Ah, spring is in the air. This is such a beautiful time of year, especially after roughing it through a Pennsylvania winter. Flowers are blooming, birds are chirping, the air is crisp.
We have so many things to be thankful for, don’t we?
What a perfect time to ponder why on earth we can’t appreciate them.
To ponder how it is we got to the point in our society where anxiety is a normal state of mind for many people.
Over the past year, I’ve had a sort of spiritual awakening. I have done an exuberant amount of personal development work between reading, writing, and learning to meditate. I feel closer to my own soul and to God than ever before.
I’ve taught myself how to stay in a positive vibration most of the time.
But this morning, something caught me off guard.
How Is Perfectionism Dangerous?
This morning, I got started with Spring Cleaning. First thing: I dug through my closet and dressers and filled two trash bags with clothes to take to goodwill. I also put a pile together of blazers and jackets to take to the dry cleaners before putting them away for the season, too.
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I cleaned and put away my boots. I put my sneakers and spring slip-ons in the washing machine to clean them for the season.
I love this process. I love envisioning my next level self, my highest self, and choosing to only keep the clothes she would wear. I want all my clothes to match the vibration of what I am trying to attract in my life. Look good feel good, right?
However, I couldn’t shake an anxious feeling this morning. I felt like what I did wasn’t good enough.
Let me back track a little.
For many of us, we grew up with Moms that worked either part time or stayed home. While many Moms still do, it is much more common now to have full-fledged careers and even be the bread winner.
My husband and I both grew up with Moms that created beautiful home cooked meals most nights, did the laundry and kept up with the housework.
As the primary breadwinner in my own marriage, with long hours and commutes home, I am simply not ever going to be the wife who cooks every night and keeps the house in tip top shape.
That is completely fine. Different from the societal “normal” we grew up on, but seriously awesome if those expectations didn’t exist.
I should feel totally fulfilled, right?!
But this morning I couldn’t shake the anxiety off of me. I felt like in order to be the wife that my husband wants, I should clean for hours since it’s Saturday. I feel like my husband, and all husbands, want a wife who does those things.
But if we let perfectionism get the best of us, we will simply be living in a state of negativity. We won’t be developing our confidence. We are subject to anxiety and stress, and living in that energy just creates more of the things we don’t want to experience.
Millennials are feeling this stress way more than past generations. A study of 42,000 college students found that ‘socially prescribed perfectionism’ had increased by 33% when compared to previous generations, according to USA today.
If we want to grow into our most happy and confident selves, we’ve got to make a shift.
Learning To Let Go Of Expectations
None of us are, or ever will be, perfect.
And that is not a bad thing.
We are all different. And that’s what makes us so beautiful. That’s what can make our society beautiful, too.
But in order to embrace that, we’ve got to let go of the expectations of others. And especially the ones that aren’t even real.
My husband doesn’t care that I don’t spend all day cleaning and cooking. He loves that I am a business woman who hustles and brings home some nice, crispy bacon.
He loves me for who I am.
I’ve got to love me for who I am too. I’ve got to embrace my badassery and let go of the expectation to be the “perfect wife”.
I’ve got to let go of what others think, period.
I’ve got to stop creating stories in my mind of what other people think.
Practicing Mindfulness
The funny thing is, I used to think it was funny that I had perfectionist tendencies. I thought it was part of my success. It kind of went along with being a workaholic – I thought it was a good thing.
I didn’t realize how much happier I would become without those constant nagging insecurities, until I started practicing mindfulness.
Of course, I still have a long way to go. We are all human and we all fall back into old thought patterns, like I did this morning. But I’ve also learned to quickly snap out of those moods and raise my vibration back up.
Mindfulness is an ability we all naturally possess. That is the ability to simply be living fully in the moment, without stress, anxiety, or expectations.
Unfortunately, our society makes this extremely challenging.
We spend all day long consuming expectations, fears, and anxieties. We go on Facebook and read all the rants about people hating their lives. We go on Instagram and see a highlight reel of travel, edited photos, and women with 10 pounds of make up on. We watch the news and become filled with fear, seeing only the negative events going on the in world.
Through practicing mindfulness, we can learn to let go of all of the negative thoughts in our minds. We can learn to simply observe the negative ideas, doubts, fears and insecurities that are all jumbled up in our brains.
Meditation is a great way to learn to let go. There are many benefits of meditation, which you can read about on my post here. Meditation simply teaches us to not attach ourselves to every single thought that crosses our mind. It allows us to gain control of what we want to think about. If we can do that, we can learn to focus on the positive.
Journaling is another great way to let go of our insecurities and expectations. Gratitude journals help us focus on the positive in life. We all have so much to be thankful for, but most of us need a little nudge to remember to focus on it.
Embrace Positive Thinking
We all have a tendency to focus on the negative things. The drama, the doubts, the fear. These are strong emotions.
I have found that a good place to start practicing letting go of the negative is right before bed and first thing in the morning.
It’s pretty common to let ourselves lay down in bed before falling asleep, thinking of the crap we have to do tomorrow. That meeting we really don’t want to go to. The coworker who’s been pissing us off. That employee we have to have a difficult conversation with.
We picture bad things happening, when half the time they don’t even occur.
Practice shifting your mindset prior to bedtime. Shift your thoughts towards the things tomorrow that you are excited about. Think about what went well today. Picture things actually working out well tomorrow. This is where the law of attraction plays a big part. Read more about that here.
In the morning, same thing. Replace your negative thoughts with happy ones. Count your blessings. First one should be the fact that you woke up this morning alive. You might be healthy. You might be about to drink a delicious cup of coffee.
What can you allow yourself to be excited about today?
I am just so thankful to finally feel the sunshine on my face.
You may need a sticky note on your bedside table or bathroom mirror as a reminder.
But overtime, I promise you can make this a habit. You will find yourself naturally drawn to positive thoughts. You’ll find you no longer lay there dreading the day. You’ll wake up and start thinking about what good things can happen today.
Remember to let go of thoughts that create expectations of you that are not your own. It is up to you to filter through and decide what thoughts are worthy of being in your mind. What you think about becomes your life.
Little by little, you’ll realize you don’t need to be perfect. You are more than enough.
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