Saturday, July 4, 2026

Letting Go of the Perfect

Thoughtful compromises can open the door to practical solutions

By Geoff Dueck Thiessen, Regional Director, Winnipeg Member Centre

Perfect is the enemy of good, as the popular saying goes. My spouse and I encountered this while estate planning. We were trying to decide who should care for our children in the unlikely but terrible event that we both died.

We weighed the options for a long time before realizing we were trying to recreate the ideal outcome. The ideal, of course, was that we would both remain alive and able to care for them ourselves. Once we accepted that this perfect outcome was not something we could plan for, we were better able to consider the imperfect alternatives and make a decision.

This principle frequently shows up in labour relations, where our quest for the perfect can cause indecision paralysis. It can show up when folks are struggling with the decision to unionize, or when a bargaining committee decides if they should accept an offer from the employer that does not match the expectations of the membership. I recently encountered the same principle while working with a grievance mediation.

Letting go of the perfect does not need to result in weakness or total capitulation. A core concept in psychology is that all-or-nothing thinking is seldom workable and can lead to tensions that result in depression, anxiety, and other challenging symptoms. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean we have to accept the horrible.

Rather, the invitation here is to be willing to accept an outcome that isn’t perfect because perfection is almost never available. This can help us identify the elements that are actually achievable.

For my spouse and I, once we accepted that we were planning for something highly imperfect, we were able to better name our interests—like safety, nurture, proximity to other family—and accept that some compromises would have to be made.

The next time you face a challenging decision, consider what impossibly perfect ideal you might be holding on to and experiment with letting go of it. See what new possibility might emerge.

Letting Go of the Perfect

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