How To EMBRACE Your Flaws And Become The Happiest You EVER

The quest for perfection, or the belief that it is even possible, has been the downfall of many.

You cannot be perfect.

You are a work in progress. You will make mistakes or be humanly imperfect. The key life lesson is what do you learn and how do you evolve.

You can get better and better in love, in relationships, in happiness, and in joyful living, but you will never be perfect.

My belief is that there are no failures ... there are only results, and lessons to learn from them.

So, what will you learn from your imperfections?

You are a unique human being, who arrived on this planet with an innate purpose (which you may not have discovered yet), but being unique is why you can’t live up to someone else’s view of how you should be.

As Oscar Wilde said, “You might as well be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

As you grow and evolve (relationships are the fertile ground for evolution), you will learn that learning what you learn while you are learning is the hallmark of improving awareness and consciousness.

Yes, that's a lot of learning. But isn't that the point? To keep discovering our flaws, and keep learning?

Your flaws are merely the shadow aspect of our potential. 

They long to be held, cherished, nurtured and brought into the light. That's how you learn, do better, and become stronger. 

Pushing those flaws just prevents you from your potential.

Once you honor your imperfections and unique aspects of YOU, you can be more ‘on purpose’ about becoming who and what you want to be — as an individual, as a lover, as a friend.

In what ways do you hide from your own truth? In what ways does your desire to be good get in the way of your own happiness?

Your shadow, your unconscious potential, contains many valuable insights that need to be uncovered.

You can do this by journaling, reflecting in nature, or while meditating, or by working with a coach.  

Personal coaches ask powerful questions, those that evoke new thinking, visions, and possibilities.  

Here are some examples of powerful questions that may help:

1. If money were no issue, what would you be doing?

2. What assumptions are you making about your lover, career, life, and what are the facts?

3. How would you like things to be different a year from now?

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4. What are you missing or avoiding?

5. What dreams have you put on hold or given up on?

6. If a miracle happened tonight for your biggest want or desire, what would be different tomorrow and how would you notice?

To become real is to risk baring your truth to someone. And that can be scary.

But take the leap of emotional nakedness and transparency and you will discover, as many masters have taught, the part of you that wants to emerge is fearless.

When you let go of needing your life to look a certain way, the imperfections become our paradise of experience!

Your wounds and past hurts that you try so hard to hide and cause you to live a lie, actually mask your greatest gifts.

Once you reframe your wounds into an opportunity for growth, you tap into fierce resilience you probably did not know you even had.

The TRUTH will set you FREE.  

But remember you don't need to shout your truth publicly, just to people you can trust or want to trust.

You have probably been trained to hide or bury your past hurts and imperfections.

While wounds can illuminate, they can also hold you back if you dwell too long on them, or let them define who you are. 

Your current desires, as opposed to your past fears, are the most important influence on the blueprint you can design for your future.

Try this strategy for reclaiming parts of your authentic self that you may have left hidden in the shadows:

Follow this template of evocative questions for naked sharing slowly, using a journal, personal reflection time, and patience.

• Recall: Remember a belief or experience that causes you to keep it hidden.

• Reflect: Consider the memory. What happened? Who was there? How did it affect you?

• Reveal on paper: Write in a journal your memories, thoughts, feelings, actions, and emotional reactions. Just free flow. Get it out and on paper. Then read it to yourself as if you were hearing about it from your younger self.

• Reveal to another: Make a big step here. Who can you share our story with? Who can you trust will listen to you with suspended judgement and full acceptance?

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• Reboot: After you have shared with a trusted and committed listener, imagine you are rebooting your memory, just like a computer memory. Let it be defragmented and safely put away and cleaned up.Now get back on your journey to your desired future, starting now. You have now achieved a clean restart pertaining to this memory or story.

In Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person, by Hugh Prather, my favorite passage explains the dangers of questing after perfection, rather than opportunities to learn:

Perfectionism is slow death. If everything were to turn out just like I would want it to, or just like I would plan for it to, then I would never experience anything new; my life would be an endless repetition of stale successes. When I make a mistake, I experience something unexpected.

Every experience is a good experience eventually. We experience both chosen and unchosen change. But even if we experience what we would not have chosen, we eventually have to make it a choice and accept what it is and learn from it so we can move from what was to what will be.

Now you have discovered ways and means to begin to reveal your truths — and stop lying to yourself and others. 

You will thank yourself someday.