I always tried to be perfect. In everything that I do. Absolutely everything had to be perfect, without any mistakes. If I made any mistake, it was a tragedy. As if everything I had done right would have been canceled by that mistake, it simply hold no value any more because I made a mistake.
I think that you can imagine how difficult it is to live like that. Not only that everything had to be perfect, but I also had (and still have) very high standards. It’s easy to be perfect when you have low standards which are easy to reach and almost impossible if you have very high standards. I have to admit that my perfectionism has helped me a lot in my career because you can imagine how much attention I pay to details (which is very important in planning a wedding), but it has also sabotaged me because when I made even the slightest mistake, I couldn’t enjoy and see the value of what I had done. Don’t get me wrong, mistakes that cannot be fixed are extremely rare (mine or others, but even those I thought were mine since I was supposed to prevent them – I thought I was kind of a super-woman who should see everything and is responsible for what others do). Just that fact that someone knew I made a mistake, it didn’t matter who, diminished my value. The problem was the fact that I have chosen a job with so many unknowns and surprises, especially in the first years of activity, that no matter how much you already know, you learn new things from each event (and how else could you learn if not from mistakes?). So for years I thought I wasn’t good enough, no matter what I did and how much I learned. There was always a small and insignificant mistake that would fuel this feeling. At the same time, I know that by being a perfectionist and having such high standards, I learned and grew much more than I would have if I weren’t like that.
When I started working on my belief system, slowly but surely I got rid of the ones that made my life difficult, but somehow this beliefs/obligations remained (like I have to be perfect and I have to be a perfectionist). Then I realized how much they have helped me and how much I grew because of them. So I cleared the obligations, but the beliefs were still there. At the same time, I learned another very important thing: that everything is perfect as it is (this doesn’t mean that it’s not perfectible!). That whatever has to happen for us to learn a certain lesson and to manifest what we want in our life will happen. But how can everything be perfect if I’m not doing what I’m supposed to or if I’m doing it wrong?
And then I was lucky enough to get the question “Did it ever occur to you that the problem isn’t that you want to be perfect but the fact that you don’t have the right definition of what being perfect means?” This was one of those moments when I realized just how fortunate I am to have the right people in my life, who which are the right questions to ask. I think this moment led to one of my biggest perception changes, which had a huge impact in my life. Because it was very difficult for me to be happy when most of the time I felt like I was supposed to do things differently or to do something else entirely. There was always regret and a bit of guilt for not doing things better or not doing what I was supposed to. It’s interesting how I blamed myself for not acting according to an information I didn’t even had at the time I was taking that action. 🙂
So I asked Life to show me what perfection is. The answer I got was mind-blowing for me: “Perfection doesn’t mean doing everything perfect or by the book, but doing what you feel like doing in every moment”. Because when we trust our intuition, we know that it is always leading us in the right direction. And if you trust that every choice is leading you in the right direction, then everything is perfect. Every single thing that is happening is perfect because it is a step to taking you where you’re supposed to be.
So my next question was “Okay, but what do I do when I have to do something and I don’t feel like doing it? When I feel like doing a totally different thing? Or maybe even nothing at all?” And the answer came in such a beautiful way in the following days: maybe the timing for doing a certain thing is not right, even though the mind is telling you it is.
I’m sure you know how it feels to do something you don’t feel like doing. I usually dread doing that so I just stall and postpone it as much as I can and do it halfheartedly. So you can imagine what kind of energy goes in that thing and that is the energy that others will feel… And in the end it takes me forever to do something I don’t feel like doing because I’m not productive at all. We use a huge amount of energy to do something we don’t feel like doing but think we have to.
If we do what we feel like doing in that moment, not only that we don’t use a lot of energy doing it, but we gain energy because we do something we enjoy doing.
So we end up doing what we feel like doing extremely fast and with great energy (energy which is then felt by the others). Then the mind comes and tells us yes, you did that very well, but you didn’t do what you were SUPPOSED to do. But the real question here is: who decides what I’m supposed to do? The mind! We need to have a lot of faith/trust in Life / the Universe in order for us to be able to live life doing what we feel like doing or the things we have energy for in the moment. To know and to feel that we are always guided in the right direction, which may at times differ than what we think is the right direction. Life might have other plans for us than the ones we already made. And we can choose to trust Life and to let ourselves guided here, or we can fight it. No matter how hard we fight it, Life will still get us there, but we will get there with a lot of sorrow and frustration.
The question I’m asking you is: “Doesn’t Life know better which is the right path for us?” Because if we truly belive this, then we can trust that we are guided on the right path, even when the path we’re on is not the one we wanted to be on. This is why the manifesting ask is “This or something better is manifesting for me now”. Because most of the time, Life has in store for us way better things than we can imagine. Let’s welcome them into our life and allow ourselves to be guided to them as easy as possible. Let’s remember each moment that everything is perfect just as it is and that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be!
