[Michelle]

Another perfectionist here.

What helped me was to ask myself:

"Why do I feel the need to put myself under so much pressure"?
"What am I afraid will happen if I am not "perfect""?
"What would be the consequence were I to relax"?
"What would it feel like if I were 10% less perfectionistic right now"?

It also helped me to differentiate between striving for excellence (which is something flexible and fluid) and settling only for perfection (which is paralysing and stiff) ...

It also helped me to identify where my perfectionistic feelings originated. In my case, it was a need to earn the love of my father by being perfect and the need to not embarass my mother by being somehow bad or weird.

One more thing that helped was developing the ability to "surrender" to the art (in my case singing) and trusting it.