How to Embrace the Imperfectly Perfect You

Surviving our childhood usually brings with it all those words or statements gifted to us by our parents, other adults, teachers and our peers. They then become our challenges throughout our life. “I’m too fat”, “I’m not smart enough”, “I’m too loud”, “I’m such a show-off”, “I’m not good enough”, “I’m too shy” and any other negative belief we have of ourselves. We live our lives from what we have taken on from others.

 Did you know that as soon as you stop trying to be perfect, beautiful things happen?

It’s true!

Choose to step away from continually striving to get ahead, to be something you are not, to achieve an impossible ideal, and you will see life open up like a flower. You will see the beauty that only you have and only you can bring that to this world. The world needs you to be exactly who you are at the core of your being, that truly authentic self.

I’m going to share 6 blessings you can experience when you embrace your own imperfection.

1.    Realise your uniqueness

When you can decrease the critical self-gaze you have of yourself, suddenly those little quirks stop being flaws and start being beautiful things that set you apart and make you your own, unique, beautiful self. No one else has your smile or your frown of concentration. No one else can write the way you do or speak the way you do. There are so many things that make you uniquely who you are.

Experiment: Try sitting quietly and start listing out those things you view critically about yourself. Once you have your list see if you can begin to claim these as what makes you uniquely YOU. Take your time with this so you can really feel the change from being critical to being accepting of who you really are. Just work with one thing on your list at a time and only move to the next when you have accepted the one you are working on.

2.    Stop comparing

Comparing is rarely helpful or supportive and it’s amazing how much we can do this to ourselves. When I think about it we have been trained from a very young age to compare ourselves. Just think about your schooling and the tests you had to do. You were marked and then ranked against your peers. We are used to being compared so it can be tricky to change this way of looking at ourselves and our world.

Embracing your imperfections releases you from the destructive cycle of comparing yourself with other people. You will never be them and they will never be You! Your Inner Critic is usually made of all those statements you heard from others and took on as true for yourself.

Seeing your so called flaws as unique characteristics, that come together making you authentically who you are, releases you from needing external validation. So, what if you don’t have a tiny waist or your legs don’t go on forever? Real validation comes from within! Learning not to depend on others to feel good enough will free you to be exactly who you are and what other people think doesn’t matter.

Experiment: Create a list of all the ways you compare yourself. For each comparison on the list see if you can look inside for validation. So if we take the example of not having legs that go on forever. To have that statement as a belief you must be comparing yourself to someone or an idea that to have legs like this would make you better than you are. To do the experiment on this belief you would need to find where you made this belief true for yourself. Whose words or idea did it begin with? Once you have discovered this, you would take a new look at your legs and notice how they look now without that false belief?

3.    Become more positive about yourself and others

Once you start to see that your imperfections are what make you uniquely yourself, you are able to step out of being so competitive which changes your mindset. Instead of being judgmental and self-critical, you begin to accept and like those parts of you that have been judged and criticised for such a long time. You focus on the things you like about yourself! And as soon as you stop beating yourself up, you become more relaxed about other people. You will more than likely notice that you stop seeing the imperfections in others in a critical way and start to see them as the uniqueness of them. Imagine how much that might impact your family, social and work life.

Experiment: Keep an eye out for how your view of yourself and others changes as you engage with these processes.

4.    Become kinder

People who are okay with their less than perfect aspects tend to be more forgiving of other people’s perceived flaws. When you embrace imperfection, your standards become more realistic, and in turn, you take a kinder more compassionate view of yourself and others. His Holiness The Dalai Lama said “If you don’t have compassion for yourself then you don’t have true compassion.” It always starts with us and our view of ourselves, others and our world. It’s like if we are feeling happy then everything around us has a positive vibe. And if we are feeling down we see everything negatively. The only thing that is different is our state of being.

Experiment: Practice being kinder to yourself and notice how your view of yourself, others and your world changes.

5.    Lose your fear of failure

Once you’ve become more okay with imperfection, failure shrinks down to more realistic proportions. You can see mistakes or missteps as an inevitable part of being human. Failure is an essential part of learning, a stepping stone on the path to success. It’s only a failure if we don’t get the learning from the experience! Because fear is no longer a catastrophic prospect, it’s a lot safer to take some risks, to stretch your challenges and who knows, even have more significant successes.

Experiment: Explore your experiences with failure and see if you can find the learning from each of these incidents. It's only a failure if you fail to take the learning from it. This is really important to learn and flip your thinking around failing. It will totally change your world and will support your growth.

6.    Your self-esteem grows

Accepting that failure is not only okay, it is important for growth and that imperfection is inevitable means that you become happier with who you truly are. You have an increased healthy sense of self! This doesn’t mean you don’t work hard or stop having goals. It does mean you are less hung up about doing everything perfectly or struggling with that never ending pursuit of perfection. All your characteristics and experiences become aspects that make you the beautiful individual you are. And that’s all anyone can ask of you, especially yourself!

Experiment: After working with these six blessings write what you notice that is different about how you see yourself and the impact this has made on your personal, social and work life. If you are willing to share your experience I would love to hear about it. Please either post a comment or share on my facebook page or send me an email at [email protected].

I hope this was helpful.

Until next time

May you be well, may you be happy and may you have Inner Peace

Linda

Host & Producer of The Truth About Trauma TV