To listen on iTunes, click HERE. To listen on all other platforms, click HERE. You can also find the transcript below. Enjoy!
Today I explore the idea of being wrong, jumping off from last week’s episode on giving ourselves permission… let’s give ourselves permission to grow.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello Everyone,
I hope you have had a great week. This week I have had some personal internal struggles, as is normal for me, and because of this, I feel like this piggy-backs quite nicely on last week’s topic of giving ourselves permission.
This week I am going to talk about how it’s okay to be wrong, and will start with giving ourselves permission to grow. You see, in growth there is no room for perfection. Saying it in a different way, let me share a thought that, although obvious, really does unravel the foundation of perfectionism:
Perfection is not even an option. Nothing can be done perfectly, and when we really accept this, we can let go of the ideas, or lies rather, that hold perfectionism together.
You see, the problem is what we make “being wrong” or “messing up” mean for ourselves. When we are so focused on being right, we are too scared to make moves. WE are scared to be real; to be vulnerable, to take risk. We are stuck. The perfect lie keeping us stuck says that if we get something wrong, then we will not be loved or worthy of love and acceptance. As Brene Brown talks about, perfectionism actually ends up being the armor we put on to protect ourselves. It also keeps us from being known and from living. It keeps us from the very things that make our lives fulfilling; the purpose of being here; growth, connection, love and acceptance.
I must stop here also and just emphasize a point I have made several times in the past, which is also echoing the whole point of this post. That is, I don’t expect you to agree with or believe anything that I say or talk about. Rather, you should figure out what sits well with you; wrestle with the ideas to find what is true, and leave the rest. I KNOW I am not going to be right all of the time. In fact I KNOW I am often wrong. I also know that when I embrace the fact that I am going to be wrong and mess up a lot, then I am not scared of this because it’s a fact just as my eyes are blue and my toes are long. I don’t get fooled by lies about what it means to be wrong, it’s simply a fact that I will face regularly. I will be wrong. I will mess up. When I can embrace that, the focus shifts away from making mistakes and to learning. I get to be curious. I get to wrestle. I get to honor the processes of life and growing, AND (a huge emphasis on this) I GET TO FORGIVE MYSELF.
Time and time again I have wrestled with this. And I will sound like a parrot as I reiterate the areas where this struggle has reared it’s head. I battled lies of perfection in college when I struggled to accept when I would get sick. When I went to work when I was brutally sick anyway, and worked myself silly only to end up in bed for days with walking pneumonia. I battled the lies that I had to have it right when I found the first parenting philosophy that seemed to resonate with me and clinged to it, rejecting any deviation from said style to my own defeat. I caused strife in my marriage, with my in laws, and deep emotional stress and struggle with myself. I did this with health, when I read something that was compelling, it had to be true, and there had to be no shades of grey, so I went all in and judged other perceptions internally, because if they were also right then I felt it MUST mean I was wrong. I struggled with this when battling over other topics that arise as you become a parent or marriage issues with my husband and my head was harder than a two-ton bull’s. Seriously, this is an area I am an expert at failing at, and thus, it’s perfect for me to re-emphasize for myself.
Regardless of your beliefs about God, I believe that there is a God, and the character of this God I believe in is the foundation of what I believe about LOVE. Whether or not you subscribe to a God or belief system of faith or not, that I feel is irrelevant here. My point here is to share the connections I have made and my thoughts and provide for you thought food that might help you to wrestle yourself with ideas and find or clarify for yourself truth that nourishes your heart and helps you liberate your story so you can embracing who you are. It is not dependent on you agreeing with me or converting to my beliefs.
So, within what I believe, it is logical to me that if God was expecting perfect people, then God would have created perfect people… BUT because God created people that are imperfect, in doing so, God created people that would be able to learn… Can a perfect being Learn? I don’t think so. God already has perfection, but wanted relationship; wanted deep love; wanted to be able to express this whole and perfect love in the most amazing and deep ways. God created people that would make choices, but have freedom to choose and they would learn from those choices.
In that very same idea, nestled so beautifully also, is the idea that God CANNOT be disappointed in us. God knows that we are imperfect, and doesn’t expect perfection, and knows we will mess up AND STILL LOVES US COMPLETELY; thus, it’s in our mistakes are where we meet God, not where we are separated from him. It is not where we are shamed and punished, but where we are picked up and brought to water. We can learn and we can forgive, just as God forgives.
In essence, we can learn real love, because we can learn that real love has nothing to do with perfection, and everything to do with growth amidst imperfection.
Real love has to do with Grace, a grace that comes from really understanding the pain of those to which it is extended; and it is very different from pitty. The point of us is LOVE. We are made out of Love for Love and there is NO SHAME in this real deep and complete love. Shame comes from the lies that we believe; lies that cause us pain, and cause us to act in that pain. Pain which is contagious and savagely viral in nature. But LOVE is more powerful than the Pain of these lies. So, we are not meant to live this life without pain, or with perfection; but with the experience of deep love through grace and growth and healing; through connection and acceptance.
I share this, because forgiveness is supposed to allow for growth and is not supposed to bind to it a scarlet letter, or label which tells the world how we screwed up. Every single person has and will continue to screw up. Not one person is capable of perfection, so that lie that we must do it all right or always be right is a never-ending spiral of pain. If your beliefs differ from mine, I welcome you to sit in comfort with me because my love and acceptance here again, does not come in us being the same; but in celebrating what makes us different and owning all of it as we grow together.
From one minute to the next I continue to grow and so do you; what good is a copy? My perspective will keep growing and changing, and I welcome that because my focus is to be curious and growing, not to be right. My focus is to be connecting and loving, not correcting and judging. Judgement is only justified in perfection, a classification of which I will never be able to lay claim to. And, although I am aware that I will still have judgmental thoughts; and I will still wrestle with the pain and the lies; I will continue to unpack them, to wrestle with them and to dissect them so that they do not run my life anymore and they do not continue to do the work of spreading that pain. To stop the spread of pain, we need to feel it ourselves and unpack the lies, so we don’t continue to act from beliefs that are coming from lies and perpetuate those feelings in those around us.
So, let’s rebel against the lie of perfectionism. Let’s stop denying ourselves permission to grow and instead accept that we will often be wrong, and we will often mess up, and that’s ok. We can own it and apologize and forgive ourselves and others knowing we are all in this together. Let’s focus on the lessons; from every experience, from every person, from every painful thought and reinforce the truth for ourselves and everyone we come into contact with whenever we can, even if it’s after the mistakes.
You see, even deep truths, as we can share them in quotes, often times are not black and white. They can be empowering and yet not fully true all of the time. We won’t understand it all. We have to keep curious and actively dissecting and investigating. The things that make our life satisfying and propel us forward, connection, humility, authenticity, growth; all depend on acceptance. They depend on us accepting what we have done, what we have thought, where we have messed up, and where we have messed up, so we can move forward bravely, not held back by fear or tripped up by lies.
So this being wrong and messing up is not just ok, but necessary. It’s not just inevitable, but it’s part of the process. It’s part of what molds us and helps us to get to where we want to go.
I will reiterate, what is true for you and for me will continue to change. When we ignore the facts, and refuse to change out of fear of what it would mean, then we don’t grow. We deny ourselves permission to grow. Embrace that you will keep growing and changing, and that a lot of what we think is right now, will be wrong at some point, or that it will be the grey area; and let that be ok. I am continuing to be humbled by the facts of all that I have gotten wrong over the years, and at a certain point it stopped hurting, because I started just owning it more and more and then embracing it. Now, I am looking for where things might be off, rather than trying to just put duct tape all over the areas where things are falling apart metaphorically. This curiosity is what allows the mistakes to be okay and helps me to see them better.
As usual, I am working to grow in accepting where I am wrong, being okay with regularly messing up and being wrong, and becoming more and more curious about where I need to wrestle and embrace change and growth that needs to happen in my life. Here are a couple of ways I am working on this that you can try as well, if you find it useful.
First, I give myself permission to grow. This means I have permission to shed my skin of what I once thought, and once served my life, that I no longer believe and that no longer help me grow or love. Last week we worked on practicing giving ourselves permission, recognizing that we often times don’t realize that we have thoughts that create limits in our lives. We talked about the simple act of giving ourselves permission, and how that can be the bridge from our dreams through our fear, to our acting and living the life that we are made for. We are all made for more than we are living. That’s what this work is all about. About taking the permission that is ours to live more fully, starting with embracing our lives, what is, and who we are.
So try giving yourself permission right now and every day this week. You can word it however you want, tweak it to what suits your thoughts and needs, but here is an example:
I give myself permission to grow. I give myself permission to shed the thoughts and ideas that are not helping me, but are keeping me trapped. I give myself permission to make mistakes and be wrong so that I can accept that this will regularly happen, and focus instead on learning from the mistakes I do make and where I am off, and become a curious person that is liberated to learn and grow constantly.
Second, I plan to be wrong actively. Now, this is encompassed in the permission but hear me out. I remind myself every day that I will make mistakes and be wrong today. This accepts that fact and then I can be more open to receiving where I can learn, what I can do and I get to be more present. I am pretty sure that this idea comes across merely by the name, the Radical imperfectionist. That was the point. I am not here to lay claim to perfection, but to blow wide open the idea that anybody could be perfect and fully embrace that I not only am imperfect, but am happy being this imperfect being that is me.
Thirdly, I love writing exercises and you can write this out or you can also do this on the phone with a friend. If you do this with a friend, make sure it’s a safe and loving relationship with a friend that knows and accepts you. You are going to write about, or talk about, at least one (but up to three) experiences where you struggled today. Write about them, fully brain dumping what had happened and how you felt, or just thoughts you wrestled with and how you reacted. Start with the reaction, then dissect what you were feeling and where in your body. Then write about what thought was causing those feelings. Think about what facts you were having those thoughts about. You are making the circumstances, the facts, mean something about you or your life. That is the thought or belief causing the feeling, and then your reactions or actions. Once you’ve done this, stop and sit back and take a few deep breaths; then step back and mentally take yourself to neutral, where you are outside of the story you are telling; the thought of what this means for you, and read what you wrote about, trying to be objective and then write what comes to you and what lesson you see in this scenario, a lesson that feels right, good, empowering and helpful. This doesn’t mean there will be nothing hard to accept, but that they will be thoughts resulting in empowerment and love and acceptance and not shame and fear. If you feel satisfied you can stop here. But you can also continue by writing the perspective of the experience with these new insights in mind. Lastly, you can write what you will do now. The action step at the end will reinforce what you are learning from the situation and re wire your brain to look at this situation from your hero narrator; so that you can see similar situations from this perspective as well. Our actions reinforce the thoughts we have, so when we are trying to change a thought we need to both figure out what the lie is, and find the truth that we will practice reminding ourselves of, and then we need to figure out an action that will reinforce that powerful thought and disarm the lie that had run previous actions.
In summary my friends, thinking we always need to be right and cannot mess up is an incredibly lonely lie to live in. On top of that, it really doesn’t matter if we are right or not or if we mess up; because again, everybody does. Being perfect is a lie and not what it’s about.
We can continue to become open about our struggles and curious about the lessons in all of it, and we have to start with accepting our imperfection not only as being constant, but as being true for everybody so that we can find acceptance for this very human part of who we are. This is a skill and, as with any skill, it takes regular consistent practice, but you will get there. Along the journey, just know that as you see fruit in this work, you will be empowered by the results right away to keep going.
I hope that this helps you this week as you face the regular struggles, which are normal and natural. I hope that this helps you not to be overwhelmed by your struggles or feel defeated because you know that you are not alone in those struggles both in that we are all facing struggles, and in the fact that I accept you despite those struggles. We won’t all struggle in the same areas at the same time, and yet we are here to give grace and love to each other as we learn to lean into our lives and accept this journey for what it really is, below the lies we have believed for so long. I am here to be your cheer leader, telling you that you’re enough, you’re doing enough, and you are amazing. Keep doing this work. Keep leaning in and loving yourself and moving through the feelings with permission to be imperfect so you ride through the fear and defeat the lies and the shame they have held you down with. You really have got this and you’re not alone.
Until Next Week,
This Is Holly Ann Kasper
The Radical Imperfectionist