’s mistakes and relentless about their own, and some apply the same hard yardstick in both directions.

Two faces within the same self-exigency

Later research found something that changes how this profile is understood. In 2006, Joachim Stoeber and Kathleen Otto reviewed dozens of studies and proposed separating two components that the classic scales had blended together:

• Perfectionistic strivings: setting high goals and pursuing them with determination. They’re linked to more motivation, more effort and, in academic and sports settings, better performance.
• Perfectionistic concerns: fear of making mistakes, doubts about your own work and the feeling that the result is never enough. This is the component linked to anxiety, stress and low mood.

The self-oriented dimension of Hewitt and Flett’s scale contains a bit of both, which is why studies give it mixed results. The meta-analysis by Limburg, Watson, Hagger and Egan (2017) on perfectionism and psychopathology confirmed the general pattern: concern over mistakes shows clearer links with distress than perfectionistic strivings do.

In practice, two people with the same label can experience their exigency very differently. What makes the difference isn’t how high the bar is, but what happens inside when it isn’t reached.

How it shows up day to day

A typical scene: someone hands in a report that their team rates as very good. That same evening they reread it, find a badly rounded figure in an appendix and spend the night turning it over, even though nobody noticed. The praise barely leaves a mark; the typo does.

That pattern repeats in other forms:

• Excessive checking: going over a piece of work far beyond what’s necessary, hunting for flaws nobody else would likely notice.
• Trouble delegating: handing off an important task feels like a risk, because no one else is going to do it “the right way.”
• Little celebration of achievements: the focus jumps straight to what could have gone better, even when the result is objectively good.
• One mistake overshadows the rest: a single error casts a shadow over everything that worked.

Excellence versus perfection

In 2019, psychologist Patrick Gaudreau (University of Ottawa) put a name to that difference: excellencism pursues very high but attainable standards, flexibly; perfectionism pursues idealized, flawless standards. The key lies in the relationship with error: in excellence, a mistake is treated as useful information; in perfection, it’s experienced as a threat to your own worth. The model is explored in more detail in the article on the flexible profile.

The alternative to self-exigency isn’t lowering the bar

Psychologist Kristin Neff, at the University of Texas at Austin, is the researcher who has done the most to develop the concept of self-compassion, laid out in Self-Compassion (2011) and in the scale she designed to measure it (the Self-Compassion Scale).

Neff distinguishes self-compassion (treating yourself with the same kindness you’d offer a friend after a mistake, while still taking responsibility for the error) from self-indulgence, which does involve downplaying the error or avoiding the effort. In a study with more than two thousand participants, Neff and Vonk (2009) found that self-compassion is associated with a sense of self-worth that is more stable over time than a self-esteem that depends on performance.

This fits with everything above: what research links to the toll is the inner tone used to respond to a mistake, not the yardstick used to measure the result. A question many people with this profile find revealing is what they would say to a good friend who handed them exactly the same piece of work.

What this result doesn’t say

This article is informational, and the test that goes with it is a short self-report, not Hewitt and Flett’s original scale. Scoring high on self-oriented perfectionism is not a diagnosis and doesn’t replace an assessment by a mental health professional.

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
• 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.
• Limburg, K., Watson, H. J., Hagger, M. S. and Egan, S. J. (2017). The relationship between perfectionism and psychopathology: A meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 73(10), 1301-1326.
• Neff, K. (2011). Self-Compassion. William Morrow.
• Neff, K. D. and Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23-50.
• 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