This perfectionism test tells you if your high standards are a strength, potential strength, or limitation
As far as strengths and potential strengths, the key difference is whether or not someone puts that strength into action, says Dr. Manly. For instance, when you’re not feeling your best and are thinking of turning in a half-baked project or having a less-engaged conversation, you can use the concept of perfectionism to motivate you to do more than the bare minimum.
“Sometimes we can get a little hopeless or down on ourselves,” says Dr. Manly. “If we say, ‘I can do better than this,’ then we can actually make [perfectionism] work for us to help us do things, to motivate us to do things that we might not otherwise.” Doing those things, she adds, ends up making us feel good .
You might also consider taking the perfectionism test a few different times, and on different days, and then calculate the average score, Dr. Manly adds. Since we feel differently each day, she says some variance in results could be normal, so averaging several results is likely to be more accurate.