“Try to just be open to the wonderful imperfections of your own experience.”

I was listening to a podcast interview with Jungian analyst (therapist) Lisa Marchiano and this line she said leapt out at me. “Try to just be open to the wonderful imperfections of your own experience.”

She said it in a specific context, but I think it applies to EVERYTHING.

For me personally, the pandemic has reanimated a hyper-perfectionistic voice in my head that I struggled with for years. Maybe, it has to do with trying to carefully follow “rules” to keep safe during this time. But like a lot of people, I’ve felt a retriggering of old patterns that I thought I had mostly worked my way through.

So, this seems like a good time to share two books on anti-perfectionism.

If you’re a sensitive person struggling with perfectionism, you might find these books really helpful.

The first is How to be an Imperfectionist by Stephen Guise.

How to be an Imperfectionist is quite popular, for good reason. So, you might have heard of it already.

If you haven’t, this book is great because it cuts right through to the thought patterns that we perfectionists & recovering perfectionists have, but are often not consciously aware of having. Guise not only gives us solutions, but writes insightfully about WHY they work.

An example he gives from his own life is of trying to exercise more. But unlike the rest of us who go in gung-ho and then fall flat, he talks about setting his exercise bar at one push-up (the whole “Create tiny habits” thing). But then, he explains why this is so effective.

In the case of his workouts, setting a super-low goal changed his actual relationship to exercise. Instead of being a “special event,” it became a part of his everyday life.

“If something is important to you, it should be your goal to make it casual–not special–because habits are casual.” Guise talks about how setting the lowest bar possible — one push-up — has meant that he has done push-ups in bed, in public restrooms, bars and stores.

“If you choose to do at least 50 push-ups a day, you’re not going to do them in a public restroom. You’re not going to do them in your bed. But you could and possibly would do a single push-up in those locations if that’s all you had to do. Extrapolate this concept over an entire day, and it gives you many more opportunities to make progress.”

This makes so much sense. A lower bar gives you flexibility.

Whether we are trying to learn a new language, keep our house clean or exercise, having a low bar means we actually take some action and we don’t wait for the “right conditions” to do it. Not only can small changes get the ball rolling, they can keep it rolling and build momentum because we’re sidestepping the feeling of failure and the inner critic’s attack that comes with aiming too high.

There’s a lot of great stuff in How to be an Imperfectionist and I highly recommend it!

This second book is for you if you were you a perfectionistic, sensitive little child.

Lisa Van Gemert’s book Perfectionism — A Practical Guide to Managing “Never Good Enough” is WONDERFUL. It’s specifically talking to parents and teachers of sensitive, gifted kids whose perfectionism is stalling them. But even as an adult, I found so much of what Lisa talks about resonating deeply with me.

I shared the book with someone recently, and they cried after reading it. Like me, I think they recognized the little child they once were. So, its effects could be THAT profound.

In this gem of a book, Lisa talks about how being a sensitive, gifted child actually makes you prone to becoming perfectionistic. If you have a talent in an area, you likely have high standards in it too.

She also writes as someone who herself was, once, a perfectionistic little kid.

“When playing with my Barbies at about 8 or 9, I never actually played with the dolls themselves. I just arranged their things in beautiful order. I would spend all of my play time setting it all up, making everything just so. I did the same thing with toy cars. I spent one Christmas afternoon totally cleaning and rearranging my room to make sure all of my new toys fit in well and my room organization system still worked. I thought everyone behaved this way.”

This made me think of myself as a little child in New Delhi, India.

I remember how my mother, as a way to keep me busy when guests came over and to involve me, asked me to clean a table. I am not completely sure why, but it was REALLY important to me that I clean each and every nook and corner.

It had to BE PERFECT.

We often had guests over during that time, and without anyone ever telling me to do this, I somehow got it into my head that I needed to help out perfectly.

But the metaphorical table was never perfectly clean. It was never good enough. I was never satisfied with it or myself.

It makes me sad to think of this now.

It’s ironic that sometimes, people think of little children having SIMPLE emotional lives. I know that I have never felt as intensely and openly as I did when I was a kid. And I know that if you were a sensitive child, you probably had intense, BIG feelings that you often didn’t know what to do with.

Arranging things in order, cleaning things, making up rules in our heads about how to create some order in this messy world helps keep those feelings at bay. It helps us feel that we have SOME control over the world around us.

And we carry this into our adult world, where things can get intense, and we keep doing what we’ve always done partly because it’s the only way we know, and partly because stopping doing it would bring up this existential feeling of vulnerability, of our anxiety spinning out of control.

So, if you’re a “recovering perfectionist” like me, I hope you have some compassion for that little child who got overwhelmed by the intensity of their emotions, of big things inside that they couldn’t label, of feelings that only existed as unnamed sensations that could easily overwhelm them. I hope you learn to hold that little child as you try a less-than-perfect way of doing things.

And I hope that you find comfort in Lisa’s compassionate & insightful advice or in Stephen’s clarifying, clutter-clearing voice.

You deserve it!

With love,

Ritu

Ritu Kaushal is the author of the book The Empath’s Journey, which TEDx speaker Andy Mort calls “a fascinating insight into the life of a highly sensitive person & emotional empath.” SIGN UP here for Ritu’s newsletter The Highly Sensitive Creative, or get the book here.