Perfectionism leaves no room for exploration, discovery and improvement.
If you can’t do it perfectly, or at least exceptionally well, you’re likely not to try at all. If you don’t try something new, you aren’t so likely to fail or do badly. It seems like that would protect you from embarrassment, sadness, frustration and the greatly-feared, fate-worse-than-death, pit of failure.
But it also means you don’t move outside your tiny area of “the known and proficient.” Carrying that back to (hopefully) before we knew how fatal and humiliating it would be to fail, would take us back to the set of “known” when we were toddlers or more likely infants. Because if you’ve ever been around a toddler, they endure a lot of failure. Of course, back then we were blissfully uninformed and unaware that we couldn’t do things perfectly. Or even well. Or maybe at all.
If we had known, we might still be eating baby food, afraid to try something new that might feel or taste awful. We would never have learned to walk because that definitely requires a lot of learning, practice and falling down (aka failure). We wouldn’t have learned to run or dance or sing or play games. We wouldn’t have ever met anyone outside our immediate family, certainly not strangers. Because that was stressful. But sometimes they brought us gifts.
What if we could let ourselves enjoy the feeling of learning, accomplishing, falling and getting up, the excitement of doing something we never did/could before? What if we realized that failure is a process of learning what we like? A process of trying something new? A process, not a personal description (failure) or a lifelong label (inept.) Or an indication that we can’t do that or other things in the future because we couldn’t do it in the past.
What if we thought of it as lifting weights to make our muscles stronger? Or learning new words to add to our vocabulary, even if we didn’t say some of them really well? What if we thought of it as another piece of glass being fitted into the stained glass window of our life. Some work, some have to be adjusted, some don’t won’t fit. Some will get broken and replaced later, but are fine for now.
Yeah, what if we thought of trying new things, sorting through them, as looking for pieces to fit in our window. No moral or intellectual deficit in the trying things for size, just looking for what we want to keep; what fits into the frame. And the light shining through those broken pieces loosely fitted together – beautiful!
Maybe stepping back, looking at the big picture and enjoying the imperfection perfected in its combination, well isn’t that the definition of perspective?
Hmmm, I think I need some more colors and sizes in my life window.