Do you consider yourself a perfectionist? Do you always want everything to be perfect, and when it's not perfect do you get frustrated?  

It's ok to not be perfect. If there's one thing that the last few years during the pandemic taught us, it's we need to give ourselves grace. 

As a recovering perfectionist myself, and someone who is a little OCD, it can be hard to not strive for perfection. But what I learned is that you cannot perfect something until you put it out there first. So this gives me permission to show up as I am now, and know that as a forever learner, I can always work on perfecting myself (the never ending project). 

If you get discouraged over and over because you're not perfect or you haven't produced a perfect item, service, whatever...you're training your mind to be disengaged. Of course you need to follow through, keep your word, and keep moving forward, but maybe you're that high achiever who is demanding a lot of themselves. It can be easy to be hard on yourself. 

So today didn't go as planned. Maybe you didn't do the thing you wanted to do, or lost a couple hours because you got sucked into the YouTube rabbit hole, or you got a migraine and the last half of the day was spent trying to sleep it off. It doesn't mean that because you didn't get your tasks done for the day, that you failed or that you are a failure.

A failure is an event, you didn't meet the expectations you set. But it is NOT you. Your identity is not that of a failure. You don't need to fall apart, lose your motivation, or give up. These external factors should not drive your internal thoughts, feelings, energy, and focus.

For those of the high achievers who are too hard on yourself, who beat yourself down when things aren't going at the pace you want or the way you want...this is actually slowing down your progress because you're getting discouraged.

Instead, try to not take things personally, because that leads to getting discouraged, spiraling, and looking for comforts in distractions. If you continuously do this over the years, you start to take on an identity of someone who can't achieve ______ or a person who will never be able to do ____. You keep telling yourself this same story each time and you stop progressing forward. 

Separate external events that discourage you from your internal thoughts and stories. Be aware of how you are talking to yourself. Are there negative thoughts constantly running in your head? 

Start taking control of the things that are happening in your life, the stories you're telling yourself, the thoughts that pop up, and flip them to help move you forward instead of keeping you stuck and frustrated. 

You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be you. 

Hope that left you satisfied and smiling [that's what she said],

~Sara