Perfection Is A Mistake

When we strive for perfection are we doing ourselves a favour or adding unwanted stress into our lives? When it comes to eating well and resolving an overeating habit, I think embracing the beautiful messiness of life is much more helpful. Click the image below to learn more about the Unbroken Community. You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. Show Notes: The top 3 ways perfection is a mistake How needing to be perfect increases the amount of thinking we’re dealing with Why perfection is boring How important the messiness of life is On the unkindness of perfection Transcript of Episode Hello explorers and welcome to episode 56 of Unbroken. I’m Alexandra Amor. I’m here today to talk about perfection, and how it’s a mistake.  Before I jump into that I wanted to mention, in case you didn’t hear me last week, that I’ve put together a page of information about a community I’m starting, called the Unbroken Community. You can join a join up for the waitlist for that community at: AlexandraAmor.com/community I want to find out if there’s interest in this sort of thing. So there’s a whole bunch of information on that page that I just mentioned, about what the community will look like, when the group coaching calls that we’ll have, the pricing and all the other details about what’s involved, whether it’s a good fit for you, there’s information there about that, and whether it isn’t. I think it’s always really important in these situations to make it clear what the offering is, and one of the ways to do that is to make it clear that this might not be a good fit for you. If so, you’ll see a little list of bullet points about that as well. So lots of information there. Check it out: AlexandraAmor.com/community if you’re interested in connecting with me, connecting with others who are wanting to resolve unwanted habits, like overeating, but it could be any kind of unwanted habit as well. Because as I said last week, they all have the same root cause. So yeah, check that out. All right, so now let’s talk about perfection. In the last few weeks, since I had my coaching call with Tanya Elfersy \that you can listen to on episode 53. As I said, a couple of weeks ago, my eating habits have been way better.  I’m so grateful for that. And I’m really happy because it feels like I turned a corner. I had had more insights, learned some more stuff as we do. It’s an ongoing journey. It’s never over is it really? I think as long as we’re alive, we’re going to be continuing to learn.  Since then, since that corner that I turned, I’ve noticed some more some thinking and more thinking that I’m comfortable with about perfection about holding myself to a standard when it comes to eating that feels a little bit perfectionist. It feels a little bit like holding an elastic really tight, you know that feeling? I know from personal experience that when I hold that elastic really tight, and really hold myself to a standard of perfection, that eventually the elastic snaps and I dive into eating badly.  So what I wanted to do today was explore that a little bit, explore that feeling of wanting to be perfect, and how it can become a bit toxic in and of itself. And that’s why the title of this episode is perfection is a mistake.  What I’m going to outline is three ways that I thought of that perfection is a mistake, ways that it can become toxic. I’m sure there are many more than this. But these are the three that came top of mind as I was preparing for this episode. So here we go. Number one, perfection really gets us into our thinking. This was the first sign for me that I was leaning towards wanting to be perfect was that my thinking becomes a bit revved up. In other words, I noticed that I’m having lots of thinking about food and about what I’m eating and how I’m doing. On both ends of the spectrum notice that actually to kind of congratulating myself on one end, and feeling good about how I’m eating, which is not the end of the world, that’s not terrible.  But the problem is that then the pendulum does tend to swing to the other side as well. And it any kind of little, not any kind, actually. But there are some foods that I might want to eat that where my thinking gets more revved up than with other foods. So for example, I had a couple of glasses of wine on the weekend that just passed. That’s something that can really trigger my perfectionistic thinking. What happens, I think, when we get into having a lot of thinking about things like this, and about trying to be perfect, is that it can be a little bit like a dog chasing its tail. There’s no way to be perfect. And this is why aiming for perfection is a mistake. And if we feel or maybe I should say, if our thinking believes that we should be perfect, that we are obligated to be perfect all the time about whatever the issue is, in this case, it’s food, then that can become its own kind of problem. And it can contribute to or add itself to all the other thinking that we have about these kinds of issues. Now, I do want to do a little sidebar here and say that, as someone who’s had this unwanted overeating habit for 30 years, and has tried so hard to fix it prior to finding the Three Principles, with self help and willpower and rules and all that things.And maybe you are too. I’m just inclined to have a lot of thinking about food.  I can observe friends when we’re out for dinner, or when I’m in situations where I’m meeting with other people. And maybe, you know, maybe it’s not true, I can’t tell what other people are thinking. But it often seems like other people who have not had an overeating habit, have a lot less thinking about food. And that makes sense to me.  When we have some sort of habit that we’re trying to resolve, our thinking does get really revved up about it.  And of course in previous episodes, I’ve talked about the pressure cooker, and how the habit is a solution to all that thinking that’s going on. So what else do I want to say about that? I guess the main point is just that holding ourselves to a standard of perfection, when it comes to an unwanted habit. And this is what diets really encouraged us to do, right? You’re either on the wagon or off the wagon. And I think that’s kind of a toxic way to look at things. So what I’m realizing lately is that I’m living my life, I’m doing the very best I can. And adding a whole bunch of thinking to myself, to my world, to my life about being perfect, and having the perfect diet and eating perfectly all the time, is going to end up creating more problems than it solves. So that’s the first way that perfection is a mistake. The second way that perfection is a mistake is that perfection is really boring.  When you meet somebody who seems perfectly perfect and has it all together, I really can’t think of anything more boring. It’s the messiness of life that’s really interesting, right? We don’t like it a lot of the time. But that’s where we really connect with our fellow human beings and perhaps even more importantly, that’s where we learn. I really fell on my face at the end of 2023 and early 2024 with falling back into some overeating habits that I didn’t like.  That whole time, while it was frustrating and confounding, and I was not feeling great about myself. It created suffering for sure. I’ve mentioned that before it was a really great learning experience. It taught me a whole bunch of things, some of which I mentioned on Episode 54. It was a really good learning experience. I learned so many things.  I think I may have said this in one of the episodes, when things get tough, that’s when we learn. So if we were perfect all the time – and I know that’s our natural inclination, and we do want things to be resolved. If we were perfect all the time, we wouldn’t learn a thing, we wouldn’t have any of the experiences that lead to insight, and that lead to learning, and that help us to connect, and have empathy for others who might be going through a similar situation.  So that’s the flip side of perfection, the messy, sticky, untidy part of life, is really full of lessons and beauty and connection. And so that’s why I think being perfect is boring. And it’s not necessarily something we need to aim for, at all. The third reason I think that perfection is a mistake, is that it’s unkind. This connects back to the previous point, we are messy human beings fumbling our way through life, divine beings, as that quote from Sydney Banks that I talked about in the episode with Tania, and then the follow up episode, we are divine beings walking through this world, trying to find ourselves and that’s messy, unpredictable journey. And while we’re doing that life is throwing us curveballs all the time. And we’re just stumbling forward trying to do our best. In that circumstance of being a spiritual being having this very dense human experience it seems to me it’s really unkind to expect perfection from that human being, from that experience. And it’s interesting, because we don’t expect it of anyone else, do we? But we really do expect it of ourselves, which is such a shame. I always try to anyway, in my life, I fall back on what is the kindest thing that can happen in this moment? What is the kindest way that I can be with this person, whether it’s myself or someone else? That’s about all I have to say about kindness and perfection. So those are my three. That’s my top three list, about how perfection can be a mistake, it can get in our way.  I also want to say too, as we’re wrapping up here, that it can be our default position to expect perfection of ourselves. And that’s how our culture is set up. We’re graded in school, we are assessed for our performance at work. We, especially in the whole Instagram of it all we see other people’s perfectly curated lives, and expect that for ourselves. And our life, of course, doesn’t look like that; the toilet has flooded and the dishes aren’t done and the dog is just thrown up on the carpet or whatever it is.  I think there’s just such an expectation and we have this disease of comparisonitis comparing our insides to other people’s outsides. And that can get really toxic and add to the problem of unwanted habits. So hopefully, we can all learn to be a little kinder to ourselves, to not hold ourselves to such a high standard and to cut ourselves a bit of slack as we’re walking through this world, finding our way learning and growing and connecting with one another.  I hope that is helpful for you today. I hope that you are doing well and taking good care. And I will talk to you again next week. See you then. Bye. 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