NOBODY EXPECTS YOU TO BE PERFECT...

Every day when I work with clients to help them with their anxiety levels I see the catastrophic effect of perfectionism on a person’s self esteem.

People will happily declare themselves as “a bit of a perfectionist”. They say it almost with a sense of misplaced pride, and nearly always without fully realising the harm they do to themselves by adopting (or perhaps I should say accepting) that attitude.
The fact is nobody deliberately decides to deprive themselves of happiness or satisfaction until they can confidently declare themselves perfect, because there is a part of us that recognises perfection is a foolish goal.

As human beings we are destined to always remain imperfect. To strive for an impossible goal would inevitably doom us to a lifetime of disappointment.

The reason we adopt the attitude of perfectionism so readily is often because for some reason our upbringing gave us the idea that we were never quite good enough...no matter how hard we tried.

Perhaps we were deprived of the love and recognition our youthful efforts deserved. This more often than not comes not from a shortage of care and attention from our parents but quite the opposite.

In many cases, a parent is so keen to make sure their offspring gets all the opportunities that they missed out on when they were young that they drive them on to constantly strive for more and to completely fulfil their potential.

Of course, this just leads to the child never quite feeling that the parent was happy with them and often leaves them feeling not good enough.

Constant improvement is a great attitude to have, and always looking to grow is an admirable outlook.

But never forget that we will always fall short of perfect...and that’s ok.

There’s a reason why you’ve never heard the story of the happy perfectionist. There isn’t one.