Are you ready to tackle your fear of failure? Mastering Perfection is the first part of a four-part series, How to Overcome Failure. Stay tuned for what else I have in store for you. If you’re ready to make a change in your life, then continue reading. If not, this post isn’t for you.
To those who want to love themselves but don’t know how.
You’re Imperfect
Perfection is a persuasive illusion of what success looks like. The trick is that it’s unattainable and you can never achieve it because it’s not real. Spending your life striving for this idea of perfection will only prime you for certain failure. You’ll never achieve the impossible standards that you’ve built in your mind because the key word is that it’s impossible.
Perfectionism stems from a principle of lack that you’re not good enough or worthy as yourself.
This manifests in two categories: debilitating or overdrive. Debilitating means that the thought of failure overwhelms you to the point that you shut down and take too little action, while overdrive means that failure scares you to the point of over-compensating and taking too much action. Both are harmful because debilitating neglects your drive for life, and overdrive neglects yourself and your needs.
Debilitating and overdrive go hand in hand, however, it’s common to lean more towards one than the other. They both derive from the same root of not feeling good enough and unworthy. Debilitating is generally correlated with behaviors linked with depression, and overdrive with anxiety. However, exhibiting these behaviors doesn’t directly mean that you have depression or anxiety, as this isn’t a form of diagnosis. It’s merely a general observation that may help you find your place with your struggles.
Debilitating
Debilitating uses perfectionism as an excuse to keep your life small by sticking to what you know and making decisions that follow a predicted outcome. You avoid taking necessary risks because you don’t trust your ability to accomplish them.
Failure is not an option, so instead of expanding your life with the possibility of failure, you choose to keep your life small because it’s comfortable. A small life is certainly comfortable to maintain because it allows you to walk through life on autopilot, meaning you’re using minimal conscious effort.
Your life is predictable, and you know what to expect, even if it’s bad. What you’re so scared of is the unknown and unpredictable, such as a necessary risk that you have no idea what it looks like on the path ahead. How you’ll do it or what the results may be is unknown, and it means taking a leap of faith in yourself that you don’t have.
To encounter a failure you didn’t expect would be devastating to your self-esteem because it proves you’re unworthy and not good enough. It’s evidence as to why you don’t believe in yourself, and you’ll only shrink your world further. Your self-esteem wants to avoid feeling that way, so it sticks to what it knows because at least that way, you know what to expect.
By not trying new things or working towards the goals you want to achieve, it keeps the little of your life easier to maintain. You have nothing to lose because you don’t have it to begin with. The possibility of achieving something only to lose it would incite an intense feeling of loss. You would rather not have it at all than risk the possibility of losing it.
When you have the belief that you’re good enough or worthy, achieving a grand success likely won’t be in alignment with your belief system. It would detect this success as an impostor and would assign your self-sabotage troops to take it down. In this way, you don’t work towards your dreams because subconsciously you don’t believe yourself to be capable, and will lose it all on your own.
Holding onto perfectionism is self-sabotage in itself because the idea that you must be “perfect” at something from the start sets you up for inevitable failure from this impossible standard. Starting something new and developing a skill requires trial and error, which means you won’t have control over the life you hold on to so dearly. Perfectionism serves to ensure you don’t do something you won’t be good at right away. But unless you’re a natural talent at a skill, you won’t be good at most things right away, much less perfect.
Here comes our next hot ticket item of self-sabotage – let’s hear it for procrastination!
When you’re procrastinating in debilitating mode, you avoid a task or a series of them to avoid the feeling of discomfort that comes with trying something you’re not proficient at. Just the thought of doing the task overwhelms you, causing you to freeze up in a state of brain paralysis. Your mind draws a blank, and your body feels too heavy to move under the weight of debilitating overwhelm.
Then you realize you’ve been procrastinating for too long, and now you feel guilty, so you criticize yourself and call it encouragement. But all it does is mentally and physically drain you of energy, so you now don’t have any energy left to do the task, and leave it for another time. You end up leaving it to the last minute, where you’re under so much pressure that you’re running on adrenaline to complete it, or you don’t do it at all.
If you’re not “perfect” at something right away, that means that you have to expend more energy towards the task to get good at it. It’s that knowledge, plus the belief that you’re incapable, and your fear of failure, that overwhelms you to procrastinate. To try something and fail would be to confirm your belief that you’re not good enough to be able to do something as easily as someone else. You want to avoid feeling like that, therefore, you avoid trying at things so you don’t have to fail.
However, you forget that a master who you believe can succeed so effortlessly was also once an amateur at the start. You don’t become proficient at something by expecting yourself to immediately get it right and give up after inevitably failing the first time. Proficiency in knowledge and skill is formed from failing countless times and trying again every time.
It’s uncomfortable to admit to yourself that you’re not good at something because it means that you have to try harder than minimal effort to become proficient. It requires conscious effort and a willingness to learn, which requires you to step out of autopilot. Besides, it’s easier to keep your life small and do the things you know, because trying something that necessitates you to work harder would be inconvenient to yourself.
Become inconvenient. It’s also inconvenient to turn 70 years old and realize that you didn’t accomplish what you wanted in life, and that it’s all too late. It’s inconvenient not to have certain knowledge or skills that you wish you had, all because you let your fear of failure control your life. It’s inconvenient to let your life pass by right under your nose because you couldn’t take the risks aligned with your dreams. Choose your inconvenience because life will continue to go on regardless of what you choose.
I implore you to choose to work towards your fear of failure so you can live the life you know you deserve, even if you don’t believe it just yet.
Overdrive
Overdrive uses perfectionism as an excuse to put yourself on the back burner for the sake of accomplishments, achievements, and being the best. Your fear of not being worthy as you are drives you to seek worthiness outside of you through external validation. Contrary to belief, external validation does not directly equate to external praise; it means that you are looking for external confirmation to prove something within you.
You take on more than you can handle, and prioritize the energy spent on your work and achievements. However, your needs are neglected because you find yourself so easily sacrificed in the name of success. So you wear your accomplishments like a badge, an extension of yourself that proves your greatness to others. It feels like your self-sacrifice is all worth it once you gain the approval, validation, and recognition that you crave.
But if someone were to pass a judgment on you, your self-esteem would fall to the floor, sending you into a spiral trying to pick it back up. The truth is that you can’t handle criticism, and any possibility of someone casting judgment toward you or your work would devastate you. So you work to eliminate any possibility of it by repeatedly criticizing and nitpicking your work.
You repeatedly ruminate over the possible judgments people would have over your work and whether it’s good enough to their standards. It becomes necessary to fix any “imperfections” of your work, even if you’ve spent your energy, because anything less than perfect is failure.
However, this constant evaluation and criticism only serve to run yourself dry in pursuit of your perceived version of perfection. But what you believe to be perfection are the standards that you believe people expect of you. Whether people impose those standards or not, your need for achieving nothing short of perfection is a life of working through the eyes of others.
When you don’t feel that you’re worthy or good enough for yourself, sacrificing yourself for external validation seems like a fair trade. You don’t provide yourself that validation, which is why you’re so willing and eager to sacrifice your happiness, energy, and commitment to self. You’re letting external sources determine how good and worthy you are as a person, but they don’t even know you. Furthermore, you’re putting too much trust in someone else’s opinion of you or even some score to be a correct reflection of how worthy you are.
Instead of trading in yourself for the unpredictable nature of people’s opinions, start looking inwards. Ask what you think of your work, what you’d like to produce, and what accomplishments you’d like to achieve. Strive for accomplishments that fuel your soul and zest for life, risking the criticism and judgment of others. You don’t want to spend your life doing meaningless accomplishments that mean nothing to you; instead, focus on goals that are in alignment with your desires.
It’s scary to consider what it’s like to view success through your own eyes and give yourself a say. That means having to sit with yourself, which may prove to be hard when you’re sitting with a constant critic of who you are and what you do. You’ve likely lived a larger portion of your life attached to perfectionism, you might not know who you are without it. Since your success has been rooted in perfectionism for so long, it means changing the very essence of all that you’ve built.
To think that you sacrificed yourself and dedicated so much of your time and energy, only to realize that you’re not happy with the foundation you’ve built. You may feel a sense of loss for what it feels like you wasted. But your accomplishments serve no purpose if it isn’t in alignment with yourself and your happiness.
Some self-sacrifice for the sake of your goals and achievements is healthy when it’s coming from a place of self-prioritization and love for yourself to meet your potential. The problem lies in self-sacrifice coming from a place of dislike for yourself, that you need to chase external validation. Sacrifice is a healthy and natural part of life, but understand that when it comes from the wrong place, it can be damaging.
The most important misconception you must first get rid of is that perfectionism is the sole source of your success. You can still find success without holding onto perfectionism while prioritizing yourself. Making yourself a priority means that you have more energy to invest in your goals and consistently do your best work.
Focus on doing the best work you possibly can with what you have in your energy reservoir. If you’re running on 70% energy levels, then focus on putting in your best work with the 70% that you have. If the next day you have 85% in your energy reservoir, then focus on putting in 85% of your best work. What you have been so used to doing is running on a 70% energy level, but stretching yourself thin to make it 100%.
Your 100% is oftentimes too watered down to be effective since you don’t have the resources in your reservoir to match it. Putting in 100% all the time is unsustainable, and you’ll catch yourself depleted to 20% energy levels, where it’s no longer possible to stretch yourself so thin. Pushing burnout means that after so long of extending your resources and pushing past mental and physical exhaustion, your mind and body force you to listen and give out. In the long run, burnout will affect your success, and you don’t want that to happen for your sake.
Working with what you have in your reservoir and prioritizing yourself will ensure that you’re consistently putting out the best work that you can. This will be more effective in the long run for the sake of your well-being and success than extending yourself with perfectionism. Although it may feel that putting in 70% means doing mediocre work and throwing all future accomplishments in the trash, the quality of work that you produce will be better than a watered-down 100%.
When you do your best work that you’re proud of and you feel good enough as yourself, people’s judgment of you will bounce right off of you. The work you put in is less of a performance and more of a reflection of what you want out of life.
Acceptance
So, how do you overcome perfectionism? You realize that you’re an imperfect human being, and acceptance of this fact is an invaluable gift to yourself because it’s an act of love. When you accept your imperfection, it opens up a new world of possibility and success because you let go of your fear of failure and act in alignment with yourself. Honing this love for yourself provides you the space to try, even if you’re not good at it at first.
To accept that you’re imperfect means that you must let go of the judgments you have toward yourself brought on by your perfectionism. When you achieve this love for yourself, you aren’t judging yourself for not achieving perfection because it no longer exists in your world. To expect perfection only brings judgment and self-criticism, and that doesn’t portray love and kindness. You allow yourself to try and fail and love yourself all the same because your worth isn’t tied to what you can and can’t achieve.
You can love yourself as imperfect, or hate yourself as perfect.
A message to those in debilitating: honing this love for yourself provides you the space to try, even if you’re not good at it at first. The more you fail, the more your life expands. You achieve more experience, knowledge, and progress towards your aspirations. To become inconvenient to yourself means the future convenience of living a happy and aligned life. It’s certainly inconvenient to spend long, grueling hours working towards that business instead of binge-watching your TV shows, but you’ll reap the rewards of a thriving business and a life filled with abundance.
For those in overdrive: embodying self-love allows you to honor your needs and respect your limits. You allow yourself to be comfortable with yourself as you are, without a need to prove yourself to others. Instead, you strive to act in alignment with your authentic goals and live a life that you’re proud of without thinking of people’s opinions. You no longer try again and fix your mistakes for fear of failure or obsession over perfection, you try again as love for yourself in recognition that you can do better.
Imagine how life would be if humans couldn’t experience failure. You wouldn’t be able to recognize mistakes and learn from them, nor could you improve upon yourself as a person. Without failure, life would be monotonous and linear since we’d be destined to repeat the same cycles like clockwork. You would be stuck with the same version of yourself since you wouldn’t be able to experience personal growth or meet your fullest potential.
How would you be able to grow into a better version of yourself if you don’t know what to improve on? To experience a sense of failure is a gift to human creation because it allows us the ability to recognize mistakes, learn from them, and grow from them. With this gift, it teaches you that you want more from yourself and gives you the yearning to maximize your life.
Failure is so beautiful because to fail is to live. It’s the human experience to constantly reform yourself into the best version of yourself that you can be and make the most out of your life. To take away failure would be to take away the human experience.
The concept of failure feels different when you change your perspective on it to something that makes you feel human. We are all just people trying to figure out this thing called life, and perfectionism is a roadblock that creates resistance. But when you see failure as a privilege, you see all that you can learn from it, and you flourish.
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