“Striving to better, oft we mar what’s well.” –Shakespeare
Today I finish an assignment of writing 30 blogs within what I considered to be a very short time frame. Mix in several trips out of town, my dog delivering puppies, church volunteer work with amazing young women, maintaining my coaching practice, and taking care of my family, and it’s felt like a huge accomplishment. That said, I have this uncomfortable feeling that it’s not my best work. I keep thinking “I wish I could spend more time making everything better.”
My coach at the Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo, invites us to establish a “minimum baseline” and do “B-minus” work. Maybe she knows we have perfectionistic tendencies or that we’re too hard on ourselves as coaches, as humans.
If I didn’t have these deadlines, would I keep putting it off until I came up with the “perfect” content, blog titles, and writing style? I’ve already procrastinated writing for these reasons.
The truth is, I’ll be able to write more. I’m never limited. I can even go back and edit. But what’s wrong with B- work anyway? It’s certainly better than doing nothing unless it’s guaranteed to be an A+ outcome. If all we ever did was go back to our past and try to correct everything we thought was a mistake, we wouldn’t be able to be present in our daily lives, or plan for the future.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I drove 12 hours recently to pick up my daughter from college and bring her home for the summer. I had a lot of time to think and also listened to the audiobook “A Million Miles in A Thousand Years” by Donald Miller. This one idea stood out to me most…
When we stop expecting people to be perfect, we can love them for who they are.
I remember before dropping my daughter off at college, I couldn’t get her to condense her belongings into what would fit in my car, much less her small, shared dorm space. My nudging turned into arguments between us. When I saw her two suitcases in the garage ready to go, I remember thinking I’d been too hard on her…she did it! And then I flipped the cover open. The entire suitcase was full of shoes. I flipped the second suitcase open…shoes again. Both suitcases were filled with nothing but shoes.
At this point we were down to the wire. I’d been prompting her to downsize for nearly 3 weeks. This was it. I was sure her belongings wouldn’t fit in the car.
Somehow, she made it work.
“We’ll see how it goes once we get to her dorm room,” I thought.
We unpacked once there, and she had a few bags to go when I left.
Those bags were there, still unpacked, when I went to pick her up 8 months later.
And sure enough, her two suitcases were ready to travel home with us, once again filled with nothing but shoes.
I laughed with her that “thank goodness, you still have your two suitcases full of shoes.” We made it home. It wasn’t the end of the world. In fact, it was good.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
We have opportunities every day to accept or judge others—one can bring us closer and the other creates distance. We may not always catch ourselves making judgments in the moment, but we can make ongoing efforts to bring greater awareness to our minds and act from a place of more genuine, intentional acceptance and love going forward.
I love my daughter, shoes and all, and I’m grateful she overlooks my flaws and allows me to be who I am—B minus, very average, not perfect, but good mom.
Acknowledge the good in your life. Acknowledge the good in others. Acknowledge the good in yourself. When we look for the good, we will always find it.
