BOO!

"Perfectionism is a dream killer, because it's just fear disguised as trying to do your best. It just it."

-Mastin Kipp

     As finals come up for me in college, a girl in my class asked me "how are you not stressing out about the finals?" I thought about it, and I just simply said, "aren't the finals what we've been preparing for the whole time?" What I mean by that is why worry about something if you've been properly preparing for it. The only reason you should worry is if you didn't prepare. Then they said "I'm just a perfectionist, so I worry all the time." When she said that it made me think maybe being a perfectionist is not a good thing to identify as. When you label yourself as a perfectionist, you place that expectation of being perfect on your shoulders. If you haven't figured it out already, being perfect is not possible. So putting that weight of "perfect" expectation on your shoulders is really sealing your own doom. No matter what it is. As I thought even more about it, I realized how perfectionism is really fear in disguise. The fear to be imperfect. The fear of not being good at something. The fear of making a mistake. The fear of not being good enough. How do we overcome this?

     Overcoming fear is a constant battle that we experience everyday. We all have our own fears that we deal with, but I've noticed in my earlier years I had perfectionism aka "fear of not being good enough" and I still do occasionally, but I've found effective ways for me to deal with this fear. I'll give you three of my most used strategies for dealing with fear.

     1) Recognize Progress! As a fitness and health nut, I'm more obsessed about being healthy and fit than the average human being, which can be good and a bad thing. The benefits are pretty obvious, I get to be healthy and fit. The downsides of being a health and fitness nut is that I'm extremely competitive with myself. I feel like I should be able to constantly destroy my personal records every time by large margins. So when I see that I only improved my mile and  a half run by one second, it seems disappointing. I didn't destroy my record, I just eeked by with a little more spring in my step. That's when I remember the mantra "Progress Is Perfection." This helps me see the big picture. It helps me remember that "by small and simple things are great things brought to pass". The scriptures had it right with that principle. 

     2)Show Up With 110%! Something that has stuck with me from when I did Insanity Max:30, was when that girl said "If I can't do one more, I do three!" Holy cow! That really is insane, but to apply it to my perfectionism. What if I was going to do something I thought I wasn't good at just once, but then I did three times? That would make me better in the end having doing it three times instead of just once. Something that my high school aerobics teacher told us was that "You can all do hard things, if you let yourselves do it." I believe that if we were to let ourselves try the things we aren't very good at more than just once, maybe some day we would find ourselves better at it.

     3)Share! A lot of the time, it's hard to admit to yourself you don't think what you're doing is good enough, let alone tell another person that. More often than not, telling someone our fears helps us. The reason for that is because we then have someone to help us through that fear. Being as we are not alone on this planet, it's a privilege that we can go on this journey of life together. If we were to support those that are close to us, and the people close to us were to support others, and so on and so forth, we'd have an unbeatable support system. A system that could help us conquer fear.

     Those are just the three strategies that I use most to conquer and overcome my fears. You might have others that you use, and keep doing it, if it works. Always stick with you doing you, and help other people conquer there fears. If we did this, everyone would be able to more richly LIVE NOW and enjoy life. Thanks for reading and we'll talk soon!