There is a painting I've been working on for almost two years, and I hate it. I don't hate it because it's bad. I hate it because I keep trying to get it right. Today I wanna talk about what that painting has taught me about perfectionism and what we're all losing when we strive to be perfect. Hello everyone. Today I am sitting on the floor in my office and which is the spare bedroom of my house, but it looks out on beautiful trees. We have these big old growth trees behind our house. they are still full of leaves. It's mid-October and we are still almost mid-October, I guess. We are still looking out at green leaves. A few of them are sort of. Subtly starting to turn orange or red or yellow if you look closely. But overall, it still very much looks like late summer outside and over this weekend it was 80 something degrees yesterday. It's gonna be 80 something degrees again today. And I am craving fall. I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that, I mean when I say everything feels gray and that I wanna live in more color. It is not just the gray of work, the conference rooms and the emails and the repetitive meetings, it's the parts of myself that I notice go quiet. When I'm doing those things. It's so important to be authentic, to be yourself. We're gonna talk a lot about that and I am slowly figuring out how I can, show up as my authentic self in all areas of life. It's not just at work, but everywhere. Even when I'm sitting alone in a room, can I let myself be free to really be me? But if we go a few levels deeper than that, I really think what it is is that I lose touch with my inner voice among all of the other outside noise. I am very in tune with everyone else's, feelings and thoughts and reactions and opinions, and sometimes those can, outweigh my own voice and my own opinions. Not really, sometimes a lot of the times, but I also lose the, I lose my ability's, not the word that I'm looking for. It's like I lose my desire to express my own voice because the whole system is set up to encourage everybody to kind of conform, or norm around one. Way forward. One set of rules, one way of doing things. of course there are opportunities for all of us to express our individuality. But as you look around at the news today, if you look at what's happening in the world and the things that people are so passionate about and upset about, these are still. Not ideas that we're thinking about for ourselves. It's like we've been presented with two choices and so everyone's picking a side and everyone is, so sure about what they think about whatever it is. But I don't think that this is because we have sat back and contemplated and really come to our own conclusion. what it is, is you're presented with a menu of options and so you select the one that. You think either sounds right to you, sounds like what you were taught growing up sounds like what you want to stand for. Maybe it's what feels right to you, but what if those aren't the only options? Sometimes when I look back at the wisdom that was passed down to us from, centuries and centuries of millennia of. Thinkers and philosophers and ancestors and I think about those are not things that just occurred to them in, one minute it came out of the blue. Before people were in an onslaught of information and things demanding their attention all the time. They had time to cultivate their own opinions and their own voice. And we don't have that anymore. It's very challenging to figure out, to find time where you can figure out what you really think and feel about something. It is very hard to find any breathing room to do any kind of thinking quietly and contemplating. And even when I try, I will be the first to admit sitting in silence without looking at a phone or reading a book or writing or doing something. It's difficult for my brain. I am so used to the pace of life and the pace of information coming at me all the time. It takes a while for my brain to calm down and allow me to just let it wander. We all need some space and some time to breathe and to just allow. Ourselves to even just process what's going on in our own lives in the world around us and figure out what we think and how we feel about it. I wanna talk a little bit about perfectionism today. I had dinner with a dear friend over the weekend and we talked a lot about some of the things that are going on in her life and my life and our reactions to it and how we wish we could be handling it versus how we feel like we need to be handling it. I started to think about painting as a metaphor for life when I sit down to make a new painting. If I have in my head a plan of what I want it to look like, I almost always feel like it didn't live up to whatever my vision was I have to, carefully plan it out. I use a lot of, pencil sketches and a lot of erasing and it just robs me of the joy of creating. Whereas if I sit down and I just follow my intuition and figure out which colors am I drawn to today, how do I wanna pair them together, let's just start and see where it goes. And remember that it's paint and so if you don't like something, you can always just. Paint over it, you can just cover it up. then I am able to listen to my gut, listen to my intuition, and really step into the flow of creating art. without fail, I can get to the point where I'm painting, I'm loving it, and then I finally feel like this is done. This piece is complete, and I will stop. and I love it. I love the piece at the end. I don't judge it. I don't expect it to be anything from the start, so I'm not expecting it to match any vision that I have in my head. so it is intrinsically beautiful to me. the same goes for if I start a painting and I'm not able to go through that whole process, start to finish. Even if I have no plan and I'm just kind of in the flow, life gets in the way sometimes. Sometimes I'm, in a beautiful flow and my 7-year-old will spill a drink on the floor or it's time to go to soccer practice, or I only had one hour and that hour's done and I'm just not done painting. so what happens is I have this unfinished painting and then of course it sits for days and days because life, and by the time I come back to it. I don't know what to do with it because when I have paintings that don't just flow and finish, I can try to step back into the flow or try to remix the same colors and then, keep going, but my mood is different I end up doing things and then I don't like them, and then I paint over them and I do something else and they drag on for a really long time and then I end up really. I hate is a strong word, really disliking whatever painting that is, which is a tragedy, right? Because all of these pieces of art are pieces of me. I have one painting that I have been painting for over, we're going on two years. It's been sitting on the easel. It's really big takes up a lot of space. I cannot, I had a vision in my head of what I wanted it to be. It's really beautiful. I can still remember that vision, but the vision is very fuzzy and it's just sort of an overall impression of what I want it to look like, and I cannot get this thing to look the way I wanted, like something that I'm happy with. And so I have reworked this painting, so it's gonna be so thick, like. When we're done, there's gonna be so many layers of paint on this painting. I don't even know. So I'm, I sort of dread every time I go to work on it, I really want it to be done. I want it to be beautiful and I wanna be able to enjoy it. But right now I just really resenting that painting. And so I say all of this because I think it's a metaphor for life. When I was talking to my dear friend, I kept reminding her like, there isn't a right way in a wrong way to be doing things. Just like when you sit down to paint because other people love to plan. They're painting first and they sketch it all out and they know exactly what it's gonna look like and they execute and it takes them months maybe, and they enjoy that. That's their process. It's not that my process is right or wrong, it's just how I like to do it. And in life, there is no right or wrong way to live your life. certainly don't hurt people, but. Some people can do things and accomplish things very quickly. Other people take decades to get to where they feel like they're, meeting their purpose or doing things that fill them up and that they're able to do something that means something to the world if that's what they're going for. I wanna talk today about what that is. Why is it that we feel like we need to. plan everything so completely before we start and make sure everything is as close to perfect as we can get it there's a right way that we're trying to get to in everything that we do. For me, I will say a lot of it stems from. Perfectionism, which I certainly do and have struggled with in the past. perfectionism is rampant in our world today. we have so much access to what everybody else is doing, how everybody else is looking, what something that we're working on is supposed to end up or could end up looking like or how someone else did it. Perfectionism thrives in comparison. We see everyone else's highlight reels online. We start believing that there's a single right way to parent or to create or to live. So we try to plan, we polish, we hesitate, and then we miss the magic that comes from trusting ourselves. And so we end up looking externally, like, how should I be doing this? Where am I aiming for? What's the vision here? How can I accomplish something that everybody else will receive? Well, how can I do something that the world will tell me is the right thing to have done, and then maybe I'll feel satisfied. It's very difficult. I won't speak for you guys. I'll talk about me. It's hard for me to trust myself because there have been enough, whatevers that I've done in life that I was so sure that this was the decision I was gonna make and that it didn't turn out like I wanted it to. And so clearly I must have made the wrong decision. Right? and other people didn't struggle with that, so maybe they made the right decision and I should listen to them instead. And I'm really trying to move away from this. I have this new working. Theory that is inspired by an Imagine Dragon song. My son likes to listen to Imagine Dragons on the way to soccer practice every week, and there is one song called Warriors, and there's a line in that song where they, talk about the warriors that built this town, and I started thinking about the concept of, okay, the Warriors that built this town, like what if this town is me and my life? The warriors who built it are the challenges, the heartbreaks, the decisions that didn't go as planned. What if they are the ones who shaped me? The relationship that ended badly, the job that shook my confidence, the classes I dropped, the pain I walked through and survived. Those are the warriors. They built this town, which is me. I've also been thinking a lot about ancestry, about how the echoes of our parents and our grandparents and everyone before us live inside of us. You have a set of ancestors who belong to you. They went through what they went through, and their stories didn't just vanish. I believe their experiences, their passion, their fear. Everything that created for them. Resilience still live in our bones, in our DNA and I think they speak through us. So maybe my tendency to look outward, to seek approval, to second guess my voice isn't just mine. Maybe some of that is inherited, passed down little kernels of shame or fear or survival strategies that helped someone else live through their time. Those ancestors are part of this town too along with the challenges and the situations that we have faced, and they have all created this mixture inside of us that has, that shapes our view. It's the lens through which we see the world and. I think it's natural and easy for it to create a, an urge for us to want external approval or to want to kind of hedge our bets or plan everything ahead of time before we actually execute to try to head off any additional pain or challenge or failure, which is also an impossible goal. And instead we end up just. Kind of hesitating and muting ourselves and maybe never taking some of the steps that we would want to take because we can't fully plan it out and get to that quote perfect state in our minds, or see a path to where we could actually achieve that in real life. And what a shame that is that we miss out on all of the beauty that comes from people expressing themselves even in the midst of. Imperfection and failure and, and just seeing full authenticity in all of the people around us. Those imperfections are the magic of being around people who are different from you. My dad growing up and still now is a combination of first class perfectionist, but also. Kind of obsessed with imperfections and other things. So for example, he loves to garden. He spends a lot of time out in his garden. He always has. And so when I was a kid, he used to take us, you know, after church on Sundays, we would stop at. Like a nursery. And he and my mom would have some plan for the garden or whatever, but sometimes he would go to like the um, garden statuary section of the nursery and he would only buy something. He was only interested in something if it was broken. Like broken pottery is his thing. So he didn't want anything that was perfect and brand new because to him that looked like what everybody else had and that was boring. He was interested in the broken piece of pottery that he kind of dug up from under a bush that someone forgot about, or the bunny rabbit that had a broken off ear, I can't even tell you how many pieces of statuary are in his garden at the house. That are all of, they're all broken. Everything is broken, and it's so beautiful and I just love that as a metaphor for life. I think we should all appreciate the beauty of the broken things that are around us and the places where something has gone wrong. And so it makes it different than what everybody else has and it makes it beautiful and worthy of showcasing in your garden among all of the beautiful things in nature. I spend a lot of time reading books that include information from. Philosophers and thinkers from hundreds or thousands of years ago. And I think about the wisdom that they left behind and how much that has shaped the world and shaped me for sure. and I wonder what our generation and what this current time is going to be leaving behind as a legacy. Do we have a legacy of, thought? And philosophy, we certainly have some brilliant thinkers today who are doing the work and really searching themselves and looking out into the world from their own lens and their own viewpoint and bringing back to us great pieces of wisdom. I also think we have a lot, a lot of people who could be doing that, who are not. Who are stuck in this, nine to five and doom scrolling and consumerism cycle that we have going on, that's distracting. It steals your attention, it steals your time, and it steals your ability to really contemplate and, come up with your own viewpoint on things. I look around at our political climate or the way that we parent our children, or just the tyranny of the online voices that really push that there is one right way of doing things and everything else is wrong. And of course there are multiple opinions. Some groups push one way, some groups push another way, but they all come from sort of a common menu of choices. It's like the world has presented us with. Two political parties. Pick one. The world has presented us with parenting decisions, right? But there's two, like you either you cry it out with your baby or you don't, these are all. Intense debates online and also intensely personal decisions. And I think that going by one or the other, using that menu to guide your decisions, limits the choices that you have or that you think you have in any of those scenarios. Instead, what would happen if we all set back? Turn off all of the external sources of noise and information and really thought about our own opinions, like what is my decision, what feels right to me in this scenario? Because there isn't one right answer for everybody. There isn't one wrong way of doing something that is universally harmful or universally a bad decision. But it feels that way. It certainly feels that way frequently, at least for me. And I frequently go online when I'm trying to figure out how do we do this? How should I handle this? What's the right way to do it? Just gimme the script, gimme the choices, gimme the script. I'll read it. We'll be good and we can move on. Which of course is not how this works. Nobody has the script. They might try to give it to you, but I really just wanna encourage all of us to check in with ourselves what feels right to you. What feels wrong to you It's harder to figure out the way forward when that happens, but when something feels wrong to you, that is a very clear signal that you should step away and figure out what your choices are. What your decision might be at which direction you wanna go. It shouldn't be in the direction of whatever is feeling wrong to you. Brene Brown, who is such a beautiful soul and such a brilliant person and contributing so much to this world. She has a quote in her book. Atlas of the Heart. And her quote is that perfectionism is a self-destructive and addictive belief system that fuels this primary thought. If I look perfect. Live perfectly, work perfectly, and do everything perfectly. I can avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame. I just like to sit with that sometimes because if we had a conversation about shame and judgment and blame at an intellectual level, I will tell you all the reasons that all of those are not useful, and you shouldn't let yourself fall into those. And of course in my life I fall into those all the time. Those are human emotions that I feel quite frequently I think it's so important to call that out and really try to recognize when that's happening so that I can stop and check in with myself and see if we can feel a different way about whatever is happening. But what she said there about trying to avoid or minimize the painful feelings of shame, judgment, and blame, we can't avoid any of those feelings. Those are all part of life, and those are all intensely uncomfortable. When I feel judged, I still flinch. I get defensive, but underneath it's fear. Fear that judgment means rejection. It's ancient. Really, our nervous system still act like belonging is survival. And so when we talk about wanting to be perfect so that we can avoid these painful feelings, I think it's really important to understand that that whole fact that we are trying to avoid something that is unavoidable, that if we did bend and contort ourselves in a way that met every single other person's standards when I don't even think that's possible. I can't even imagine a scenario where you're making every single person happy. And two, if you did that, how could you possibly do that and stay true to yourself and have any semblance of your own inner voice or your own intuition? You couldn't. All you're doing is bending to everybody else's whim and will and wants and needs that are also driven by their own, urges that are potentially ancestral scars. And you, you never know. We are all here for a purpose. We all bring value to the table. We all have a voice. We have a set of experiences that makes our perspective an important contribution to the group. And I just think it's so important to remember that and to try to stay in your body even when the feelings are uncomfortable. I think it's so important to stay in your body. I wanna key in on judgment. Because this is something that has featured so prominently in my life in the past and today. you guys, I show up to every event in my life as if I am being judged, like timed and raided and ranked against other people. So if I am in line at the grocery store. This self-checkout thing has really brought this to a new level actually for me, because I, there are like eight different self-checkout stations. It's rare that I'm there during the busiest times of the day, so it's not like they're all full. But I go up there with my cart of groceries because inevitably there's like one other line that's open and there's a line for the person that's like checking it out for you. So I feel forced to go to self-checkout. I. I feel like I need to scan the items and get them into the bags as fast as I can because there's that person that is standing at the desk watching you. They're watching to make sure you're not going to shoplift anything. But in my mind or in my subconscious, they're watching me to judge on how efficient can I do this. So I'm literally like scanning as if I have like a job interview, as if I'm expecting them to walk over to me and be like, wow. You are the most efficient grocery bagger and scanner we've ever seen. We would like to offer you a position here at this company. I'm not auditioning for some sort of some sort of role. It's just this mindset. As if there's some sort of trophy at the end of it for being most efficient. I don't know if any of you feel this or if I am showing my neuroticism right now, but hopefully some of you can relate to this. I married a man. Okay. He's an Eagle Scout and he grew up in a house where efficiency was absolutely efficiency and performance were rewarded in his house. And so at the grocery store, when he's with me, when we're in line behind a person, whether it's self checkout or a person who's gonna bag your, you know, check out and bag your groceries for you. He is very insistent that there is a right way to put the groceries onto the conveyor belt. Heavy things first, because when you're bagging the groceries, you wanna put the heavy things at the bottom of the bag. And so when I'm reaching into the cart and just grabbing what's on top and trying to, get everything up onto the conveyor belt as fast as I can,'cause that's my game in my head, he's like, no, no, the milk has to go first. And the. And then you have to make sure that the potatoes are upfront and, it's like adding an extra layer of stress for me. And it's also showing me what he is judging himself on. And look, he absolutely was being judged on this and rated on this when he was growing up. Like this was a thing in their house. Like there is a right way to do everything and if there is a right way, you should do it the right way. And so he's still judging himself like that because tho that's his inner voice. That's what his inner voice is telling him, which is his dad's voice his dad probably was told that by his dad. So it's this whole legacy that everybody carries forward and you end up falling into the role of I wanna be efficient, I wanna be a meaningful, steady member of society. I don't want anybody around me to be judging me I think that it's important to remember that when I'm feeling judgmental. Which I do. Sometimes I catch myself, especially when I'm in a bad mood or going through my day really stressed out. I am a little bit ruthless in my head. I'm sad to admit it. Feeling a little bit of shame to admit that, but I am, I can be kind of ruthless in my head. let's say that I'm in a hurry to go somewhere and I am driving down the road. You guys, I am known to be not a kind driver. I'm a really kind person. I get behind the wheel and I just change personalities. I'm driving down the road and I wanna be going fast'cause I'm in a hurry because I'm chronically late and. Let's say we're on a two lane highway and there are two people in front of me, one in each lane going exactly the same speed, and neither of them are going as fast as I wanna be going. This is a scenario that I have a lot of trouble staying calm in because the left lane is the fast lane. Like just move over. Why? If you're gonna go the same speed, be in the same lane. My head, in my head, I start judging. all of the things I make up, all of these scenarios about who that person must be and why does their car look the way that it does, and why are they not in a hurry at this time of day? It makes no sense. Of course, there are different people. Maybe they're having a wonderful day and they're feeling very relaxed and calm, and they're just driving down the road thinking about beautiful things and not paying attention to the crazy lady that's in the car behind them, which. Advantage them. I would rather be them than me in that scenario. Or maybe they're really sad and they're stuck in their own grief and they're dealing with that, or they have a kid in the back and they're just not able to pay attention to the car in the lane next to them. I don't know, these are things that I really need to work on. And I get really judgmental. And what's really happening in that moment is that I am judging myself. Not them, I mean I'm judging them, but it's really because I'm sitting in judgment of myself and I am upset that I'm late and then upset that I'm upset that I'm late. And it's just this toxic cycle and this toxic circle of chemicals and emotions that happen in my body and what a shame to waste beautiful days worrying and judging myself and others for not meeting whatever invisible standards and arbitrary deadlines are occurring in our lives that have nothing to do with what's real? There is no time in history when a tree has needed to meet a deadline for losing its leaves or growing to a certain height, there is no stress that any of the animals feel about showing up for dinner at exactly the right time or making sure that if they're gonna play a game. In the jungle. They get there right on time or else there will be a penalty. These are all fake, made up, manmade things that are I think they're harmful. I understand that they allow us to, run society in a certain way, and that's fine on the outside, but if you internalize it the way that I do, you end up in a really difficult Headspace with a lot of judgment, with a lot of shame, stress, cortisol. The cortisol coursing through my body every day. And then you end up just wanting to avoid all of that judgment and all of that shame. You don't want anybody to inflict any of that on you, and you never wanna end up in a situation where you feel like somebody might judge you in the way that you judge other people. And so if you're me. You look around and you see how everybody else is doing things, and you say, okay, well they seem to be doing fine. I'm just gonna do it that way. And slowly and slowly over time, you lose touch with your own inner intuition, your own desires, your own thoughts, your own ideas. you're just going through the motions, going through the motions that you think are the right motions to try to achieve this perfectionist vision of your life, and it's no way to be. So what I've been doing is gathering together a set of thought exercises and journal prompts and ways to kind of sit in my body, kind of connect myself with my body and my breath, and ground myself and figuring out where I am, not showing up as my full. Authentic self. Where are the areas of my life that I'm not thinking for myself? Where are the areas where I am holding myself to a set of rules that don't feel like they belong to me? Or I'm not showing up in the world in a way that is not bound by other people's expectations or by roles that have been put on me. It's kind of like a ritual that I've been trying to walk through to sort of unbind me from these expectations and these roles and these rules that no longer serve me. So I have this ritual of unbinding. And if you would like to walk this path with me, send me an email. You can reach me at Laura at a life in color.co. And I will happily share it with you. And I would love to hear the results of this or what you think of it, as you walk through this in the same way that I am. And I will share with you what I discover as I go through as well. Either way. Do me a favor, I want you to consider what rules are you living by? That no one actually assigned to you rules that don't actually belong to you. What part of your life or parts of your life feel like my unfinished painting? Where might you let yourself paint over it and begin again? I think we'll wrap there for today. On this imperfect episode of a life and color. I hope you enjoyed this. I hope this resonated with you, and I hope you'll join us again next week. Thank you and have a wonderful day.