Perfectly Perfect in Every Way

Are you perfect?

Do you ever suffer from paralysis by analysis?

Of course you answered "no" to the first question. Even perfectly perfect people would say no. Only a humorist could answer "yes." Truth is that no one is perfect - we are perfect examples of our uniqueness.

How about this one, then: Do you strive for perfection in those things you do?

Or this one: What is your definition of "Be the best you can be"?

If you were raised to be good, to do what you were told, and expected to make A's (particularly more so if you did), then you may very well strive to be perfect in everything you do. Since none of us is perfect (that's the flip side of the training we were given growing up), we often fail at being perfect, right?

This is one reason many dieters stop dieting. They fail at some point.

Guess what? We're all going to "fail" at some point. We will reach a plateau, or we will stress-eat, or we will think "I already ate that, so I'll just have some more" or we hear those negative voices playing in our heads and - get this - we listen!

On a site dedicated to folks working to improving their financial situations, someone posted this quote from a well-known and respected business book The E Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber. Apparently it held a quote from another well-known and respected book. In Search of Excellence by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr:

"Tolerance of failure is a very specific part of the excellent company culture - and the lesson comes directly from the top. Champions have to make lots of tries and consequently suffer some failures or the organization won't learn."

I'd not heard that quote before, but I can say with some certainty that comes from experience that being successful at weight loss and at getting healthy definitely involves tolerance of failure as you will hit plateaus and have set-backs, none of which needs to derail you. Sadly it often does to many people who think they have to be perfect.