How to change your outlook
on perfectionism
Hi !
Maybe you believe this about yourself, or did at one point in your life- "I'm a
perfectionist" or "I need to be perfect".
This doesn't have to be something you tell yourself or others.
Your thoughts, behaviors, and emotions show you how comfortable you are (or not) with making mistakes and how much you stress out when you make them, or rub up against feeling as if you don't have control over a situation.
The same goes for obsessing about small details, which can be important to notice and deal with, but the stress behind it is harmful.
This type of mentality is often deemed to be beneficial in
society and a quality looked for by employers.
It makes sense from a business perspective- of course companies want to hire someone who goes the extra mile to make sure everything they do is exemplary.
But this belief that you, or everything you do, can be, or should be perfect is a dangerous illusion.
Yeah sure, you can accomplish a lot of things, look good, and make money...who doesn't want that?
But, the dark side of perfectionism is the toll that it takes on your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual
pieces of you, as well as your relationships- especially with your partner, children, and coworkers.
If you consider yourself a perfectionist you get lost in your thoughts:
You obsess about the past and worry about the future, ruminating about any mistakes you made or can possibly make.
You are terribly afraid of failure or being seen as not successful enough.
Perfectionism comes from childhood programming and exacerbated by the agreements made by society, to which you subscribe(s)
to.
How you look and what you accomplish are two of the main methods people use to "control" the anxiety that comes with adopting this belief.
It is rooted in the fear of not being enough, especially not being loved and accepted.
Does that resonate with you?
There are ways out of this mentality and still maintain achievements with a more balanced mindset:
One of the main methods, which heals the root cause, is to increase your awareness by working through your unhealed, and often unconscious, adverse childhood experiences.
As you can imagine, this is a lot of work and many people are uncomfortable doing it because an integral aspect of this process is to accept your faults and mistakes as a human and also to experience really difficult and challenging emotions.
It also takes time and patience...more time than people want it to take and more patience than they allow themselves to have.
I'm telling you from my own personal journey- it's more than worth
it.
It takes a brave and courageous person to set the intention to do the deep work and come face to face with your shadow, and an even braver one to hire a therapist, coach, or other practitioner who can help you increase your level of
awareness.
In case you didn't know, I do that exact sort of work.
Email me if you want to know more about working with me individually (short or long-term), in my online program, or with a remote Shamanic Healing.
Another helpful tool is
to re-frame- to shift from the idea of perfectionism to one of Mastery.
In order to keep this newsletter from being too long, I am going to write more about how to do that in my next one, which should be out next week.
Until then, I will leave you with a homework assignment that one of my teachers gave me, which helped me tremendously:
Choose something (not major) every day for a week and purposefully mess it up. She did not use the word "mess" by the way 😉.
Notice how your whole world
doesn't fall apart.
You might even notice you're already messing things up without even trying to and you're more than okay.
I'd love to hear/read what you experience, so please let me know!
