Do You Feel the Need to Do Things Perfectly?

Do you ever feel like if you could just do something perfectly, you would be happier or more successful or more popular?

This need to do things perfectly can be doing you more harm than good.  

While you may feel like it makes you more productive or accomplished, it is actually damaging your love for yourself.

You create an image of yourself that is what you feel you need to do or be.  But this image is based on other people.

As a child and throughout your life you made subconscious decisions  about the way you needed to be, the image you needed to project to others, based on how other people interacted with you.  

If they got angry or teased you, you changed your behavior to avoid pain, sadness or other difficult emotions.  

Instead of being you, and true to yourself, you learned to mold your behavior into being the person who you thought other people wanted you to be.  

In this way, you could sometimes promote positive responses from others rather than the negative ones that didn’t feel good.

The further the images you projected to others became from your truth, the less love you had for yourself.   You eventually started relying on everything and everyone outside yourself for this love you no longer received from within you.  

As you practiced these new images…they became what others expected of you and what you came to expect of yourself. 

If you are someone who places a tremendous amount of pressure on yourself to be perfect, the first step is to become aware that this is a sign that your own love for yourself has diminished.  

The unhappiness with yourself is based on the images you have been projecting to yourself and to others, and these images are very different from your truth.  The more you try to be perfect the more you are seeking love in the wrong place…outside yourself, and the more unhappy you will be with yourself.  

The first step to loving yourself is to connect with your inner truth.   Not the person that others want you to be.  Not the perfect image you feel will control others responses and interactions with you.  Not the perfect image that is so different from who you truly are that even if you attain this image you will never be truly loving of yourself.