Today I’m bringing you a moment of complete and utter transparency. Life is HARD. Juggling a million priorities at once is HARD. Trying to be the best at everything is HARD. You may be wondering why I haven’t been as consistent with my blog lately. Well, I recently started a new job and I have never felt so overwhelmed. The transition took longer than I expected, I was spending more time at the office and I was just really stressed out. I felt drained, exhausted, and overwhelmed by just about everything I had going on in my life. A lot of days I felt guilty and ashamed like I was letting people down, letting myself down, and feeling the need to be “on” at all times. I was striving for perfection and just kept failing – miserably.
But taking a little break gave me the space I needed to really think about my priorities and frankly just get my life together! I had to go back to the basics. Reminding myself of my purpose, setting goals, and developing a strategy for accomplishing them. Then I planned. I wrote down what I wanted to achieve and how I wanted to achieve it. Fun fact: you are 42% more likely to do things if you write them down! Meticulous planning also helped me to feel less overwhelmed. Breaking up my to-dos into manageable pieces and setting realistic expectations for myself helped me shed some of my anxieties. As I accomplished the small things I started to get a sense of pride and fulfillment. I started to have thoughts like ‘okay I can do this!’ It’s about taking each day as it comes and accepting your success but also your failure.
“Done is better than perfect.” This is my new motto. My new anthem. Of course my first thought was “no, actually perfect is better”- um hello what idiot came up with this? Then I thought deeper about it and came to this realization: done is achievable, perfect is not; done means accomplishment, perfect does not; done creates change, perfect does not. So the next time you are striving for perfection just remember that perfect is merely a figment of our imaginations, but done can be our reality!
I want to hear from y’all! Do you struggle with perfectionism? How do you deal with it?
xo,