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

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.

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.

Preaching perfectionism for its own sake is akin to idealistic hazing designed to override the fundamentals of human motivation and to override free will.

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.

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

perfectionism is mostly a result of learning, programming, and conditioning. I see it as an ingenious adaptation to a hypercritical, high-pressure, invalidating environment, a psychological self-defense strategy that unfortunately creates more problems than

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

trying to attach your well-being to what once was creates attachment, a holding-on to what must inevitably change and fade away. Attachment isn’t only a loss of contentment, it’s also a loss of independence. By making your well-being dependent on the perfect circumstance, you lose the sovereignty of your well-being. Your inner life becomes dependen

You’ve come to equate the meaning of success with “not-failure” or “un-failure.” You are either a failure or a not-failure. If that’s the meaning you assigned to the notion of success, it’s no wonder you never really feel successful. You’re only someone who once again didn’t fail. So, of course there’s never any reason to celebrate or allow yoursel