An unexpected role
A few months ago, I was given responsibility for about 40 children and 15 adults. This wasn’t a role I had lobbied for or even expected. It came out of nowhere. Who was I, a newly married, childless young woman to take care of all these children? Surely, someone with more experience could be found. I felt completely inadequate. I still do.
The initial weeks were filled with stress. I tried to do everything and make everyone happy. As always happens when you try to make everyone happy, I fell flat on my face.
Trying to grasp at all the strands of responsibility, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer mass of tasks. I stayed up at night thinking over all the ways I could have done better and all the things I still had to do.
Eventually, I realized there was no way I could do this all on my own. I needed to delegate tasks to someone else.
But I struggled with that.
What if they couldn’t do it as well as I could. I couldn’t trust someone else to get the job done. It was my responsibility after all. The only person I could trust was myself.
As you can probably tell, I’m one who likes to be in control. I like to know exactly what is getting done, and sometimes I’d rather just do it to be sure it’s done right.
Sound familiar? As a kid, my mom would get frustrated with my attempts at chores. It would have been so much easier for her to do everything herself rather than having laundry soap all over the ground from my clumsy hands. The time it took to do it right would be way less than the time for me to learn from failure.
Just like my mom had to trust me, I had to trust the leaders to teach the children in our primary.
I’ve had to learn to let go of complete control. It’s insane to imagine that I could control everything. Life doesn’t work that way. Plus, my sanity would not allow it.
The truth is, things may never turn out exactly how I envision. It can be messy. Things may be complete failures. But, being able to accomplish great things – like teaching the children about life and gospel principles – far outweighs the possible failure.
As I’ve slowly learned to give up control over the past few months, one thing I’ve learned about trust is that it’s scary.
Giving up control is terrifying
As someone who cares way too much about what others think, I have to learn to be vulnerable. Things will get messy. And that’s okay. If everything in life got wrapped up in a perfect little bow, honestly, I’d be beyond bored. Life is risky. That’s just how it is.
At one point, I even had a dream manifesting this terror I felt. You know those dreams where you wake up and still feel completely exhausted despite the hours of sleep? Yeah, that kind of dream.
I had been having trouble finding others to take on the responsibility for the children from the ages of 18 months to 3 years.
In my dream, I was at church. I had peeked into the room with the older children and saw them all paying attention to the leader in front and participating. I left the room feeling calm, knowing the adult leaders had things under control. Walking down the short hallway, I noticed instead of the one room we normally have to watch the youngest children, five rooms were in its place.
Looking into the rooms, I saw each packed with children. They played with toys and ran around the room discovering all the wonders in a three-year-old’s view. As I looked closer, I noticed the chaos and, more importantly, a lack of adults. In the five rooms, only three adults worked to wrangle all the young children.
Throughout the rest of my dream, I spent the whole time running through the hallways after escaped children. Trying to keep them all safe and in one place seemed impossible, and I panicked. My heart raced at the impossible expectations. I wasn’t enough. I didn’t have anything under control.
Do you ever feel like this? You might be in charge of teaching children, working full-time, exercising three times a week, building a business, and maintaining relationships. You feel like you’re running around untethered.
The truth of the matter is, it’s impossible to control everything in life. The only way you’ll release the pressure to keep everything perfect is through acceptance of imperfection.
Accept the imperfect
It’s easy to say on paper and a lot harder to do in real life, but when you start to accept that you won’t be perfect, you release a ton of anxiety. We build up layers and layers of expectations over time until eventually we become paralyzed in fear. Start each day expecting imperfection. If you look deeply, you may even find beauty in the imperfections.
I remember learning about the Humans of New York project years ago. It started in 2010 as a photography project, however, I was struck by the stories the photographer eventually discovered while taking the photos. Behind each photo was an imperfect human being. As I learned of their stories, each person became beautiful to me. It didn’t matter whether they were “beautiful” by traditional standards or not; their story made them beautiful.
While this post isn’t about self-acceptance specifically, this project translated into other areas of my life. I started looking at life situations through this lens. When I failed at something, after the initial let down, I thought back to this photography project. Where was the beauty in each failure? In what ways did I grow from it? When I started looking at each situation as a thing of beauty, I learned to let go of the pressures of perfection because no matter how badly I had failed, there was always beauty to be found.
Perfectionism is why I couldn’t trust. The more it takes over my life even as I fend it off, the more I see it as a disease. The only way to combat it I’ve found that works is to accept imperfection as beautiful. Because perfection is so ingrained into society, it may be difficult to fend off, but by taking small, consistent steps each day, you’ll succeed.
Here are some ways you can fight off perfectionism each day:
- Look for beauty in imperfect situations
- Learn to recognize perfectionism
- Write in a journal exploring specific triggers for perfectionism in your life
- Try a social media fast for 24 hours
- Make quick decisions rather than spending excessive amounts of time on unimportant decisions
- Try something new with no expectations of how it will turn out
- Shorten your to-do list
- Repeat positive, realistic statements like “Nobody is perfect,” “No one is liked by everyone. It’s okay if someone doesn’t like me,” or “Progress over perfection.”
- Try something spontaneous
Determine to complete one of these activities each day. With consistent actions, you’ll find it easier and easier to accept imperfections each day.
Just as I can’t be perfect in my role in primary, neither can anyone else. And that’s okay. In fact, only through failures and mistakes can we learn. While I will always have to fend off the pull of perfectionism, I know I’ll be able to move forward as I find the beauty in imperfection.
As always, make each day better.
Pin it for later!
