Hands up who suffers with perfectionist tendencies? I am a recovering perfectionist and have to consciously bring it into my awareness every day otherwise I start driving myself a bit nuts with striving for things to be perfect.
Here’s how it plays out in my life:
I procrastinated until I think I know exactly what I am doing. Guess what…… I’ll never ever know that things will turn out the way I want them too so I may as well take action and give myself a chance to course correct if necessary
I didn’t try new things for fear of looking stupid. Now I logically talk myself through the fear and some of my favorite questions to ask myself is “what’s the worst that can happen” and “what’s the very best that could happen”
This does two things, if I can live with the worst then it lessens the impact in my mind of taking action and what’s the best allows me to build up a picture in my mind of what could happen, in effect I am visualizing the thing I want to achieve and guess what……..
The mind cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, therefore it creates the same feelings in our bodies so why don’t we take advantage of this more often.
By imagining what we want for 5 minutes every day as bright and as bold as we possibly can, we are creating new neural pathways in our brain.
So the next time your perfectionist habit comes up, challenge it and dare to be perfectly imperfect. The world needs more of this because we want to be able to relate to other people and see the honest truth behind their stories of what they did to get to where they got to.
Our perception seems to default to thinking that other people’s lives are perfect, especially with all the posts and photos we see on social media. We make ourselves wrong and start comparing ourselves to others when all we really need to do is get more vulnerable and declare our imperfection.
So, today I stand before you proud to be perfectly imperfect, it got me to where I am today just by being ME. That is all any of us ever needs to be.
So next time you catch yourself striving for perfection stop and think who is it that needs to hear my story, who needs a boost of confidence and solidarity in knowing that we are all human beings and none of us is perfect. We make mistakes and we learn and grow from our experiences.
That’s the beauty of having experiences! So don’t shy away and not do something for fear of looking stupid, go at it wholeheartedly and know that the next person you cross paths with lives with this same fear. It’s up to us to show them that it is okay to be ourselves – warts and all – imperfect beings – living our best lives – as best we know how.