Day 7: Perfectionism

Defining it as an on/off switch, list all the ways that perfectionism could potentially derail your self-care practice. In other words, in what kinds of situations could you imagine yourself saying, “I ruined something” or “I’m never going to be able to do this so I might as well quit now”? For example, how would you likely react after not walking for a few days?

Response:

This is something I've been working on for a long, long time. Losing that perfectionist attitude. I used to be a real perfectionist and it was ruining lots of things in my life. If I missed a workout, I would beat myself up. If I screwed up a craft project, I would beat myself up. If I did something wrong at work, I would beat myself up and ruminate about it for days. But I've been working on not doing that. I've been working on accepting the fact that I am not perfect and doing things to the best of my ability is good. I don't expect my students to do better than they are capable of, why would I expect it of myself? Some ways where perfectionism can still creep into my life:

Workouts - I still tend to have some all or nothing thinking about these and definitely need to lose that.

Food - though I've gotten much, much better at looking at meals as one-off events, I still have times when I say oh, I'll get back on track on Monday or the weekend or whenever.

Training Mavy - definitely need to work on that in this area. Missing training clearly doesn't bother him, but I would like to have more fun time with him.

That's about it. I really have gotten pretty good an not being a perfectionist in most areas. I even will purposefully skip a day here and there just to show things don't fall apart if I do.