Stop Being a Perfectionist, Instead Focus on This…

Photo by Vitolda Klein on Unsplash

There’s no problem with wanting to be our best. In fact, we should all strive to be our best.

However, sometimes we can get too obsessed with wanting to be our best. We try to be perfect. This could be at one thing in particular. Or it can be with multiple things in our life.

Perfectionism is when we refuse to accept anything less than perfect from ourselves.

Perfectionism isn’t a good thing. We are all human, and we are by nature imperfect. We all make mistakes from time to time.

Don’t misconstrue this and think that it’s okay to slack off.  

We should set high standards for ourselves. We should work hard and push ourselves. And we should strive to succeed in life.

However, the unhealthy obsession with being perfect causes more problems than benefits. 

The biggest problem is that it causes us to fear making mistakes. 

This makes us avoid making choices in life. Perfectionism causes us to procrastinate. 

It prevents us from taking action to solve our problems or work toward our goals. We don’t take good actions because they aren’t the perfect actions. So we end up not taking any action at all.

And this is often worse than taking the wrong action.

We just need to take action period. 

Taking action gets the ball rolling, even if it is the wrong action. It forces us to be actively involved in the process of achieving our goals.

We waste so much time trying to be perfect. We would reach our goals quicker and easier by being okay with making mistakes.

Making mistakes is unavoidable in life. We can't be perfect all the time. At some point or another, we are going to make the wrong choice. 

Instead of fearing this fact, embrace it.

By embracing mistakes, we can move on from our fear of making mistakes.

This takes a lot of stress off of us.

It is actually a great thing to make mistakes. Making mistakes teach us what we did wrong. This provides us an opportunity to reflect on how we can do better. We get to learn and improve.

By embracing the fact that we will make mistakes, we change our focus towards the right things. We aren’t focused on our ego’s desire to be seen as perfect anymore. We are now focused on the process itself.  We are focused on the goals we want to accomplish.

Being focused on the process that we are taking to achieve our goals, makes us more likely to achieve them. We are creating solutions to the obstacles we need to overcome to reach our goals.

Perfectionism blinds us of the steps that we need to take to achieve our goals. Trying to take the perfect actions is not how you achieve your goals. There is usually no perfect way to achieve our goals.

We have to find solutions that work for us to get to our goals. We have to carve our own path.

Letting go of our fear of imperfection allows us to be free to make mistakes. It encourages us to be bold and take action. 

We learn and grow from this process. We become better at what we are doing… because of the mistakes we make.

And we have more fun in the process.