Perfection is Killing Your Progress

Where are you limiting yourself because of a perfectionist, all-or-nothing mindset?

What I mean by this is we can have this mindset that if it’s not fully up to our idea of perfect, we abandon ship.

For example, I normally like to have an hour long workout and I love to lift heavy weights, but I’m pressed for time and truly only have 30 minutes. In that 30 minutes I can’t get too sweaty. Instead of asking myself what I could do within that constraint, do I instead say “it’s not worth it” and do nothing. What are all the ways I could move my body with intention in 30 minutes without working up a sweat? I could walk, stretch, do some mobility, maybe even move through some lifting technique with lighter weights.

Or how about with our food choices? We set our mind to eat a particular way during the day, but then someone brought brownies and we decide to have one. No harm in that. But we eat the brownie and instead of simply enjoying that, we get fixed in this idea that because the day wasn’t perfect, we might as well eat the chips and the candy corn and the handfuls of cereal and the….fill in the blank, when we get home at the end of the day.

Or take my son, Sebastian, for example. He told me one area he has seen this in his life is schoolwork. If he was late on one assignment, instead of realizing it’s late, completing it, and still turning it in, he realizes it’s late and chooses not to even try to complete the work. Instead of a reduced grade because it was simply late, he chose the zero.

The moral of the story is this:

We don’t get a flat tire and then decide to slit the other 3 good ones, but in our lives, are there areas we are using 1 poor decision to justify making others?

What do you need from yourself today? Is it compassion? Grace? Honesty? Margin? Rest? A listening ear? You may not get what you need from the rest of the world, but we can at least try to give ourselves what we need.