Latest / Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic / 75: Monday Moment: The Mischief of Being Imperfect

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75: Monday Moment: The Mischief of Being Imperfect · Banish the Lies: Outsmart Your Inner Critic

• 0:00
  Hello, friends, and happy Monday.
• 0:03
  Today's Monday moment goes out to all my fellow recovering perfectionists.
• 0:07
  I had a major breakthrough recently that if you don't have perfectionistic tendencies, may not sound like much of a breakthrough at all, but let me explain.
• 0:17
  The other day, a woman I interviewed on the podcast reached out to let me know that she had a free resource she wanted to share with Banish the Lies listeners, and she offered to have me add it to the show notes, which I thought was wonderful.
• 0:30
  And then I thought, you know what?
• 0:31
  I'm going to hop onto Instagram and I'm gonna record a little reel telling people about it.
• 0:37
  So I did, and I was actually quite proud of myself because I did it in one take.
• 0:42
  Again, this may not sound particularly impressive to you, but I cannot tell you how many times I've recorded a video, watched it back, and gone,"Uh, no," and recorded the whole thing again.
• 0:53
  But this time I decided, nope, we're doing this in one take.
• 0:56
  We're just gonna go with it.
• 0:57
  And then I posted it and immediately noticed a typo, not in the caption, which you can edit, but right on the cover of the video, which you cannot change.
• 1:10
  My stomach immediately went into knots.
• 1:13
  Oh, that looks messy, I thought.
• 1:15
  That looks unprofessional.
• 1:16
  I need to fix it, and of course, the only way to fix it was to delete the whole thing and start again.
• 1:22
  So I took a slow breath, and I decided to leave it.
• 1:28
  I know, revolutionary, right?
• 1:30
  But I'm telling you, it felt like my own tiny version of exposure therapy.
• 1:36
  I was exposing myself to the horrifying experience of making a very public mistake and then not correcting it.
• 1:45
  And once I got over myself, it was incredibly freeing, so I started noticing this impulse in other areas of my life.
• 1:54
  For example, a friend messaged me recently and asked me how I was doing, and I happened to be having a pretty emotional moment, so I sent her this voice message, and I probably overshared a little.
• 2:08
  Actually, a lot.
• 2:09
  And I got very teary, and a few seconds after I hit send, everything in me wanted to delete it before she could listen to it.
• 2:19
  And again, I stopped and just asked why.
• 2:24
  Why did I need to delete it?
• 2:27
  And I realized I was feeling almost the exact same thing I had felt when I saw the typo.
• 2:33
  I was feeling shame.
• 2:35
  Shame that I had been vulnerable, shame that I hadn't presented the polished version of me, shame that I didn't look like I had it all together.
• 2:42
  And that one really hit kinda deep because maybe this perfectionism isn't always about wanting things to be simply excellent.
• 2:52
  I think a lot of the time it's about wanting to control what other people get to see.
• 2:57
  So lately I've been experimenting with something.
• 3:02
  Not intentionally doing things badly, of course, and not throwing standards out the window, but just noticing the moments when something imperfect happens and asking,"Does this actually need to be corrected?" You know, does the video really need to be redone?
• 3:17
  Does the message need to be deleted?
• 3:19
  Do I really need to clean this up before someone else gets to see it?
• 3:24
  Sometimes, of course, the answer will be yes, but sometimes maybe we can just leave it.
• 3:30
  Let the typo stay.
• 3:31
  Let the voice crack.
• 3:32
  Let ourselves be a little messy, a little vulnerable, a little human, because I'm discovering that there is enormous freedom in not taking myself so damn seriously.
• 3:45
  And of course, the freedom isn't in finally getting everything right, as if that's even possible.
• 3:52
  It's really in discovering that sometimes you can get it wrong and just leave it there.
• 3:59
  So my fellow recovering perfectionists, perhaps you may want to join me this week in looking for one tiny opportunity to resist the urge to correct yourself.
• 4:10
  And may you have a joyous, light, intentionally imperfect day.
• 4:15
  Cheers.