You’re Allowed to Be Imperfect

Here's a 4-step approach to being truthful with yourself and getting better and making life better and being happier at the same time, or doing the same thing for people that you love in your life, maybe even your kids. Number 1, here's, here's the truth. You're not perfect, but you're normal because nobody's perfect. This is incredibly important to understand because once again, our Pleistocene brains that are still back in the, you know, our tribe or band of 30 to 50 hierarchically arranged individuals. You know, we feel if we're, if we're, if we're not as good as somebody else, that that's abnormal. And we want to be normal by, by being better than other people. But the truth is that that's wrong too. You're imperfect, but it's really, really normal to be imperfect. To have pain is normal. To feel uncomfortable, to be sad is, is normal. To feel inadequate, to feel insecure, it's normal. And, and it's so important to tell yourself and to tell your kids, yeah. I feel crummy today. That's a really, really normal thing. That's a metacognitive practice. This is something that people do in Vipassana meditation or many forms of prayer to say, I feel insecure about myself. I feel sad about myself. I'm feeling bad about these particular circumstances. Why is that? To be introspective about that, to acknowledge the fact that these are normal human emotions being produced by a human brain that contains a functioning, healthy limbic system. As a source of signals about the outside world. There's nothing bad about that. There's nothing normal about that. And then to say, this information is actually useful to me, very useful to me. Stay tuned because we don't want to leave it at that. That's just step 1. I'm imperfect and I'm normal. And so are you. Step 2, I accept this. I accept myself. I mean, again, that's sort of the I'm okay and you're okay. And, you know, I sort of trashed that a minute ago. And I still would, you know, if this were the only piece of advice. Accepting yourself is one step in this, but it is an important step, is to accept this. And again, this is not to say I'm okay, but to accept the fact that this is reality is the way that this actually works. I accept my imperfections and I treat myself with a kind of compassion. You know, we often are so much harder on ourselves than we are to other people. You know, I recognize that because I'm such a striver and I'm such a perfectionist in everything that I do. And I realized if anybody talked to me the way that I talk to myself, I'd be so insulted. I mean, I would be scandalized if somebody talked to me that way. It would be hard for me to forgive anybody who talked to me the way that I talk to myself. You moron. Or something dumb like taking a right when I was supposed to go left. Anybody did that and I was the passenger in the car, I'd say, I think you needed to go right there. Oh, okay. But me? You get the point. And so it's having a compassion about yourself is really important. There's a great article on this, by the way. In Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which is a great journal. From me to you, self-compassion predicts acceptance of one's and others' imperfections. Acceptance, not celebrating it, but accepting it as normal is step 2. Step 3, work to improve. Now here, this gets really important because if you stopped with, I'm okay, you're okay, then you can do something that a lot of people have done in the last decade. Which is to make your flaws into a sort of identity, right? My, you know, bad things about my personality, things that ordinarily you'd want to improve. It's like, nah, that's who I am. And use it kind of as a cudgel against other people. Don't do that. Your flaws shouldn't be your identity. You shouldn't relate to yourself through your, you know, the things that you should want to improve. Doing that is to say, is to resolve the cognitive dissonance that life is crummy, the world is against you, And so therefore you're going to try to, you know, not just make the best of it, you're going to use it as a source of self-understanding. Very unhelpful to you. Very bad for your mental health to do that. To say, you should acknowledge I'm flawed in this way right now. That is not to say I will always have this flaw. On the contrary, self-acceptance can and should facilitate improvement. Now, here's a good example of this. I learned Spanish as an adult. I moved to Spain when I was 25 years old. I did that because I was chasing a girl that I had fallen in love with to Barcelona. And I moved there. I didn't know a word. I knew no Spanish. It was so dumb. I studied German in high school. That's useful. You go to Germany, they all speak better English than we do. You go to Spain, nobody speaks a word of English, including the girl I was in love with. Nothing. So I had to learn Spanish and I talked like a toddler. At 25. It was unbelievably humiliating. I didn't say, "I'm just crummy in Spanish," and then never try to talk to anybody and shut in on myself and say, "Well, Spanish is stupid." No. I said, I made myself into a kid again. I have my grandsons, I have 4 grandsons growing every day, it seems. Well, they're growing, but the number appears to be growing every day too. And when they're learning to talk, nobody's like, "You idiot, you just "Hey, you just mispronounced hospital. You said it 'hopital.' I mean, idiot." No. On the contrary, you say that, you say, "That's a funny little flaw." And then you tell them the word and over time they actually learn it and you treat yourself with the same self-compassion and you work to improve. And over time, sure enough, after about a year, which was slower than some people and faster than others, I could go out of the house without rehearsing what I was going to say. And now, years and years and decades and decades later, I can lecture in Spanish and I can live in Spain and the other day I did live TV in Spanish. It's my second language. I'm almost as comfortable as I am in English. I still have an accent, by the way, but you get the idea. Self-enhancement says that, that whole idea, you won't make progress if you pretend you can already speak fluently and you also won't make progress if you make your lack of fluency your identity. You get my point. Work to improve, step 3. Step 4, don't blame other people for your flaw. Now again, sometimes other people are to blame for stuff, but it still doesn't help. It still doesn't help. There's a very interesting body of literature that shows that people who take responsibility for things that aren't even their responsibility, they tend to do better in life. And you can kind of figure out why that's the case. They're sort of life entrepreneurs, right? They find solutions to things. But if you're wallowing in the idea that everything is somebody else's else's fault, you're very unlikely to be making product— finding productive solutions to the problems in your life. And you're going to get less happy. Marty Seligman, Martin Seligman, University of Pennsylvania, my great mentor. Marty Seligman, he created a whole body of research on something called learned helplessness. Now, learned helplessness occurs when you feel like nothing that you can do can make anything better because everything is out of your control, ordinarily because of the actions of other people that kind of are conspiring against you. And he said that this is a huge predictor of depression, a huge predictor of anxiety. And by the way, it makes it so people can't ever solve problems, even if they're not the cause of the problems. They have no, they have no possibility of solving these problems, which is really, really unproductive. He's shown this with laboratory animals. He showed it with people and, you know, people get just sort of depressed mood. And, and, and in a sort of permanent state. Learned helplessness is horrible. And it comes because you figure there's nothing you can do because things are outta your control, ordinarily because it's somebody else's fault. Scholars have shown that people with a weak capacity for emotional self-regulation tend to blame others for their poor choices. Now, I'm not gonna say that everything is your fault. If something's wrong in your life, sometimes it, I mean, there is injustice, there is discrimination. I completely completely have got it. But the idea of looking for culpability in other people and outside your control is usually the worst way to look at things, at least as the first course of action. Fifth, here's the best part. That's why you're here on the show, is reframing your imperfections and others, not as failings, but as puzzles. So here's, here's the fun about self-improvement. When I first started getting really interested in self-improvement, I remember when I was kind of older, as a matter of fact, I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, 1936. I read Stephen Covey's book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and they just energized me, man. Not because I was like, check, I got all this stuff, all these 36 habits to win friends. I got all of them. No, I didn't. The interesting thing was that I didn't have most of these habits. And the fact that I recognized the fact that there was something that I could do was great. 'Cause it gave me this challenge. It gave me this, gave me a castle in the sky I could walk toward. It was so wonderful. It was a puzzle for me about myself to solve. That's one of the things that people really like when they're starting a program of physical fitness is that it's not because they're already fit. It's because they have a purpose. They have a direction. They have a goal. And that gives them all this gusto for being alive is a puzzle that you can solve. That's utterly solvable. And when you do, you're going to be better off and that's going to make you happier. I'm going to get better grades. I'm going to have a better relationship. All the imperfections of yours are interesting puzzles to solve. Now, I tried to raise my kids this way. When something wasn't right, I wouldn't say that's bad. I would say that could be better. Here's how. And they want to be better. They would do that. And we had, you know, when there was a grades problem, we would deal with it and, you know, whatever it happened to be or behavior problem. And The idea of puzzles to solve without just getting a cookie at the end, by the way, with the satisfaction that comes from being better. This is the most exciting thing. Now, again, I'm preaching to the choir here because you're watching this show because you're into it. You're watching Office Hours because you know that, that you can be happier and you want the secrets. That's already acknowledging that you're not as happy as you could be, but that you believe that the secrets are there and you're watching this show to get those secrets. 'Cause you want to apply these ideas. You already understand how to turn imperfections into puzzles. Do that more and do that with your kids and do that with everybody around you. And you will become a force for absolute positivity in your life, in the lives of other people. Now, that also suggests one last point, which is how boring not to have areas of improvement in life. How boring. What a horrible way to live. You know, that, that leads to this idea that I've arrived and I've talked in the show before about arrival fallacy. You get a particular goal in anything in your life, in your relationship, in your money, in your fitness, in your health, in anything, it doesn't live up to expectations. The goal in life is progress, making more progress and more progress. And when you find something that's an area of imperfection in your life, don't lie about it. Say, yeah, man, that's why I'm alive. That's what it means to be an entrepreneur. That's the kind of progress that I want to make. And that is a big part of the meaning of life because meaning has purpose at its core, goals and direction at its core. Your imperfection is the source of your excitement in life, and that's a great thing.