Jun 20, 2006

Giving Yourself Permission to be Imperfect

If you want to rapidly increase the pace at which you overcome personal obstacles and weaknesses, let me give you a simple perscription: Give yourself complete and total permission to be imperfect. Just decide you’re going to be okay with it. Stop sweating the fact that there are 57 different things you wish were different about your life and let it go.

Here’s why: If you don’t give yourself permission to be imperfect, you’re setting yourself up in a position of weakness. You’re starting out with the “I’m so screwed up” or “My situation is so bad” perspective, which doesn’t do anything to help you overcome things. In fact, it just keeps you there longer, because you get depressed about how many problems there are with you and your circumstances. Your ability to take action to change things dissolves.

The way to successfuly work on overcoming your “imperfectons” is to use a different strategy – the triple tactic of honesty, realism, and action.

How The Truth Sets You Free
Instead of hiding from the truth, admit your shortcoming – but at the same time admit that it’s not the end of the world. All too often, we have this idea that a personal weakness invalidates us as a person, or condemns our whole future forever. But this just isn’t the case. Let’s say you’re demonstrating zero willpower – you just don’t follow through on the things you need to. Instead of getting depressed about it, admit that this is where you are, and you’re not going to hide from it anymore or pretend that it doesn’t matter.

It does matter. A lot. It’s messing with your life and your goals. But be honest and realize that this is just where you are right now, and it doesn’t have to be this way forever. Tell yourself that it’s okay for the moment that you have this shortcoming, because you’re not going to let yourself stay that way.

Most people will never get past this step. Perhaps that’s because they don’t realize the second tactic:

Getting Real About How Life Works
Human beings tend to trust emotion over reality. We can take a few negative references and treat them as absolute fact, even if they have no basis in reality. We fail a few times and feel like a failure. We stop and start on goals and feel like we have no willpower. We feel like we can’t change a situation. We feel these things, and we imagine that they are real.

The thing is, they aren’t. Just because you’ve failed over and over again in the past, doesn’t mean that your future is doomed. That’s an emotional feeling that doesn’t reflect objective reality. Unless you’re an extrordinarily unique case, no one is holding a gun to your head, preventing you from taking action on your goals. The key you need is to find the appropriate leverage to take action.

That’s a big enough topic that it needs to be another article (which, fortunately, it is.) People don’t need a magic formula to succeed as much as they need a little bit of reality therapy – the understanding that there is nothing in the world that has to block you from making some progress on your goal, skill, or strength every single day.

We tend to worry about our imperfections as if they are some insurmountable obstacles when they aren’t. They are brick walls that can be chipped away, in some cases only one brick at a time. The fact that there are a lot of bricks has nothing to do with the fact that you can take out a few of them right now if you just follow through.

The reality is that anything you want to change, you can. It just takes consistent work. Most people never get past this step, either, because they’re too turned off by “work” to do it consistently (but don’t let yourself be one of them).

Nothing Happens Until You Make It Happen
Ah, work – the four letter word. This is the place where the magic happens – or, in a lot of cases, doesn’t. If you want to make your goals happen, you’ve got to show up, every day, and hammer at it. You can’t just expect it to all fall together.

So decide that you’re going to get to work, right now. If you need some motivation find some here and here. And get to it now so you can start getting some peace of mind towards yourself – imperfections and all. Do it now. You’ll thank yourself for it.