Cultivating Devotion over Perfection

One of my best practices for overcoming my perfectionist tendencies is to cultivate a mindset of devotion.

For me, this means remembering that creativity, at its core, is about a commitment I’m making to myself and to my process of *becoming a person who creates consistently*, no matter the outcome.

So rather than getting stuck on one small part, trying to make my creations perfect, or obsessing over merits and metrics, I remember I’m *creating a body of work*. 

And a body of work requires me to keep moving, keep trying, and keep creating – in a spirit of devotion.

This gets me in a headspace of remembering that creativity is an ongoing, unfolding practice of becoming and stepping into stretchy identities (writer, artist, coach, etc.) – so if I’m creating and moving forward, this means I’m already succeeding and meeting my goals.

So when I put something out into the world and it falls flat or when I try something new and I fail or when I feel like my creative magic has disappeared, I return to this question: what am I most devoted to?  What am I trying to create for myself at the deepest level?  These questions help me find my way back to something good and true for me.

My own commitment is to live an out-loud, alive, creative life.  What’s yours?  And how it that vision guiding your life, process, and day-to-day?

Paths of Failure

One of the life goals I set for myself (when I was about 14 years old) was to learn Spanish. Committing to that process is one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.

Not because of the awesome new skill it gave me but because it broke something in me that needed to break.

I took a Spanish class my first semester of college that felt like an absolute disaster: an endless series of humiliating failures (obvious evidence of my complete ineptitude), that agonizingly specific feeling of embarrassment and despair in those frozen moments when I couldn’t find the words, the C (gasp!) I got on my midterm.

But as anyone who has learned a new language (or done any hard thing ever) knows, reaching a goal is simply a matter of failing well, productively, and consistently.

So there was a choice to make: I could choose a different major and return to what came easy for me, or I could commit to that path of failure.

To get what I wanted, my identity had to change – from smart person to determined person, from person who gets straight A’s to person who commits to processes of learning, from person who succeeds a lot to person who fails a lot.

I am thankful I had Spanish to remind me that I am not here (that I did not come all this way into this dimension of time and space!) to hold my breath so as not to disrupt some frozen stasis of perfection I’m clinging to for dear life. I am not here to serve or uphold models of smartness, goodness, or success that other people made up. I am here to get gritty and dirty – to come into fierce contact with the world and my own self.

And here’s the thing: I speak Spanish almost every day, and it’s often still a colossal failure. I still lose words or say them poorly. I still have to ask people to repeat themselves. But I have also traveled alone in other countries with Spanish. I have assisted clients in accessing services, navigating the legal system, and creating safety plans with Spanish. And I have had conversations with hundreds of people I would not have been able to speak with had I not chosen this path of failure.

And what I know now that I did not know then is that there is no ultimate arrival or success – only beautiful milestones along a path of infinite failures.

I believe that part of what it means to be human is to take ourselves to our edges, to have our identities shattered and recreated, to surrender to what it means to be a beginner, to let go of where and who we are to embrace an ongoing process of becoming. This is what I came here for. And I like it a lot.