Perfectionists are never happy, no matter how fit they get. If you’re a perfectionist, you’ve probably accomplished many of your goals in life through sheer willpower and determination. But while your dedication and high standards are admirable, you often get results by driving yourself too hard and sometimes driving other people away. Happiness depends on balance, and your challenge will be to find that happy medium in your life.
As a perfectionist, you want everything just so and often drive yourself crazy making sure that everything is in its proper place and corresponds with your image of how things should be. For many of you, perfectionism is an attempt to bring order to the external world because your inner world feels out of control.
Many perfectionists grew up in unstable or chaotic households and decided at some point to deal with the distress by exerting control over their lives. Many react by becoming super-achievers and super-responsible. While this pattern of behavior may have helped you survive a difficult childhood, it has outlived its usefulness.
Perfectionism leaves you drained and squeezes joy out of your life. Many times, you set impossible goals or try to exceed your personal best. You have forgotten how to relax and enjoy life.
When you’re in a relationship, you find it difficult not to criticize your partner and are surprised when the other person is offended. Hey, in your mind, you were only trying to help and make things better! Often this desire to improve the people around you manages to push them away. This leaves you feeling lonely and frustrated.
Sooner or later, you will get tired of trying to make the world perfect. That’s when you experience burnout and just let everything go. When you embark on a weight-loss and fitness program, you tend to become too ambitious, which leads to poor overall results.
The key is to stay within balance, set realistic goals, and stick with them. With your great potential for discipline and drive, you can stay on track and achieve your weight-loss and fitness goals for the long term.
All-or-Nothing personalities are extremists driven to achieve goals or abandon goals. If you’re in the all-or-nothing category, you can flip from one extreme to the opposite. Going from gung ho to gung ho hum. You’re a thrill seeker, looking for the next big kick that will give you a mega rush of excitement. The problem is, you often neglect other areas of your life while pursuing your passions. Your preoccupation with achieving your goal to the exclusion of everything else eventually leaves you feeling burnt out, empty, and depressed. You need to learn to live without the high highs and low lows and find a middle ground.
As an all-or-nothing personality, you are addicted to extremes and live for the adrenaline rush that comes with living on the edge. You are motivated by a desire for attention, and you’ll go to extreme lengths to get it.
Many all-or-nothing personalities came from families where they didn’t receive the attention they desired. This led to trying diverse ways, both positive and negative, to gain the notice of significant people in their lives. In adulthood, the attention-seeking has continued, leaving you pursuing the adrenaline rush.
All-or-nothing leaves you crashing after each new high. You know you’ll have to come down to earth and deal with the consequences: adrenal fatigue, boredom, emptiness, and burnout.
Your relationships suffer because you put people on the back burner while you focus on your goals. People get tired of getting ignored or put off, and while you’re out taking a hike, they take a permanent hike. The irony is that by abandoning others while you pursue your goals, you often end up feeling abandoned. You seek attention but don’t offer it to others.
You can only walk the all-or-nothing high wire for so long. Sooner or later, your pursuit of your goals and the lack of balance in your life will cause you to burn out and come crashing back to earth.
Strive for moderation. It’s great to pursue goals, but not at the expense of everything else in your life.
The Victim tries to find someone or something to blame when goals aren’t achieved. If you scored high on the victim scale, you rarely think anything is your fault. People often do things that make you feel slighted, hurt, and angry. You’ve experienced many disappointments in life because you feel people let you down. It’s difficult for you to see that you play a part in your unhappiness. But until you accept responsibility for your life and well-being, you will be ensnared in a cycle of blame and anger.
You see yourself as someone who is on the receiving end of poor treatment from others. In your eyes, people often let you down, so you frequently lose your temper and lash out. For you, progress depends on seeing your part in everything that goes wrong in your life and understanding how you play a role in these unpleasant situations.
Growing up, you most likely experienced neglect or abuse and were victimized in some way. To move beyond victimhood, you need to let go of the past and move beyond identifying yourself as a victim…and start seeing yourself as a survivor.
You are highly emotional and experience a range of difficult emotions. Your feelings are often hurt, and you often feel slighted and mistreated.
You are distrustful of others and frequently feel as if you’re waiting for people to let you down or wrong you in some way. When you feel wronged, you can become enraged and tell people off. You often end relationships abruptly, feeling all the problems were the other person’s fault.
Many of your problems in life recur with different players. You get caught in a negative cycle because you believe that you play no part in the problems. When trying to lose weight and get fit, you will shun responsibility and try to blame your lack of success on outside forces, such as the trainer, the facilities, or the exercise equipment. Until you start to take responsibility for your results, you will make little, if any, progress.
Realize that you have the power to make positive changes in your life and that it all begins by accepting responsibility for your success or failure. Remember: no excuses! Remind yourself: I will not be the victim again.
Searchers try to adapt to other people’s interests hoping to gain identity and acceptance. If you’re a searcher, you’re always on the lookout for something or someone that will inspire and motivate you. You sometimes latch onto other people, hoping their passion and enthusiasm will rub off on you. You try this, you try that, you try the other thing, but you still are driven to keep searching. Until you find the spark within, you’ll always feel that something is missing in your life.
As a searcher, you’re seeking inspiration and motivation. Following after this person and that person, and trying on their interests for size. This external focus often leaves you feeling empty inside and distant from the people you’d like to get close to.
Many searchers grew up with little guidance or direction. Some had no role models that provided a good example of how to pursue personal passions. As a result, you’ve always felt something was missing in your life, and you’ve been searching for something that will make you feel motivated and engaged.
While you seem fun-loving and easygoing on the outside, on the inside, you feel empty and alone. In some ways, you feel like a fraud because you don’t have the drive and enthusiasm you perceive in others.
Many of your relationships are superficial…maybe even a source of fear. You are afraid other people will expose you as an empty, shallow person with no real substance. For this reason, you’ll do almost anything to avoid conflict. You don’t make waves, won’t criticize, and try not to cause arguments. But you often keep the peace at the expense of the person you really are.
Because you’re seeking meaning and purpose in life, you’re always trying something new, hoping it will be the thing that does the trick. For your weight-loss and fitness program to succeed, you need to stay with a program long enough to see results.
Create your own realistic goals and stick with them.
People with a void personality type are easily discouraged and fall back on bad habits. If you scored high in the void category, you feel empty and lacking but are resigned to feeling this way. A “void” is a blank space where nothing exists and since nature abhors a vacuum, you try to fill the emptiness with distractions, addictions, or compulsions. You take up expensive hobbies, run up your credit cards, eat, drink, and indulge in many ways, shapes, and forms all in a vain attempt to fill up the emptiness you feel inside.
While many people feel a sense of emptiness from time to time, the void experiences this inner vacuum consistently and believes there’s no way to change the situation. The void is resigned to a lack of fulfillment and tries to fill the emptiness with material things.
Many people in the void category did not experience emotional closeness as children and learned to cope by turning off or burying their feelings. When these feelings try to surface, the void looks for ways to make them go underground again. Possibly by engaging in distractions, hobbies, or overeating.
The void tries not to feel and engages in a variety of activities (e.g. shopping, overeating, drinking) to keep the feelings under the surface.
Because of the void’s feelings of inner emptiness, it is difficult for this personality type to develop close relationships. While you’re fairly easygoing and non-confrontational, you don’t get too close to anyone. You don’t expect much of other people and rarely find it.
When you embark on a weight loss and fitness program, you need to be prepared for buried feelings that will start to surface. Be ready and willing to spend time caring for yourself and learning to observe your feelings.
Your success will depend on finding a purpose in the fitness regimen. Participating in team sports will provide a sense of meaning and allow you to feel part of something bigger than yourself.
The caretaker plays many roles and takes care of many people but usually neglects personal needs. If you’re a caretaker, you feel best when you’re taking care of other people and feeling needed. You’re the quintessential mother or father figure with open arms ready to take on the burdens of the world and give aid and comfort to all who might need it.
Taking care of others comes naturally to you, but you often take on more than is humanly possible to manage. Your intentions are always good, and you genuinely want to help but usually try to do too much, leaving yourself feeling drained, neglected, and resentful. You need to learn how to set boundaries and care for yourself.
Caregivers often played this role during childhood, taking care of siblings or other family members. People with this personality type show a heightened sense of responsibility from an early age.
You love to feel needed. Not only because you care for others, but also because it gives you a sense of identity and importance. You like feeling that the people in your life couldn’t manage without you, but at some point, you will feel overwhelmed and resentful that you are doing so much and getting so little in return.
Your life is entwined with the lives of many other people. From family members, friends, social acquaintances, and coworkers. You have a hard time saying no and are an easy target for someone looking for help or guidance. Your caretaking draws people close to you, but often drives you farther from yourself and your personal needs, resulting in feelings of resentment, ultimately causing conflicts in your relationships.
The caretaker can turn into the victim, so be careful about giving too much and leaving nothing for yourself. In a weight loss and fitness program, you have to keep your commitment to yourself and your well-being by putting yourself on top of your list and making yourself a priority.
You will only succeed in weight loss and fitness if you can learn to care about your own needs. By caring for yourself, you will show others that your needs are important and deserve care and consideration also.
Athletes focus on their chosen sports at the expense of everything else in their lives. If you’re an athlete, you’ve spent a good part of your life in the single-minded pursuit of athletic goals. Everything else has taken second place, and your entire identity has been wrapped up in sports to the detriment of other aspects of your well-being. This includes your emotional maturity, intellectual development, and interpersonal relationships. The key to your well-being is expanding your identity beyond athletic exploits and achieving greater balance in your life.
You’ve probably achieved a great deal of acclaim for your athletic talents and have exhibited outstanding discipline and determination to achieve your goals. When you enter the work world, you expect the same high standards from your place of employment. You want people, including yourself, to achieve their highest potential. When interacting with others, you often mention the highlights of your athletic career to gain attention, inspire respect, and gain confidence.
Many athletes grew up in families where they were designated as the “athletic” ones, while siblings were applauded for their academic achievements. Excelling in sports became a way to gain attention and carve out a personal identity.
Your identity is tied to your ability (or inability) to perform as an athlete. When you are not excelling in your chosen sport, you feel empty and have the sense that life is meaningless. You feel that success as an athlete will bring you attention, love, and praise from others.
When you’re in a relationship, you expect your partner to measure up to your high standards, both in terms of appearance and achievement. Your desire to change your partner will make the person feel unloved and unvalued. You will drive so hard that you often drive the person right out of your life, leaving you feeling lonely and disappointed.
When athletes are injured, sidelined, or can no longer play their preferred sport, they have a hard time dealing with the loss of identity that these changes in fortune bring about. To avoid dealing with feelings of loss and disappointment, many athletes turn to self-destructive behaviors such as overeating, smoking, drinking, and taking drugs.
Realize that you are a multifaceted, worthy person, and your life is so much bigger than your athletic career. Get outside of your comfort zone by taking up new endeavors. Try a different sport, learn a foreign language, or take up a new hobby. Develop yourself on multiple levels—your mind and emotions as well as your body.
This has helped thousands of people over the years to determine what their problems are. I had a girl named Nicky doing life coaching who took the test, and we discovered she was a perfectionist and caretaker. As a result, she always blamed her husband for doing what he needed to do for himself. He played golf, traveled with friends, went to the gym every day, and she never understood why he would do those things when she worried about dinner, housekeeping, and even cleaning for the cleaning lady! The caretaker, however, will either become a victim or a void after a while if she/he doesn’t feel appreciated or begins to become numb. As a perfectionist, she would go through fits of depression because she just could not make things right in her mind, causing depression and weight gain. She felt that she had changed who she was for her husband and that she had given up so much. So we worked on what she had to do every week to ensure she was living the type of life she wanted and that she had to start to realize that nothing or no one is perfect. In order to have a more perfect life, she had to live with the idea that imperfect things are okay.
After this section, you should be able to identify the personalities that have been or are currently keeping you from understanding what has held you back from success in the past. As a young man, I never, ever felt listened to. I still think this is the number one problem in my relationship with my wife. By far, most of the fighting we do is when I am not feeling listened to. This triggers all the old feelings, and then I’m instantly in fight-or-flight mode! Feeling like I have to fight out of the corner. My wife might simply look at her computer or phone while I am trying to be heard, and it sends me into pure rage. If I have too much stress, I find the stammering starting to creep back. I have been to the hospital in an ambulance four times for nothing medically serious, just an anxiety attack. I have always had a sense of hyper-awareness. One look from someone can tell me an entire story. In high school, I went into a frenzy when I had to walk by a glass window in the lunch area. I was flooded with anxiety about what the girls were saying about me and my stuttering. I would do anything to avoid that dreaded set of windows!
What can you do when you have trouble objectively viewing yourself? Maybe encouraging people in your life can say nice things to reassure you about your positive qualities. But maybe you shrug these things off or feel like they don’t make up for your enormous pile of flaws and deficits. Or maybe you know that you did a fabulous job on the work report, even if you had trouble with a speech at one small moment of the presentation. Should you feel proud of yourself for the good work you did? Is there any way to see how much truth is in positive statements about yourself? The point of the assessment isn’t to nitpick about how well-rounded you are. It’s not about showing that you have enough skills or plans. This is aimed at zooming in on your bona fide strengths and values. Let’s get a good look at them and dig deeper into WHY these things are so central in you. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve accomplished in any given realm here, but about what you’re drawn to when you picture a satisfying life.
An additional test you can take is the Myers-Briggs Personality Test, which can help you identify who you really are and what has been holding you back. It is well known that human motivations differ from one psychological type to another. But how often do these types appear in the general population? Some people wonder where their personality type falls on a scale of more common (or rare) personality types. Please find below the estimated frequency of each of the personality types (sorted by temperament) by gender and total population.
