Focusing More On The Progress, Not On Perfection

A lot of people have put themselves into extreme pressure by their expectations of perfection. Instead of following the process step by step, they want to arrive at the top by the press of a button. They tend to give themselves unimaginable goals with an inexplicable expectation of perfection. But what they do not understand is that it is the process and the progress that give birth to the result. When you shift your mind and focus on the process, then you will begin to see success as a journey rather than as a destination.

It is worthy to note that success does not mean flawlessness or perfection, but it is a continuous approach to get better and improve on your high-score. If you are waiting for a time to achieve perfection, you will wait for so long and you will put yourself into unnecessary mental stress. It is true that we should strive towards perfection, because it gives us boost to go beyond our best, but it is also a very catastrophic weapon if wielded wrongly - it can actually discourage one from even making any attempt.

I will use what happened to me some years back to explain the negative effects of expecting perfectionism. I joined a particular choral group due to the influence of my friend. However, I discovered that the leader of the choral group was someone that believes in nothing short of the best. This made her to always use the same set of people for all her performances because she believed they were the ones that would deliver to her expectations. Even when she eventually decides to allow someone else to take the performance, she would give the person a list of expectations to meet and any error would be dealt with severely.

To her, she was trying to make people bring out their best, but to them, they got scared of performing because even the slightly mistake would be met with heavy consequences. After about 1 month of being in the group, I got tired and even scared of performing, and I stopped coming for rehearsals. I withdrew myself from the group and of course, I never performed because I was already scared. However, it was not long and the tenure of the woman was over, so a new leader was elected. The new leader called me back and for the first time, I felt belonged.

The policy of the new leader was very different because he believes in the processes and not even the final result. He knew that if the process will be gotten right, it will impact of the end-result positively. He started giving everyone a fair chance to shine. And even when errors were made, he simply corrected them with wisdom. By allowing people to practise, it was not long and almost everyone became very good, even beyond our expectations. This was when I understood that if you focus on the process, it will lead to perfection. Perfection is not enforced, you simply grow into it.

The truth is that the people that you see as perfect in a particular field started from somewhere. If they were not allowed to express themselves, they may not have developed themselves to be the best they can. You may only need to focus on the steps that you need to take and how to take them. It is the collection of these steps that will ultimately lead one to their desired destination. The means to get to your destination holds as much importance as the destination itself. So as you focus on becoming perfect, you should also know that it is almost impossible without practicing.

In order to make the most out of the process, you have to learn to celebrate your little wins. When you celebrate every step of the way, it tends to give you more zeal to put in more steps and then the more you take step, the closer you are to perfection. Always remember that you cannot arrive at a destination in a twinkle of an eye, you need to take it a moment at a time. As long as you are better today than you were yesterday, then I will tell you that you are making progress. Keep at it and it will be easier to achieve a state of mastery.

Thanks for reading