At some point in everyone’s lives they’ve probably considered themselves a perfectionist, someone who strives for the highest degree of excellence by setting extremely high standards for themselves or others.
Wanting to do the best that you can may help you in many ways but perfectionism goes hand-in-hand with a fear of failure, so when this mentality isn’t managed it creates an unhealthy relationship with your self-esteem by only focusing on the mistakes that were made.
When setting these impossible goals for yourself you can be blindsided from all the beauty and success you’ve also achieved.
The mindset that everything you do has to be perfect restricts the possibilities that could be fun because you were too afraid to try. When you stop talking about the things you do as “not good enough” and instead acknowledge how far you’ve already come by simply trying, you practice patience. If you didn’t complete a task perfectly the first time, what makes you think you’ll be able to do it the next time if you decide to quit?
Everyone has heard that no one is perfect but I don’t think that is true. Perfection itself is a construct; it is not a true or false adjective that you use when describing the color of something but it’s an opinion. No matter how many people agree on something, there will always be someone who disagrees so how can anything be entirely flawless? Everyone has something that they see as either perfect or imperfect, and what you see as not good enough may be someone else’s perfection.
Humans were never meant to be able to do everything flawlessly the first time around, if that was the case we wouldn’t have all the inventions we do today that someone created to help them with things they couldn’t do right the first time.
People may be able to sing on their own but taking voice lessons help a lot of people to get better at it, and with the help of inventions like instruments people are able to create music in any way they would like and seems perfect for them.
Many people have been playing certain instruments or sports for years – maybe it feels like forever since you successfully played that chord or scored your first point but somewhere in the world there’s a kid celebrating that achievement even though it seems so little to you.
Maybe you’re not the best, but what fun would it be if everyone was able to do everything they ever wanted to on their first try?
The hard truth is that feelings of judgement and shame are a part of life and no matter how hard you try to do everything perfectly and avoid those feelings – you’re still human. These feelings are normal and happen to everyone and without them people would struggle to understand each other. Everyone wants to be the best but being hard on yourself to meet unreasonable expectations isn’t fair to yourself.
