Self-Mastery for A Better World Part 4: Self-Mastery is Not About Being Perfect — Late joining this series? Catch up from last week\’s Part 3 or from the beginning with Part 1!
False Perfection Gets in the way.
Self-mastery is not about perfection. Trying to be perfect gets in the way by creating a barrier to essential self-acceptance. Self-acceptance helps you want to be in your own company enough to do the necessary inner work.
Perfectionism is no help to you mastering yourself. Stay out of perfectionism: unless you consider perfection to include flaws, which (spiritually speaking) it does. Like my kung fu teacher often said: “The imperfect part is part of the perfection.”
When you relax out of perfectionism and into self-acceptance, you can be relaxed about yourself. You can rest into yourself enough to care for yourself properly. Remember (as I have shared in previous articles in this series) self-mastery is a practice of self-care.
Trying to be perfect sets you up to beat yourself up about your imperfections. This is the opposite of self-care. The self-mastery approach to dealing with your flaws is to be gracious with yourself about them and apply copious amounts of self-compassion. You see, when you are gracious and compassionate with yourself about your imperfections, you treat yourself well enough to master yourself with the deep and thorough self-care practices of self-mastery.
Safe Self-Exploration —
When you accept yourself deeply, you can safely explore your weaknesses and address them. You can go about strengthening yourself without attacking yourself as you do. Facing your flaws and overcoming your weaknesses gets to be enjoyable to you because you do so without demanding perfection of yourself.
A Change of Leadership —
A vital part of self-mastery is going from letting your ego lead you to your soul leading you. Your ego (which has its uses but is not a good leader) is concerned with the flawless version of perfection and how you compare to it. It will belittle you for all the ways you do not measure up to be flawless. Your soul is wiser and will lead you to use self-acceptance to usher in the unconditional self-love (and self-enjoyment) that gives you the power to transcend to the level of master.
Call to Action —
Set Aside Being Perfect to Master Yourself.
You can learn more about self-mastery in my next article in this series next week where I share about “Self-Mastery for Self-Actualization.”
If you enjoy this article series, read my book on self-mastery when it comes out (date to be determined). This article series is a collection of excerpts from the self-mastery book I am writing.
– Accolon
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Accolon is the founder of the self-mastery system Soul Strength Kung fu. He is a Life Coach, Kung fu Teacher, and Spiritual teacher with over 25 years of experience training people in self-mastery and promoting health.
