Perfect, Schmerfect

Perfect, Schmerfect

Good enough. Words I have come to love. In the yorely days, good enough never was. Being a perfectionist sucks. Well, at least it sucked for me.

There is a huge difference between doing my best and doing it perfectly. When I strive to do my best, I feel satisfied and content with my efforts, and I am relaxed. When I try to do it perfectly, I am frustrated and tense, and may find myself reworking and reworking and never actually getting my project done.

I also found, for me, mind you, that the older I got, the more my perfectionistic tendencies got in my way. In fact, sometimes I would actually be stymied into inaction. Yikes. It turned out a lot of my old procrastination was based on an unconscious fear that I couldn’t or wouldn’t, do X perfectly, so I couldn’t even get started, and would withdraw into time-wasting behaviors. Oy, did I hate that. Especially since I was just baffled as to what was going on.

How do I know good enough is good enough?  

Of course, one of the things I did think was that somehow my divine perfection was tied into my being able to do stuff perfectly. It meant that because I made mistakes, I was inherently flawed. If I were inherently flawed, with no hope of change, what was the point of even trying? Depressing.

How do I see my divine perfection? What makes me good enough?

It seemed to me that I was surrounded by people who were better than I, people who never made mistakes, who recognized my flawed nature, and looked down on me for it.

Oy. What makes me compassionate?

As I let go of my perfectionism, I started to see how much those people who had been looking down on me were suffering, trying to hide their mistakes by drawing attention to me, or anywhere except on them.

As I let go of my perfectionism, I started to see how much leeway we have in how we accomplish stuff. I used to think there was one right way to do things, and either I knew it, and was somehow better than some people for it, or I didn’t, and was therefore, less than.

Oy. Why am I flexible?

The perfectionist thing is all about negative emotional judgments, judgments that hurt both the people we make them about, and hurt us because we stay stuck in the I’m better/less than X.

Exercising our judgment is a good thing. We can make decisions about behavior and consequences, but when it starts slipping into our thoughts about people, we need to take a step back. Often, when we want to make negative emotional judgments about people, we’ve got some topic up that is bringing up feelings of not good enough for us. When we can identify those topics, and address and integrate them, we will go back to feeling fine.

How do I know I am okay? Why do I feel safe? How do I trust the Universe?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 01112014

Perfection vs Perfectionism

Perfection vs Perfectionism

Perfection. What an enticing and seductive word. Perfection, all crystalline and pure. Who would think that something that seems so lovely could be so very dangerous.

Oh, yeah, I said dangerous.

We are perfect beings at our core, beings of light and love. And this moment is perfect, perfect for where we are in this moment. These things are perfection. And we tend to think of perfection as a positive thing.

But the instant we start to try for perfection, we are doomed. Perfection is a state of being, not an activity.

Doing our best is a wonderful thing. It makes us feel good, we feel satisfied when we’ve done our best. We feel content.

Striving for perfection, on the other hand, can make us crazy. We can end up spending way too much time on a project trying to make it perfect. Most of the time good enough is good enough.

In the olden days, I tried to make things perfectly clean. It took forever, and still they weren’t perfect. I tried to make my skin perfectly smooth, to iron my clothes perfectly, to write the perfect sentence, knit the perfect glove. Sometimes, it would happen right away, sometimes I had to work and work at it.

Kind of like an abusive relationship.

The other part of the equation was that, as I got busier with a second job, and a third (we’ll talk about that another time) I couldn’t spend 5 hours cleaning the kitchen floor. So I stopped. Spending half an hour to iron a shirt; I stopped ironing. I stopped trying to knit fancy things, I stopped writing anything but journal entries.

Stymied. Brought up short. Because I thought that if I couldn’t do it perfectly, what was the point. Oh, I wish I could go back in time and tell me how wrong that was.

Good enough is good enough. Why am I capable?

Hit a lick at a snake. What makes me get it done?

Doing my best is wonderful.  How am I satisfied?

Being a grownup means that I know when to apply good enough, and when to give it my all. This is using positive emotional judgment. It makes my life easier, it leaves me with more energy for other things, including spending time with you.

Being a grownup means that I no longer am striving for perfection when I write you. I get our community in mind, I pull a Creative Questions card, I contemplate it until an idea pops up (don’t you love creativity) and then I write it, read it for typos, and give it to you. I do my best, but I don’t strive for perfection. I’d never get these written if I did.

Loving “good enough” is a giant leap toward our natural life because it lets us relax in our feelings, and then, too, in our bodies.

How have I changed from making myself crazy to exercising my positive emotional judgment?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2013 all rights reserved 09032013