Who here thought they should’ve been able to change their drinking on the first try? 🙋🏻♀️
Or counts sober days and starts over at zero when they make a mistake? 🤦🏻♀️
The desire to be perfect, especially when something feels high stakes, may come naturally, but is it serving you? Because perfect isn’t actually a thing. So what happens when you’re less than perfect (i.e., human)?
Here’s what often happens:
We judge ourselves.
We grow impatient.
We wallow in frustration.
We give up.
What if we could shift our approach to quitting, taking a break, or cutting back, away from perfectionism and toward seeing it as a practice instead? What would that look like?
It would look like setting an intention and making our best effort. If/when that effort is short of our goal, then it would look like reflecting on what happened with curiosity, adjusting our approach, and trying again. And bonus points for doing it all with an attitude of kindness.
We worry sometimes that if we aren’t hard on ourselves for our mistakes we won’t reach our goal. But what if the opposite is true? What if we could change faster and more deeply by acknowledging from the start that mistakes are part of it? Maybe then we wouldn’t be so afraid to look at what happened and understand and learn.
This approach is not about letting ourselves off the hook, making excuses, or glossing over hard things. Judgment and shame shut down the parts of the brain responsible for learning and growth and makes changing that much harder.
So, what do you say? Are you ready to shift to a practice mindset?