Redefining Perfect and Turn Vulnerability into Your Strength

Perfectionism turns into a silent freeze that keeps us busy while we avoid the one move that would actually change everything. We reframe “perfect”, explore why vulnerability is strength and builds real trust, and share a simple way to get back to neutral so we can take action. 

• Perfectionism as an invisible block that feels like paralysis
• The belief underneath it: being loved, seen, or safe only if we are flawless
• Vulnerability as a practical tool for trust, connection, and influence
• Why people relate to struggles more than polished wins
• Failure as the raw material for mastery, expertise, and purpose
• Redefining perfect

This is only the beginning to shifting our perfectionism and unlocking our unconditional self love. We dive much deeper in our webinars and free community, The Soul-Led Life - come join if you are looking for more or reach out at brookebarnard.com

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Promise

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Make Sense of It, the podcast where we explore how the energetic and physical worlds come together to form the unique formula you need to create the life you want. I'm Brooke, an intuitive healer and coach. And for as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed with understanding how the world truly works. The universal laws, all things intuition, and neuroscience. Once you understand how it all truly works, you stop guessing. You realize that you are the actual key to the creation and life becomes limitless. Now I'm excited to share with you all the pieces that make a difference that you can actually use. Let's dive in. Hello

Perfectionism As A Hidden Freeze

SPEAKER_00 0:41

and welcome back. Today I have what I think is going to be an important one for a lot of you, especially if you're finding yourself coming up against those paralyzing blocks. I'm really seeing this pop up a lot in private sessions with clients and with intuitive students as they push through different parts of their journey and the soul path, soul pool. And I am no exception to this. I have spent a lot of time working through this one, shifting a belief that's held me back, and I bet it's held a lot of you back too. And it's the old chestnut of perfectionism. Needing to be perfect. There are so many versions of this, so many different veins and beliefs wrapped around it that almost all of us have experienced it, are experiencing it right now, and are looking for a little bit of relief. That's exactly why I want to dive into this today and give you a reframe that starts changing this programming. A lot of us picked this up early through our younger years, through society, through everything we're constantly consuming now, like the contagions of it all, social media. And we are just carrying this belief that we need to be a certain way to be loved, to be seen, to be accepted. It is holding so many of us back from doing the thing we actually came here to do, from living in that highest version. And it's often tied to a deeper belief that we carry, and that's the foundation of unconditional self-love. And how we actually view ourselves, our perception of ourselves, that belief holding on to perfectionism is what stops so many of us from taking action. It becomes the invisible block. It's the I know exactly what to do, but I just can't do it. Have you ever experienced you're trying to do something? You can see the full strategy, and it's like your whole body gets locked down. You physically can't move like there's an invisible man holding you back. That's my experience. But instead, we tend to do a million different other things, convinced we are being productive, convincing ourselves we're moving the needle, when really we're just avoiding the thing that would actually change the situation. Thank you, ego. Thank you for getting in the way again. This need for everything to be flawless before anyone's allowed to see us, that's held me back a lot in my life. And I know I'm not alone in that. Perfectionism, the need to be seen in a certain way, the fear of judgment, these barriers that quietly keeping a lot of us stuck in our careers, not being able to chase our goals, and do the things that we actually want to build. So today I do want to dive into perfectionism, being vulnerable, the power of vulnerability, and change how we actually see perfect. I want to reframe that. A new way of looking at perfectionism, at what perfect even means that changes everything. It's going to be a game changer in how you see situations, how you show up to them. And this one little upgrade changed everything for me, specifically when I'm in the thick of it, when I'm actually stuck in that moment of like paralyzed. Perfectionism controls so many of our beliefs, our actions, our habits that dictate our lives. And it shows up in so many different ways. It can show up as fear of being seen, doubt in our abilities, it shows up as overwhelm. That is definitely from my perspective, it can show up as pressure that we put on ourselves, and the list goes on. But at the core, perfectionism is normally attached to something we believe we can only have if we are perfect. So people carry this belief: I can only be loved if I'm perfect. People will only like me or want to listen to me or trust me or want to work with me. The list goes on. Whatever the external validation is, if I'm perfect. If what I present is perfect. And from there, it builds our other programming like criticism, beating self up, the pressure to deliver at a certain level. For a lot of us, this does come back to something early in our lives that taught us we could only get love, attention, or approval if we were perfect. I didn't realize how intense mine was until I actually looked at it a little bit later in life.

The Childhood Roots Of Flawless

SPEAKER_00 6:02

I will share my little story because I laugh at this one now. I was such an overthinker. I overthought, analysed, sat in the spinning brain for way too long. Thank you, Intuition, for helping that. And then when I was in the middle of unpacking this program, I started to think about where it really came from and what made me feel like I could never be vulnerable. Vulnerability was not my strong suit. However, now I laugh because the minute I tell you where it comes from, you'll be like, Well, Darbrook, how did you not see that coming? It is the most obvious situation ever. I but I knew no different, right? Growing up this way. I actually took this on from my mum. Bless her. It's nowhere near as intense now, or maybe I'm just not as attuned to it. But my mum had quite severe, had, has quite severe OCD around cleanliness and presentation. So like the house, clothes, how we presented ourselves growing up, especially the house. Especially the house. And as a child, my home was immaculate. And when I say immaculate, I feel like that's an understatement. We could probably have eaten off the floors. They were so clean. They were clean multiple times a day. If mum had made the beds and they were like straight and tidy, it honestly looked like she had ironed them. You couldn't sit on them. You couldn't play on them. Like you just couldn't touch it. And you trying to tell a six-year-old they're not allowed to play on their own bed probably didn't go down too well for her own, her own programming, but that would that was what was happening in my life. And then as a teenager, or actually, this happened throughout all my life, but as a teenager, it definitely hit home a little bit harder. I always remember if the kitchen was clean, if the dishes were done and all like the drops of water were wiped out the sink, and you came along, you were not having food. You were missing a meal. It was just the thing. You were not leaving dishes in the sink. Now, somewhere in there, a small version of me decided that okay, I'm only safe, I'm only lovable, and I'm only allowed to take up space if everything around me is flawless. Um, that belief has definitely followed me through, and I have spent quite a few years at this point working on it, and it has been phenomenal to watch the shift, to see where I was and to see what I was able to let go of, and then like now be able to show up the way I do is just insane. I've definitely adopted a new kind of approach. There's a couple of ones that stick in my head. I always think around I've got more to lose by not doing the thing or not showing up. There's always a reason that I'm put in a position. So I always like to lean onto that approach. But a lot of this always, a lot of this started when I really started to unpack what does it truly mean to be perfect? So what does perfect look like? What is done look like? And truly the way the world is now, the amount that we take in outside of ourselves, every bit of contagion we take in just keeps feeding that need to be perfect.

Why Vulnerability Creates Connection

SPEAKER_00 9:33

But here's what we actually forget: holding on to those beliefs is what stops us from being vulnerable. And being vulnerable is strength. And I'll be honest, when I first heard someone say that to me, I didn't take in the power of it because I was missing foundational pieces of how everything actually works, how connection actually happens, how our creative field responds to what you're willing to show. The more I understood that, the more I actually realized vulnerability is one of the most powerful tools you have, especially when other people are involved. So if you're talking about a client, a partner, anyone you're trying to build something with, it is gold. I going back to my level of vulnerability, my mentor, I remember about a couple of years ago, the first time I started unpacking this, he said my ability to be vulnerable to people was at 2%. That's how closed off I was. I've spent a lot of time deliberately working on this because I can now see the power of it. I can now see the importance of understanding where I've come from and how my vulnerabilities are so powerful with the bigger picture of everything. And I'm now at that point where I am happy to be seen. I'm happy to share what has worked, what hasn't worked, where I failed. And I don't just mean sharing polished parts. I think polished parts are things that I almost try to pull back from now for sure. But I also mean having the vulnerability to share my actual opinions, what I'm actually interested in. The parts of me most people are too scared to share at times to let anyone see because we're worried about being judged. But being able to show your weaknesses, to show that you've pushed through the hard times, gone through things, learned something new, grown, developed a new skill. That's what people actually admire in others. People connect with you when they can see themselves in you. They want to connect with people who understand their struggles. That's not even a spiritual concept. That's just human. It's universal. People like to be around people who make them feel better about themselves. So there's this whole piece around letting vulnerability be your driver. When we are vulnerable, we open up a universal law. It allows people to love you more. It allows them to want to connect with you more, to want to be around you more. Here it is. To the degree that you let people see your failures, see the negatives as much as the positives, is to the degree that they are able to connect with you, to love you. And the reverse is just as true. To the degree you only ever show your perfectionism, you only ever show the wins, is to the degree that people can't connect with you. If you're only ever showing your greatness, your positives, you're actually making the other person feel worse about themselves. We need to start realizing that our vulnerabilities are exactly what people want to see, exactly what they want to connect with. It's really important that we share both sides of the story. People see you standing next to them, not above them. The negatives are just as important as the positives. And here's what I have learned most and is the key. Our successes are actually built on our failures. They are a compilation of our failures. Without the obstacle, without the forces that rise up and push against you, you simply couldn't be that version of you that's standing here today. You wouldn't have access to the path you were built to walk. No one succeeds the first time. And if you did, if they did, if something worked out perfectly the very first time you tried it, I can almost guarantee you will let go of it. You will just dismiss it. You won't see the value in it because there was no skin in the game. There was nothing there for you. But when you have to struggle for something, you have to look at it from so many different angles. You have to get up every day and ask, okay, what's the next piece I'm going to tackle here? And because you've put in the hours, you've put in the work, you've looked at it from all the different ways that it works and it doesn't work, that skill becomes yours for life. That's how you build mastery. That's how you build real expertise. By knowing every way something can fail, not just the way it eventually worked. I can tell you how many times I have gone on a new learning journey. Developing new skills to build new forms of business, and it's gone nowhere. I'd learn a new skill, developer, get really excited about how it could work. I can often see this and do absolutely nothing with it. Pick it back up, try again, drop it. And at the time it felt like failure. And I was really hard on myself to share this stuff. But looking back, I was actually building every piece of business that I now actually use. Every skill set, every mastery, every process that makes up how I run my business today. If this is happening for you right now, I would almost guarantee it is going to be a part of your path. Something you need to master to fulfill your purpose. Being able to say I started and failed at so many things, and that there are still pieces I'm developing. That's done more for the people I work with than I've got it all figured out ever could. Now, here's

Redefining Perfect As Balance

SPEAKER_00 15:50

the thing that changed everything for me. And this is where most of us actually go wrong. We've all been conditioned to hold a very dialed in definition of perfect. If I asked most people outside of my world what the word actually means to them, they'd almost certainly describe it as all the positives, something that can't be criticized, something with no negatives, no faults, nothing bad attached to it. That's how we've been conditioned to define the word perfect. But now if we look at source's definition, I'm going to challenge you and I'm going to rewrite that definition for you because it will change everything. For something to hold unconditional love, for something to be truly remarkable, it has to have equal parts positive and equal parts negative. 50% of each. That's the actual definition of perfect. That's balance, that's source love, that's unconditional love. So the next time you feel the need to be perfect creeping in, look at how the negatives are actually what's making the situation whole. Find both sides. Get yourself to neutral and notice how whatever you have to offer is essential, exactly how it is. Mess and all. Because without the negatives, without the failures, you'd be missing so many key pieces of your path. Every failure, every obstacle, everything you've learned is all part of it. It's essential. Learning to love it all, source will tell you that every moment is perfect. It's in complete balance. It's honestly, it's been built that way. There's nothing can ever be done wrong. It's just our perception that changes it. So change your perception and change your definition of perfect. However, without acknowledging the negative, which really is just the perception, you miss the exact thing that's meant to move you forward. So we do want to be able to see the positive and the negative and identify why something feels negative to you. That is a reflection. But once you do that, you can stop needing life to look a certain way. You start realizing every situation is perfect, everything about you is perfect, everything you do is perfect. Not because it's flawless, but because that's genuinely how the world is built.

The Weekly Reframe Practice

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So take this with you this week. The next time you catch that tight, anxious pull to make something perfect before you let someone see it, or you feel that like paralyzing moment, pause and ask yourself, where is the positive and where is the negative here? How is this going to be the perfect thing that needs to go out at this point in time? How is this the perfect thing that I need to do right now to move forward? That's it. Start looking around and see if you can let every situation be perfect exactly as it stands. Everything you have to offer as it is, everything about you as you are. Well, that was a fun way to end that conversation. I hope you take this. I hope you start reframing that definition and seeing how it opens things up for you and changes your approach to situations. Thank you for being here and until the next one. Bye.