Overcoming the Perfectionist Paradox.

I’ve been an artist-entrepreneur since I was 15 years old.

At 15 I sold a surfboard I made for $1000.

 But that particular board stole a year from my life.

I danced with the fear of failure and success for months before finally embodying the confidence to finish it. 

Selling that board didn’t reconcile my root fears within perfectionism.

Money couldn’t mend my deep fears of failure, judgement, and success. 

In fact, it doesn’t matter how ‘successful’ or accomplished you are in your endeavor; you are still limited by your relationship to fear. period. 

So the perfectionist paradox is this: 

The future you try to avoid, you are bound to create. 

Why?

Because you embody what you focus on.

The harsh truth is that your focus is subconsciously rooted in fear.

Fear is already embodied. 

If the future I try to avoid is one where I feel like a failure, and my drive is rooted in just trying to not be a failure, where does that leave me now?

Trying to avoid future fear creates the reality of that fear now, you just can’t always see it. 

For over a decade, I thought I was taking all the actions to avoid my fears, but then I had the tough realization that I’ve been completely operating from them all along. 

It didn’t matter how successful my projects became, I was completely limited by fear because it was the lens I was looking through. 

Despite a genuine desire to care deeply, the perfectionist operates from a fundamental story of fear. 

Perfectionism is only a top layer symptom of fear.

It is a behavioral adaptation.

It’s function is to try to avoid a future of realizing the underlying fear, which is futile. 

To ensure that your future will be one dominated by the fear of failure, judgement, and success:

Live your life trying avoid your fears.

But if you want freedom…

You have to fully feel your fear to heal your fear.

Perfectionism is a behavioral adaptation caused by fears of failure, judgement, and success.

These fears are supported by fear of inadequacy, scarcity, and insecurity. 

It doesn’t matter how much $$$ you make or how successful you are, you have fears of inadequacy you need to reconcile.

Perfectionism is a doorway.

The paradox of perfectionism cannot be solved.

But It can be dissolved when you mend the root cause fear.

Then, symptoms discontinue. 

True success, fulfilment, and freedom exists only in the absence of these fears.

The power you outsource to fear returns to you when you sit with, accept, and re-write your deep stories of inadequacy. 

When will more ever become enough if you don’t fully believe that you are already enough?

You will just constantly seek for more accomplishment, more clout, more $$$ yet still be left feeling not good enough deep within your story of self.

When perfectionism arises in your craft, use it as a doorway to discover the deeper stories.

Follow them down to their roots.

Fully accept them, but question their validity.

Their constraints feel real, but the actual root is completely false. 

Imagine what becomes available to you with this knowingness.

That’s the process of dissolving the constraints of perfectionism.