excellence

How Did I Manage to Stumble into That?

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perfectionKatherine Cartwright  – I’m pondering lessons around imperfection today.

Ugh. Maybe I’ll just put my toe in the water. But while standing at the edge of the deep waters, I was pulled in. And I can see where this Summer of Self-Love is going to take me. To the places where I don’t love myself well.

What did I expect? Really.

A good friend tells me I always walk into things so guilelessly and end up being so surprised when they bite me. It’s something we laugh about together. Thank goodness for friends you can laugh with.

Anyway, don’t ask the Universe for help and then be surprised when it comes in interesting life lessons.

So yesterday I published the first post of this daily discipline of writing and it was beautiful. Except for the pesky extra space between the picture and the text, which I thought would be a simple enough thing to fix. I’d already posted it and did not like the look of it when I went in and read the published version. It was just a tiny little thing, but it really bugged me. So I went in to edit. All I did was take out a space. I went back and viewed the blog and it had transformed into the ugly blog. Three different fonts. Two different font sizes. How the heck did that happen? Continue reading →

5 Tips To Help You Recover From Perfectionism

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Lissa Rankin MD – Perfectionism can be a real joy killer. If I had been too afraid to appear imperfect, I might have stayed in two unhappy marriages or kept a job that was sucking the life out of me.

perfectionismPerfectionism can also be a barrier to intimacy, as well as a potent form of self-sabotage. If I had been committed to trying to give a perfect performance in front of a live studio audience, for example, I might have missed the chance to giggle and connect with the audience the way I did when I flubbed up my words and exposed my imperfections. They might have wrongly assumed that I had it all together, when the honest truth was that I was terrified to be doing something so far outside of my comfort zone.

But, as soon as I let go of the expectation of perfection in myself, my whole body relaxed. I could be imperfect! And I would still be good enough…

I realize that’s what it really comes down to. When I’m too focused on being perfect, it’s usually because, deep in the shadows lies a basic lack of worthiness. Some part of me thinks that, if only I overdeliver, I’ll finally be good enough.

But beneath that shadowy part of myself lies something deeper, something more true, something I call my Inner Pilot Light, and that part of me know that I am – and YOU are – inherently worthy simply because we all have sparks of Divinity within us, and we don’t have to prove anything in order to earn that worth.

Excellence Or Perfectionism?

I notice in myself this struggle between the quest for excellence and the tug of perfectionism. Where is the line? How much striving for excellence is noble versus how much is just ego, rearing its overfluffed head? Continue reading →

Pursuing A Life Of Excellence — Showing Up With Integrity In The 11th Hour

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integrityJack Adam Weber – At this stage in history, many of us are fed up with “humanity.” Yet, we find goodness in people all day long, love one another, and manage to act kindly. So, we are made of light and dark. Unfortunately, however, our collective darkness has shrouded much a bright future for humanity. But with a little help from our friends, each of us, at any moment and for the moment, can act brightly and kindly — with excellence.

Outspoken climate science researcher and professor emeritus of conservation biology, Guy McPherson, is the one who planted in my head this notion of pursuing excellence at this crucial time in history. He speaks of exhibiting good manners, especially in the face of turmoil. This essay explores what I think is needed to pursue a life of excellence and what it might entail relative to our ailing biosphere and our own species on the edge of extinction (as communicated in this article from The Atlantic magazine.)

In a nutshell, pursuing excellence is to live with integrity. But integrity is a loaded word. It’s loaded with goodness, because it means the dark side of our nature has been examined, worked with, made conscious, and modified to make it less lethal and destructive. It’s been integrated into our wholeness. So integrity involves integration, of our dark nature into our light and love. Especially important to integrity is working with our core hurts and wounds, which when unexamined, go on to hurt others, including innocent life on Earth. So, emotional honesty (feeling our true feelings) and intellectual honesty (getting the facts straight, or as straight as we can without emotional bias and with the effort of critical thinking) are crucial for integrity. Without integrity — without working on ourselves — we can’t really treat the world as well as we imagine we can. Continue reading →