I Am Enough...and so Are You!

Happy Wednesday! Today's reflections...

At my last summer solstice peace circle, Naike Forde shared with us a beautiful teaching....'when we judge, we miss the abundance." When we judge ourselves or others, we miss the opportunity to experience the abundance that we or they are enough. We miss the truth that we are abundant in our beingness. We miss the abundance in all the moment holds for us. These are powerful words and I carry them with me everyday now.

In a world where perfectionism and perfectionistic behaviour is celebrated and made to be a certain kind of benchmark of abundance, "I am enough" is a radical perspective of what love looks like towards ourselves and others, even when mistakes happen.

Perfectionism includes a tendency for very high standards for self and others with a clear goal of successful performance often at the expense of inner peace, social connection and a patience for things to unfold as they need to do.

"A basic psychological definition says, “Perfectionism is to hold an unrealistic ideal and demand that one’s behavior or appearance conform to it.” Notice that it is defined as a binary phenomenon in how someone relates to their own behavior and their expectations of others. It is a filter by which we all must measure up to.

Failure is not an option and is a sign of weakness, and if shown, it has to be hidden from the public eye at all costs. Let’s be clear: being detailed, wanting to be better, holding yourself accountable is not the same as toxic perfectionism.”

Toxic perfectionism is the need to avoid mistakes as much as possible, judging others by the same criteria, and preventing interactions where we know we might fail.

Recently, a client was struggling with this issue of perfectionist ideals and it was causing them great distress. Every mistake was cause for shame and some flavour of guilt and self loathing. On the outside, this person appeared successful and well adjusted. And yet, the inner torment was real. Through our coaching conversation, this client discovered how she could transform her 'failure' to learning. Their reminder phrase is personal to them, however, the core transformation involved opening to the teaching that 'I am enough'. And when "I am enough" then I can learn, and grow and evolve. (Even evolution is about selection, not perfection!).

"One of the greatest myths of perfectionism is the invention of hustle culture. This is the emergence of the workplace ideology that people are not hustling hard enough if they are not trying to stretch themselves beyond what we’re capable of. It turns effort into a seemingly magic bullet and rubric that we all measure our levels of success by.

It has also had a large hand in contributing to mental health issues. Limitations can be a good thing. We need to begin romanticizing the fact that it’s okay to rest, take breaks, and opt into self-care routines.

What does evolution say about the cultural normalization of perfectionism? Evolution is ultimately about selection, not perfection.

What does this mean for perfection? It means we have created a culture where things like the imposter syndrome, body image issues, the perfect employee, the man of my dreams, and the perfect parent have never been part of our actual DNA, but have been accepted as a natural part of our social norms. We have made it almost impossible to ever make mistake, and even Darwin would disagree with this.

There are five core components that drive our desire toward cultural perfection: personal standards, concern over mistakes, parental expectations, doubting of actions, and organization. These all work together to set us all up to be like a god—a god with clay feet, where we try so hard to hide those clay feet from our fragile egos, others, and even our environment.

We ultimately think that letting someone down is the ultimate failure. There is no separation between the person or the failure—they are one and the same.

Deep down, we know this is not true. However, when the process of overidentifying with our mistakes becomes inseparable, the person we once identified with outside of that perfection no longer exists. A lot of these ideas are borrowed from ancient middle eastern myths that have had a hand in propagating people as fallen, dirty, and sinful.

We are not made to be perfect—we are made to be human." 1

So for today, walk as though this is true: I am enough----because it is true. And give yourself permission to learn, grow an evolve.

Remember...we are not made to be perfect [it's not in our DNA], we are made to be human."

This picture of my late dog Carlie is her being content after a few walks, training complete, and she is uncombed and dirty! She was happy being a dog.

1 https://www.elephantjournal.com/.../toxic-perfectionism.../