Present Perfect: A Mindfulness Approach to Letting Go of Perfectionism and the Need for Control

The process view allows you to see your entire life as an unfolding work in progress, as an ever-changing blossoming of perfection. In a process view of perfection, failure is not an option, in the sense that you are always succeeding since you are always doing your best.

In being self-driven, you are driven by a self that you didn’t actually program.

this shadow is a metaphor of your programming, a representation of your past. As a perfectionist, you are constantly projecting your vision of what should be onto what is. Your perfectionistic software, like your shadow when the sun’s at your back, is leading rather than following you. All of us have the experience of not wanting to say something a

When there is no audience and nobody to narrate for, the narrator goes away and the experiencer steps in. Be patient. Your mind has been talking for years. It won’t stop on a dime. Give it time: maybe a few hours, maybe a whole weekend. A meeting with perfection is worth the wait. In the state of wordless awareness, you’ll discover that there is no

Accept and change: accept that at any given moment you are doing the best you can do and, having learned from the experience of this given moment, try to change and improve the next moment to the extent that you can.

a mistake is either a mismatch of expectations or an accident. That’s all!

Whereas an expectation is an unwarranted entitlement, a demand that reality comply with your vision of how it should be, a preference is just a wish.

Thomas Hurka observes: “the perfectionist ideal is a moral ideal…it is an ideal people ought to pursue regardless of whether they now want it or would want it in hypothetical circumstances, and apart from any pleasures it may bring” (1993, 17). Restated, this means that we should strive for the sake of striving—not because it feels good, but just b

Instead of saying, “I don’t care; you decide,” I recommend that you decide. Make a choice when the actual choice doesn’t matter to you. Practice making a choice when it doesn’t matter so that you can make a choice when it does.