#14 - Being Perfect

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

thoughts, perfectionism, goal, DIY, doors, path, woman, abandon, journey, trisha, failure, project, attempts, dream, wife, imperfect, fails, peter, people, created

SPEAKERS

Trisha Barita

00:02

Hey there, I'm Trisha Barita. I'm a mother of twin girls, a wife, an entrepreneur, a psychology major, a lawyer, and a coach. With all these different roles in my life, in the past, I truly struggled with limiting beliefs in my ability to adequately juggle all these roles successfully, I often would be frustrated that time and again, I let my goals and dreams always take a backseat to everything else I was trying to do. And those dreams always seem to be on the horizon, just out of reach. Until I discovered tools and thought work to help me tackle and learn to balance all of it. Now, I don't let these titles define my limits. I define my balance in life by how I choose to show up for myself every day. Am I perfect? Hell no far from it. But I do work every day to believe in myself, and to be present with whatever I experienced in this life, The Good, the Bad, and The really fucking ugly. to own my truth and own my thoughts. I created this podcast to talk about how that noise gets in the way of our goals as women. And now I help women and teach them tools to cut the overwhelm of noise in their life, preventing them from getting the balance they want. If you like this podcast and want to take my free course to get started on designing your balance, and saying fuck that noise, go to Trisha barita.com forward slash free course. Now let's get after it

02:07

Hello, fabulous friends. So I think people that DIY are super awesome. Of course I'm referencing Do It Yourself proach to things whether that's home renovation, updating furniture, making your own art for your house, or creating your own website. I just love that some people love learning how things work and trying it out versus always hiring someone to do it for you. So everyone that even attempts DIY is super interesting to me. A admit in the past, I've spent more than one whole Saturday afternoon watching some individual or couple try to tear apart their kitchen to make it look amazing on some reality DIY show. Anyway, there are some things that I myself am better at than others when it comes to my attempts to DIY and I try to remember those limits before I get big ideas in my head of tearing out cabinets and demo day on the walls of my house. I don't want to be the girl in those reality shows that's crying in the middle of our kitchen, you know, or at least I want to try not to be and to be honest, that's because well for a hot minute, I thought it'd be fun to be the renovation queen.

03:26

My goals when it comes to DIY are not really Home Improvement type goals. I think I prefer the DIY creation of digital things like podcasts, for instance, obviously. But there's certainly something fulfilling about creating something whether it's physical or digital. It can feel empowering. I think my husband really enjoys some of the more physical house projects than I do. If you have a spouse or significant other who likes to do DIY house projects, then maybe you can relate to this story that I'm about to tell. So recently we've been doing some projects around our house and we needed to put a new door on our laundry room because while we had gotten these front load washer dryers that open out and the door we had we realized wouldn't be able to open correctly with the new the new arrangement at the washers and dryers so so I was looking for these like half doors to open out and we couldn't find the right size and it was just like really difficult. And then actually found some but they were they were it wasn't actually half doors there was like an accordion door and after reading the reviews on these doors some you know handy purchasers showed pictures of how the taken the accordion type door apart and redid the hinges to make two smaller doors, which is what I had been looking for all along So I showed my husband, he was like, I can do that.

05:06

So we still order the doors and they come and he, he reconfigures them and puts them up. And then, you know, one of my daughters runs to come get me to look at them. Because while I was working on something in the other room, my daughters were assisting as much as six year olds can assist in Peters project of putting these doors up. So one of my daughter daughters is like, dragging me into where the laundry room is at. And of course, I had to close my eyes and have a big reveal, because that is how the burrito twins reveal everything to Peter and me. And he opened my eyes and I look at the doors, and they look awesome. And look at Peter and I say OMG I love them. And Peter was like, yeah, the doors seem to be made of a nice wood. And he explained how he hung them. But then he said, Well, you can see I'm gonna have to fix them. And I was like, What do you mean? They look great. And he was like, No, the doors aren't exactly straight. They're not, you know, plumb straight up and down. So I looked really hard. And I was like, huh, I mean, I guess it's told him Peter, if there's anything, I can barely see it, I really think they look great. So, so why am I telling you this story? Because perfectionism is something that can be useful to a point. I don't know if Peter will go and fix whatever he thinks is wrong with those doors. If he does, it will not be because of me. Because I can honestly there, you know, say that, if there was anything, I could barely see it, what he's talking about, and I really think the doors look perfect. And there's nothing wrong if he does, or he doesn't make whatever changes he wants. The reason I bring this up is because like in episode one of this podcast when I talk about the different types of noise we can experience, and how some of the loudest is in our own head. Sometimes it's our own thoughts that drive the perfectionism when it comes to achieving a goal or task.

07:06

Sometimes the perfectionism we think we need in our process to obtain a goal is not useful. What about as women? Do you feel you need to be more perfect? Where does the thinking of being perfect for women even come from? It's kind of funny, because when I pick the cover image for this podcast, I picked a 1950s scene, with the wife vacuuming in a beautiful dress with her makeup on and the high heels on and our hair down while our husband reads a book and smokes a pipe on the couch. And then the child watches TV and imperfect like pink dress and both the images we see can affect us. And certainly this time period in the 1950s is well known to have created this BS philosophy that women were supposed to portray this type of perfectionism in their roles as a wife, as a mother and as a homemaker. But we're well past that time period.

08:15

So why are we still having perfectionism thoughts? Look, there's lots of reasons I could talk about today. But I want to talk specifically about the perfectionism thoughts you experience when you're trying something new. Something you've not done before, some goal that you want to achieve. Just like a DIY project, your thoughts around perfectionism can affect how you go about attempting to meet this goal. Let me give you an example. Say a woman tries something to lose weight, or improve her health by you know, let's say healthy eating or exercise. And she not only doesn't lose the weight after two weeks, but she gains a pound. So she quits and searches for a new diet or exercise program to try. Not because she learned that the healthy steps she shows were not effective. But because the scale revealed a setback. So her thoughts drove her to abandon her efforts before fully committing. Therefore possibly leaving the process at the beginning stages of our goal because the path to our goal did not go perfectly.

09:26

Another example, woman decides to open her own business. She has been dreaming about this for a while. She goes and creates a website starts going to networking functions in our local area and online has great conversations with people about her business. But nobody starts working with her. Nobody's buying from her. So she becomes discouraged thinking maybe this isn't for her and she isn't great at doing this or maybe you know, if she had more sales, obviously then it would you know show that you know She has the idea of a successful business. And after a few months, she closes the business. So rather than pushing through, to maybe evaluate her messaging or her sales process or tweak her website, her thoughts leader to abandon this entrepreneurial dream of hers. What about the goal of finding time for yourself to work on your goals? In my free course, on my website, I teach you steps on how to do that. But say you take my free course, you attempt to find the time and then week one, it goes, okay, but week two, you find you don't necessarily satisfy that the time like you wanted to. And so, you know, like you had planned for, you know, you give that time away. And you decide to abandon the process, thinking it doesn't work for me, I'm just too busy, etc. And you really get down on yourself and your efforts before, before you really spend time trying to figure out what is not working, why isn't out working? Before you make any tweaks here and there, or discover the obstacles to work through until you can, you know, truly find your way as to whether or not it's going to work. How much is this idea of perfectionism getting in the way of you, not giving up on your journey to reach a goal.

11:25

When you have a goal, I think you need to get a little more scrappy. You know, you need to not give up on yourself. You see what is more interesting to me than the people that just do a DIY, do it yourself project. Or those that do the do it yourself projects, they have setbacks, they have failures, and they keep going. And maybe they have some more setbacks, more fails, and then keep going and eventually figure it out. Because hidden under the surface of the do it yourself project fails and struggles. In the finished do it yourself project is the true lesson learned the grid that took them to get themselves there, to not give up on themselves. If we could harness that, borrow that. By that, then we could apply it to our own goals. Not necessarily the the DIY projects, although if your goal is to rent out your kitchen, hey, more power to you. But maybe the example of the woman on the new health kick, you know, a food diet exercise, or the woman trying to be an entrepreneur, or the woman just trying to commit to time on her schedule for herself. Maybe she doesn't give up on herself and actually starts believing she'll figure it out. And eventually she does.

12:53

But I'm telling you right now, as you look around the room of people in your life, that have accomplished something you want, as you scroll your social media feed and see people that have done this or that. Remember that perfectionism is not how they got there. Because while shit might look perfect now, I promise you, their journey was far from fucking perfect. The best journeys are not. So in that moment, when you're smacked right in the face with that imperfect journey, when a failure of sorts has just happened. In attempting to achieve your goal, the thoughts of defeat may creep up the thoughts I can't do this, the thoughts of why they pick this two week goal. Or the thought, Well, I tried my best, it's not in the cards for me. In that moment. You're now standing in the forest, with two pads in front of you. One path looks like something from the Secret Garden. beautiful bright colored flowers and sunshine which leads you to get out right now. Abandon the goal, not because you've made a conscious decision that you no longer want this goal. In fact, quite the opposite. You still desperately want this goal. But on this path, you know, you let the failure and the thoughts that come up with it. Like I just mentioned, control that decision for you.

14:17

The other path you're staring at towards your goal is surely filled with more failures and more thoughts about you failing. And what that means. It looks more like the path and the Disney movie sleeping beauty that Maleficent makes for poor Prince Philip on his way to wake Princess Aurora. It's filled with thorns and twisted wood. Twisted woods and it's dark. So my friend, which path do you choose? You're probably thinking, well Trisha, obviously I choose the secret garden. I mean, who wouldn't? And I say to that, well that's it. That's the end of your Disney career because for Aurora would still be sleeping in that tower. And if Prince Philip took one look at Maleficent and that thorny, wooded path she created and was like, You know what? Peace out, I'm pretty sure there's a princess in the next village. Or maybe I'll just stay a bachelor. What I would say is that your thoughts about your failures are like that dark twisty path that I just described. And what it just What if you are the one that's making them all dark and twisty. What if you're making those thoughts more dark and scary than they really need to be? I can tell you from experience. And with helping others at this crossroads, the only way to know for sure is to choose the dark and twisty looking back to keep going. And I say that because so often these thoughts about failure on our way to a goal, they feel so powerful. But it really is sometimes because you make them powerful.

16:06

Now it can feel like they're so strong, that the garden path looks easier, and there's no other choice. But as you identify your thoughts about failing to a goal, you can start to slay those thoughts to process them. And really question What are you making them mean. And by that, I mean removing the power you've given them. I like to see women dream scary big, like I talked about in episode 10. And, and when they're smacked right in the face with a failure, they choose to keep going. They choose the dark twisty looking path. And you know what's super cool. Every time you choose that path, those thoughts have less and less power. They may still come up, but you recognize them as just thoughts. You separate out. You know that when trying to obtain your big scary dream your goal, that seeking perfection means the journey will somehow be perfect as well.

17:07

Because when you go through the imperfect journey to obtain the big scary dream, then you don't need to buy the grit, borrow the grit, or try to harness someone else's grit. Once you stop giving up on yourself, stop to meaning your journey be perfect. Stop looking for some different journey. Stop wasting your time comparing yourself to others. You will find your own journey and that's where you want to be. You'll find your own grit that got you through. And that my fabulous friends, is when you will realize the true perfect journey on your way to achieving your goals will often be the one with the hiccups. The one with the setbacks, the one with the epic fails, and that being perfect was never the goal all along. And I'll leave you with that. Now go get after it. You got this

18:08

Hey, thanks for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, and are a woman ready to say fuck that noise, so you can start designing the balance in your life. Go take my free course to get started at Trisha barita.com forward slash free course. Now Have an awesome day and I'll see you next week.