The Perfectionist’s Challenge

By Sarah Susanka, Author & Instructor of the The Not So Big Life

It’s no picnic to be a perfectionist. It can mean making yourself (and others around you) miserable with constant judgment, correction, and impossible standards. But there are ways to begin to see through it. To learn something new, something beyond the beliefs and dictates of the personality (the personal software that you’ve come to think of as “you”*), you have to “go toward that which you are rejecting.”

One way of doing this is to leave the “imperfect” ways of others alone for a perfectionist. Your personality will likely predict dire consequences if you don’t intervene, but because it has NOT intervened, “it” (the personality) doesn’t really know that this is true. It just THINKS it knows this is true. You are going to collect some evidence to the contrary.

“The next time you find yourself on the verge of stepping in and fixing something, back off, leave it alone and watch what happens.”

So here’s a challenge for the perfectionists out there. The next time you find yourself on the verge of stepping in and fixing something, back off, leave it alone, and watch what happens. With your Watcher’s hat on (read Chapter Six of The Not So Big Life to learn more about the Watcher), make notes about what the personality says will happen. Then watch and make note of what actually does happen. Finally, report back here and let us know what you find out. (I need to add here that I am not encouraging you to ignore real dangers–just the things that are really personal preferences of the perfectionist personality.)

Register today for The Not So Big Life workshop at Duke Health & Well-Being. In this workshop, you’ll discover how to inhabit your life completely by listening to what your heart already knows. The end result is greater meaning, vitality, and a sense of being at home in your life focused not on what you do but on how you are in everything you do. Explore techniques for remodeling your life, transforming it into something you love, without having to change your outer circumstances at all. Through collective inquiry and simple exercises, you’ll learn to:

• Find time in a too-busy life
• Understand how you’ve created the idea of “you”
• See-through habitual patterns and emotional reactions that no longer serve you
• Experience everything that happens as a reflection to help you see yourself more clearly
• Relax into life as a human “being” instead of a human “doing”

Register Today!