Pivoting Feels Like Failure Because You’re Chasing the Perfection of Completion

Pivoting is a necessary part of any process or journey, but when you aren’t taught to see it as such, it begins to feel like failure. Those who identify as perfectionists might have been taught to believe that a goal or process should be completed within a specific framework, and anything outside of that is considered unfinished. Leaving things unfinished, for a perfectionist, is like a kind of death, threatening the very identity that has helped to encourage the success you’ve achieved thus far. So, a pivot holds the weight of an entire identity shift, when in reality, it’s an unavoidable and inevitable part of the journey toward the kind of alignment you’re seeking.

The irony is that pivoting is a way for you to reach a form of completion, but because it requires you to accept and move through change, you resist it. As a perfectionist, the acceptance of what is and what you can’t control is too much to bear, so instead you cling to the idea that you can make your current reality work, even when it obviously doesn’t. A pivot will appear when you’ve exhausted all the resources, energy, and necessity of your current experience, inviting you to take on a new, more uncertain stage of this journey; your responsibility is to accept this invitation and recognize the finality of this stage, despite it being imperfect.