The Perfect Imperfection of Your Personality E135
March 5, 2024
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Today I’m giving you a behind-the-scenes of thoughts I had just this morning. And while I was forming this episode, some very beautiful messages came out of it. Something to inspire you to be kinder to the people in your life and to yourself. Enjoy.
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The idea for this episode came to me this morning when I finished my meditation and looked at my office chair in front of me. I looked at the metal structure with the 5 legs and the rolls at the end and reflected on how, from my perspective, most legs of the metal structure seemed to have different lengths.
But I know this is just from my perspective of where I am sitting, how our eyes take in the information and how our brain translates it into a picture. The legs of the metal structure are obviously all the exact same length to give the chair the perfect balance.
My thoughts moved from the chair to our personality
That’s when my brain kept thinking about the perfect versus imperfect balance that I was observing and how this can be applied to us humans and our personalities. So many of us strive for perfection and some of us literally kill ourselves with the need for perfection. We make ourselves sick working so hard to make everything perfect but never truly reaching it.
But what if imperfection is the true perfection? Let me explain what I mean by that.
As I was looking at the different lengths of the legs of the office chair from my perspective, I started to associate these with parts of our personality. Let’s take an example of 5 personality traits and the length of each leg is how high or low somebody has this trait developed. One personality could have high openness and agreeability, a bit less flexibility and much less confidence and being ambitious.
That’s what we could perceive in a human person. We could observe this in somebody we know quite well like a colleague or a relative. From our perspective, this could be our assessment of these 5 personality traits showing up in this person. But it might not be like that at all. That’s just how we would see it from our perspective which is influenced by the limited information we have about the person and our own perception and understanding of these 5 traits.
Our limitational thinking creates the imperfection
And to be honest, most of the time we probably focus only on one thing in a person. We might judge them or criticise them for having low confidence or a lack of ambition. Or we look up to them as we see their vast openness and flexibility. But we don’t see the rest of that mix!
Just because you perceive somebody to have high agreeability and low confidence, does not mean it’s wrong or bad. What if they have the perfectly right amount of agreeability and confidence for their personality and their lives? What if their perceived imperfection is the perfection the universe, god, or nature intended? And what if that mix of personality traits created a perfectly balanced person like the metal structure of the office chair?
Let’s look at another example, this time with physical attributes. Let’s they a person has high muscle tone and vitality, is a bit less fast, and has short legs and not the best core strength. From our perspective, we might say: Wow, this person is pretty fast with those short legs. And maybe that in itself is perfection. Not being fast with long legs. No, instead being fast with short legs. It’s the perceived imperfection that makes this human perfect as the universe intended it to be.
Begin to see the bigger picture to see perfection
It’s about seeing the bigger picture. If something seems not perfect in someone you can be sure that the person has something else that is balancing out that perceived imperfection. The mix of our personality traits or our physical attributes makes us the perfect mix in the end. But we would never be able to see the totality of the perfect mix of another human being. We are not even aware of our own perfect mix.
What I take away from this metaphor is that we don’t want to judge the book by its cover. The limited information we have about another human being is first of all not everything there is to it, and our perceived observation might not even display the “right” pictures as we see others through the lens of our own perceptions that are unique in each of us.
Instead of focusing on perceived limitations in someone, we can decide to be curious about their extraordinary gifts, talents, or strengths. Instead of pointing out their weaknesses, which might not even be a true reflection, we want to see the bigger picture of the person’s personality and look as well at their strengths. We all have them! We’ve all been created perfectly and we only become imperfect when we lose sight of the totality of who we are.
But that was not all that came out of this thinking …
And then my mind went even further: What about how we perceive ourselves to be imperfect most of the time? We can easily criticise ourselves for being less confident and having short legs but is that not as short-sighted as we are with others? We pick one part of us that seems imperfect and disregard the other traits and attributes that make up the totality of the mix of a perfect personality.
Let’s take one more example. This time about the mix of emotions someone can have. Assume the person is myself and I have high levels of frustration and contentment, a little less feelings of peace, and low levels of anger and satisfaction. It would be pretty easy for me to judge myself for feeling often frustrated and very little satisfied in my life. I can decide to only look at these perceived shortcomings and focus all of my attention on changing those. Disregarding at the same time that I feel high levels of contentment, an adequate amount of peace and low levels of anger in my life.
Is that not something that resonates with you? Picking parts of your life or yourself and judging it? Telling yourself again and again how your life is imperfect and most certainly that you are imperfect? Not realizing that this is just one part of who you are. One imperfect part of you that completes the perfection called you.
See the perfect imperfection of your personality
I invite you to think about this balanced metal structure of an office chair next time you argue about an imperfection in your life or in yourself. And tell yourself to look at all of the 5 legs of the structure that makes up you. Find 4 other things that make up who you are and that create the perfect balance.
I know it might sound a bit weird and it will feel weird the first time you do it. But what is your option? To keep seeing just one part of who you are and use it to bring yourself down? Have we not done enough of that to ourselves and others in this lifetime? How about doing something new, something that will give you permission to celebrate your uniqueness?
Thank you so much for reading about my crazy thoughts from this morning. Allow yourself to have these kinds of crazy thoughts that can create the most beautiful messages for the people in your life and most importantly for yourself. I’m very grateful for having had this train of thought this morning and deciding to make this an episode. It has helped me to see you and myself from a new perspective.
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