No. 3 - POST-PERFECTIONISM

“POST-PERFECTIONISM”

January 22, 2025 • Issue No. 3

Hi Sparkle Gang 💎!

I have a milestone to share! On Saturday, I had to take a test to update my coaching credential and two things happened:

1. I passed the test (woo! yay! go me!)

2. I immediately beat myself up about my score (yikes!)

It’s ironic because just before the test, I’d sent a text to my good friend Natali. We’ve been friends for over a decade, but in the last few years we’ve been accountability partners for our “words of the year.” WOTY is kind of like a vision board, but you set your vision with just a few key ideas. Last year my words were ease and flow because I wanted to prioritize listening to my intuition. It was starting to feel like I’d created a habit of choosing the path of most resistance, and I needed to break that habit (quickly!) Here are the texts I sent to Natali at 10:26am:

So nice, right? So wise! So classy! So demure!

By 12:37pm, I had finished the test and I was holding my score report. Everything I’d texted to Natali had gone out the window. I had been hoping for a perfect score. I hate to admit it, but I was crushed to see the number on the page. I felt dumb. 😞 I immediately kicked into high gear thinking of all the ways I could do better next time: get more sleep, create a study plan, hire a tutor, memorize every available test prep material, be the best, be… perfect. Just as I was about to get all wound up, my own words came back to me: prudence, perseverance, post-perfectionism. I’m leaving Perfection in 2024 because she’s mean! She makes it her job to remind me that I’m never good enough and that’s not true.

There are so many places in my life where my desire to be perfect gets in the way of making any progress at all, and moments when it snatches the joy right out of my celebrations. It’s so annoying! And it’s exhausting! I’m not sure if perfection is impossible - but I do know that it’s usually unnecessary. And so, this is my era of post-perfectionism: as in, after and beyond perfectionism. New year, new less-perfection-focused me!

I didn’t need a perfect score on that test to gain my credential, I needed to pass. You don’t need every email and presentation to be error-free and color-coded, you need to communicate. We don’t need to be perfect, we need to make progress toward our goals. If perfection is the goal, aim for it - but usually perfection is just a distraction.

Even as I type this, the voice in my head is contradicting me: How will people take you seriously if your work always has typos? Why be mediocre? These are valid questions, but they’re not the right ones. There’s an entire valley of possibility between always and occasionally - and there’s a spectrum of options between perfect and mediocre. I’m losing too much energy catastrophizing that I’ll lose my credibility by misplacing my punctuation marks outside of a parenthesis. I need that energy back (!) because I do my best work when I feel good about myself. So, if I want to do my work from a place of confidence and self-regard, I have to accept that I will make mistakes but my mistakes don’t make me unworthy, or unqualified, or dumb.

In my post-perfectionism era, I’m releasing perfect and grabbing hold of my goals. I went into that test to pass it, and. I. did. I completed the thing that matters! It’s time to celebrate, reflect and move on to the next.

Until next time, stay sparkly! 🙂