Perfectionism is a personality trait that involves rigidly and unrealistically requiring absolute perfection of the self and/or other people in most (if not every) important life domain. Not surprisingly, perfectionism is a risk factor for and a maintenance factor in mood, anxiety, and eating disorders. It is therefore important that therapists are able to conceptualize, assess, and treat perfectionism.

This excellent book was written as a self-help guide for lay persons who wish to address their perfectionism independent of professional assistance. Overcoming perfectionism through a self-help guide alone may be difficult. Perfectionism is a moderately heritable, temporally stable personality trait that is hard to treat. Such obstacles, however, do not discount the importance and the usefulness of Overcoming Perfectionism. This book can be much more than a self-help guide. We believe this book is a valuable resource for therapists with a cognitive behavioural (CB) orientation. Our review is directed toward such therapists.

Overcoming Perfectionism uses an accessible format. Early content provides the reader with an understanding of perfectionism from a therapist's perspective. The authors also identify perfectionistic behaviours detrimental to mental health and explain why these behaviours are not requisites to success. Before the treatment protocol is covered, a CB model is outlined describing how perfectionistic thoughts and behaviours lead to negative outcomes. This is a key component, because the subsequent approach to overcoming perfectionism stems from this model.

In line with CB models of mental health, the treatment protocol aims to identify and to remediate perfectionistic thoughts and behaviours. This book provides very useful exercises outlining costs and benefits of changing perfectionism, self-monitoring exercises, and diaries to increase awareness of positive outcomes. A wide variety of behavioural experiments are also provided, allowing perfectionists to test the practicality and the effect of non-perfectionistic behaviour. This book also provides worksheets to assist perfectionists in overcoming common pitfalls (e.g. procrastination). Overcoming Perfectionism does an outstanding job of assembling an extensive set of tools that can be directly employed by individuals and their therapists.

One salient advantage Overcoming Perfectionism has over other such books is the empirical support for its treatment model. Shafran is a renowned researcher in perfectionism and there is empirical support for both her CB model of perfectionism as well as her treatment approach (e.g. Glover, Brown, Fairburn and Shafran, Reference Glover, Brown, Fairburn and Shafran2007). Shafran has also developed a clinical perfectionism questionnaire, corresponding to her CB model (see Chang and Sanna, Reference Chang and Sanna2012). This questionnaire, in concert with this book, could prove very useful to therapists. Overcoming Perfectionism includes summaries of research supporting the CB approach to perfectionism. The authors also cite other evidence supporting their assertions. In the references section they suggest other resources relevant to perfectionism. In sum, despite this book's practical and anecdotal style of writing, its underlying research foundation is solid.

The appendices are another useful aspect of this book. They provide blank worksheets for clients to undertake the CB exercises mentioned above (e.g. self-monitoring). Every worksheet in the appendix has a corresponding section in the book explaining the goals of undertaking the exercise, how to undertake the exercise, and how it will contribute to the treatment of perfectionism. These worksheets are helpful tools to supplement therapists’ CB techniques.

Praise notwithstanding, therapists must adjust their expectations of this book given its intended lay audience. For one thing, perfectionism has complex relationships with other disorders (e.g. mood disorders). Early content in this book acknowledges perfectionism's comorbidity with such disorders, but does not elaborate much further. Perfectionism, in and of itself, is the main target in this book. This is understandable, as treating complex relationships among multiple disorders is beyond the scope of a self-help guide. Therapists should nonetheless be aware that severe perfectionism rarely occurs apart from other disorders, and complex (e.g. reciprocal) relations may exist between perfectionism and other disorders. Although this book's major selling point is its evidence base, scientist-practitioners may find reason to critique the CB model of perfectionism outlined. Shafran and colleagues’ model is narrower than other evidence-based models of perfectionism (e.g. Hewitt and Flett, Reference Hewitt and Flett1991); for example, other-oriented perfectionism (i.e. rigidly demanding perfectionism) is a fundamental dimension of perfectionism. However, readers receive little (if any) ideas about how to modify demandingness and hyper-criticalness directed toward other people, despite evidence that other-oriented perfectionism is a destructive trait (Hewitt and Flett, Reference Hewitt and Flett1991).

These quibbles aside, Overcoming Perfectionism has a very high potential to facilitate treatment of perfectionism by CB therapists. Using a series of practical exercises, this book will assist clients in obtaining a basic understanding of how perfectionism is problematic and how perfectionism is maintained via maladaptive thoughts and behaviours. We highly recommend Overcoming Perfectionism to CB therapists wanting to expand their tool kit for conceptualizing, assessing and treating perfectionism.