117 Marbles
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.
Brené Brown
You’d think that I’d get this by now - if there’s a charge and a judgment around someone else’s behavior, chances are there are places where I exhibit that behavior myself. I call it the Boomerang Effect.
Remember the Perfection marble (a mere five marbles ago) where I judged a woman I know for having a fixation with perfection? Today I was at a friend’s brunch and I said the word “perfect” five times as I was helping arrange and set up the table and in the course of the brunch. The funny thing was that every time I said it, a voice in my head had a ticker-tally of the number of times I’d used the word, “That’s one” to “That’s five.” By the fourth time, I’d gotten that I was displaying the very behavior that I claimed to dislike.
In Psychology, the term for what I was experiencing is projective identification where we cleverly get rid of unwanted feelings by identifying them with someone else. I’ve experienced this tendency so many times in myself (and of course in others) - it’s the age-old “When you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back to you.” The pressing question is, as a writer, does that make me an unreliable narrator?
The reality is that it makes me human: perfectly imperfect and as in the other definition of perfect “Excellent and delightful in all respects.”
Do you notice when there is a charge and a judgment around other people’s behavior? Can you check in to see if that charge is because the behavior is something that you don’t like about yourself?
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis.
Brené Brown
You’d think that I’d get this by now - if there’s a charge and a judgment around someone else’s behavior, chances are there are places where I exhibit that behavior myself. I call it the Boomerang Effect.
Remember the Perfection marble (a mere five marbles ago) where I judged a woman I know for having a fixation with perfection? Today I was at a friend’s brunch and I said the word “perfect” five times as I was helping arrange and set up the table and in the course of the brunch. The funny thing was that every time I said it, a voice in my head had a ticker-tally of the number of times I’d used the word, “That’s one” to “That’s five.” By the fourth time, I’d gotten that I was displaying the very behavior that I claimed to dislike.
In Psychology, the term for what I was experiencing is projective identification where we cleverly get rid of unwanted feelings by identifying them with someone else. I’ve experienced this tendency so many times in myself (and of course in others) - it’s the age-old “When you point a finger there are three fingers pointing back to you.” The pressing question is, as a writer, does that make me an unreliable narrator?
The reality is that it makes me human: perfectly imperfect and as in the other definition of perfect “Excellent and delightful in all respects.”
Do you notice when there is a charge and a judgment around other people’s behavior? Can you check in to see if that charge is because the behavior is something that you don’t like about yourself?
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