Being a perfectionist is debilitating. It stops you from actually taking action because your brain tells you something along the lines of, “…why even bother. It’s not going to work out the way you want it to. Not even close to it. So what is the point?”
One of my favorite quotes about failure is from Bill Cosby: “In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure.” I used to have that stuck on my mirror at university. I want to tweak it a bit though. Here is my adapted version: “In order to succeed, your desire to learn how to fail should be greater than your fear of actually failing.”
So much lately did not and will not go according to the plan. It simply will not measure up. And you will not feel as if you are measuring up. And learning how to be okay with failure will help you not feel like a failure yourself. Reason? A lot of what “failed” recently, was not in your control. So if I picked you up and dropped you off back at the start of 2020, could you control even 50% of what didn’t go according to plan? Probably not…
Setbacks are going to happen. Failure and things going in a completely different direction that you anticipated is what we call life. In fact, we can expect that. It happens to the best of us homo sapiens out there. This does mean that as you are a human being yourself – that you need to be comfortable with plan B or C. Or even plan X.
The only way you’ll get there is if you expose yourself to failure more often. You are looking to make mistakes and accept that good things can come from those mistakes.
The more you fear and avoid making mistakes, the harder it will be to take action. Go slow, and give yourself a lot of encouragement for attempting something, even if your brain says “don’t do it. You’ll never do it right anyway.” The point here is to attempt with action. That is the goal – perfection/success/getting it right is not at all the goal. Focus on what you do have control over here – attempting it regardless of failure or success.
