28 Jesus Made Mistakes - Dealing with Perfectionism

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Welcome to the less stress family podcast, where we believe you are valuable and what you do matters.

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This is episode number 28. I am Justin

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and I am Shauna Would.

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How are you, honey?

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I'm doing well. How are you today?

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I'm great. Coffee here. Uh, that life is good. Great rule. We're out of cream, though. So that's a problem. We have

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thio in our household. Yeah, that's what I call a first world problem for sure. Thank you for taking time out of your day to listen to us. We hope that you enjoyed today's topic. And don't think that we're totally sack religious at the end of it.

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So today we're talking about the fact that Jesus made mistakes and we're really talking about perfectionism. Yes, go ahead.

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I've got a story. Oh, so as you all know, if you've listened all the podcast we home school, but we do it at night so that we're able to work during the day. And so after the supper dishes, air cleaned off the dining room table turns into the classroom and I do some teaching of everybody at the table and then people kind of go off in different directions, and I migrate around the house to where each child is. So. The other night I left and I had two kids happily contentedly working on their schoolwork at the kitchen table. I went to the couch to read with another child. Finished reading, came back to the table,

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which is about what, like 12 feet away.

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Yeah, not far away. And this child, who was very happy doing his math, is now red faced body language slumped over, tears welling up in the eyes. I'm like, Wait, it's only been my 15 minutes what crisis has occurred in that time period when I could still see you from the other room. And the problem was, he came to a math problem that was difficult. And for him, he got so frustrated about the possibility of messing up that math problem that he could not take action like he couldn't even just start playing and maybe get the wrong answer. He was just frozen that perfection and that fear of messing up literally just had him frozen, messed him up and in a very not fun place at the table.

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And so here is our problem our society teaches its underlying that to make mistakes is to make a moral failure. Or if in the church world of sin, you don't mean right. But Jesus himself. If you think about Jesus as a baby, he had to learn to walk, right? Yes. And so in order to do that, he made mistakes. He's done well in Phil. If he was a carpenter or that construction worker, whatever the whatever word you want to use, um he had to learn how to drive a nail or whatever is that he did. He had to learn, so he had to made mistakes in that process. But making mistakes does not mean that you have made a more failure. Right now. You can You can make a mistake.

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That is, the

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more that is, um, or moral failure. Right.

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But they're not sinning. They're

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not the same. They're not the same. Mistakes and a moral failure are not the same,

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right? And I even think is I'm like, Well, how do we know that he made mistakes? Well, here's the deal. You know, badly. Ah, nobody thought that he was fully God. And if you had an infant, that immediately walk that immediately. Talked who did all things as a teenager in perfection, a cz faras never making any mistakes. People would think that he was some kind of god, but people didn't think that, right? So we know that he made mistakes just like the rest of us,

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right? Right, right. And so somehow we we have got it into our head. I think some people, I think are more wired to think this about perfectionism, but to think of people make a mistake, they have just committed. They need to go to prison like that's what they feel like. I'm gonna mean like, that's what

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I think. Can we Can we go a little bit a level deeper? Sure. I think the lie underneath that is that my value is determined by my performance.

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Right, Right, right. So there's

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that means if I make a mistake, I haven't had a good performance. I really am not a valuable

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not as valuable as if I Yeah, right. Right now, the key is I feel like that's what a parent does as you try to give your kids a safe space to make its many mistakes as you can tolerate, right, you know, so that they learn how to do stuff. Yes, whatever that is. Math or chopping vegetables at the table or whatever. You're okay with them learning, right? Right When you don't want the mistake, cause some mistakes can cost you your life. Go playing out on the road right on the busy interstate. That's a mistake you can allow people, you know what I mean? Like, that's part of the pants job, right? You keep people from certain mistakes,

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right? From fatal mistake

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for fatal mistakes and severe hospital mistakes. Right, if you can avoid it.

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And I think this is really an applicability thing, not only if your parenting Children in your home, but even in the work space, like I just had the conversation last week with a project manager who was so frustrated because his like second in command, had not trained any of the other staff people should do multiple jobs, right? Well, when in the second in command left business, no one knew how to do these things, it would have been so much better if Second in command had have taken his crew, trained them on things and said, Hey, I'm right here. But I'm gonna let you do this right now so that if they made a mistake, he was there. He could have corrected it, right, But he would have trained up replacements for

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him. Right? Right, right, right. Yeah, that's for sure. That even this morning Ah, we had one of our kids. The younger one who want to make oatmeal had never boiled the water on this stuff, right? So I decided that person was not yet ready to learn how to operate the stove because I was not in for that lesson, But they could. That person that kid helped do all the other process right. Get the get the container. Let's let's put some water in the pot. Thank you. Like put the water in the pot and it took some effort on their part, and it was a little bit messy, but it was They made some mistakes, even doing that, You know what I mean? Like right? They didn't have it all quite down, But it wasn't. That's not a moral failure to make a mistake, right? And so it's we we all kind of shift into this perfectionism of just totally beat yourself up. You know, um, that's just not you Talk about stressful, right? When you set your standard as I'm not allowed to make any mistakes, you are gonna be so stressed out. You're gonna not be fun to be with for anybody, your work with you or with your family members or whatever. And I think I think the result is people tried to pursue perfection or excellent. Some people call excellence. Really need you to bring it. Yeah, let's bring excellence. So they'll in one area of their life, they can really go after it. But there's no way you have all the bandwidth and energy, you know what I mean to to pursue excellence and really perfection in all the rest of her life. Right? So you talked about that. Will you know that we call that look like the will of life where you know your health and your finances in your family relationships and all that stuff. It's like if you don't have that will worked out, you were going to it's gonna be rough.

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Yeah, for sure. And I think you know, honestly, we have so many people struggling with this. I think That's why we have so many people who have major digestive disorders, you know, irritable bowel and acid reflux. And all of these things headaches, just chronically chronic migraines and that kind of thing. Because our bodies, we're never designed or purposed to maintain those high levels of stress continually.

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Right? Right, Right. And it's almost like we've lost. What does it mean to learn? Because when you learn, you have to make mistakes right in like we had, you know, in our society is back in the day. What do you have? An apprentice? You know what I mean? Like, you would go and you will go work with someone, right? And they would teach you Skeel usually without getting. Now we call internships for a short time, right? Right. But they would teach you a skill blood beginning. I don't think you got paid, right?

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Yeah. I mean,

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I don't think Yeah, not much, because yeah, because they don't expect you to know a lot. And they expected you make a lot of mistakes, right? And so, But by the end of it, if you had as you're going through the apprenticeship, you would actually have a skill and you would know how to do something really, really well, right? And for somehow for some reason, I feel like our society just missed that whole thing about making mistakes. Yeah, like it's just knows no room for error. And we assume it was like, some kind of moral failure to make mistakes. Right? So what's the solution, honey?

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So I think the solution is just acknowledging that mistakes are a part of life and they're particularly a part of any kind of growth. So if you want to learn anything new, if you want to do anything new, then you just have to have, like, in your mind. This cushion of this is like my mistake cushion. You know, it's gonna happen, And I need to make mentally make it okay for that to happen.

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Yeah, for sure. You had a quote there. What is perfection is

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I saw the sign and said Perfection is stagnation. And I thought immediately of the kid at the kitchen table who couldn't work out that math problem because he was so scared he was gonna make a mistake.

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Right? Right, right.

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You know, this also makes me think of we've done a couple different ventures. Um and so one of them was business. We private label. We started a business. We were private, labeling some products, selling them on Amazon. And we were taking a course because we had no clue how to do this. And one of the things that the instructor was saying was that there are so many different aspects that are needed and so many steps that if you wait until you have, like, he was using the example of the label for your products and your packaging. If you wait until that label design is absolute perfection, then you will never, ever get your products.

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Right. Right.

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So you have Thio. He was the 1st 1 that I heard Talk about B level work is like, just shoot for B level work. Maybe even sea level work would get it done, get it done fairly well, right? But don't expect it to be perfect,

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and then expect toe, go back eventually and read. Ready? D'oh!

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Emperor Mac and tweet

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it right, right.

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But you have to get that ball roll

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right over, and that's I think that's part of the deal. We don't have a tweaking process. We expect it to be perfect the first time. And there's no understanding of We have to tweak and make this improved. Right. So you with this podcast, right? So the intro song is me on a guitar? Yeah. I did it one time and I realized, Hey, I'm not in tune this guitar. It does not sound quite right. So then I did it the second time. My strings or dead. Like I went through my head about five things that were wrong with that set up, right, I put the but this mike right on the guitar. And there's something other ways You could have done this, that probably would've been better. But I was like, You know what I gotta do? Andro song. I'm gonna do this right here. Boom. This is song I've been playing for just messing around with for quite a while. Yes, that was it.

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And we've talked about like, Okay, probably now that we've actually got the podcast going, Let's tweak the intro,

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Right? Right. Right. Because we got other songs the kids wrote. Actually, we're gonna maybe do a song. Kid wrote our kids wrote, and we all play together which is kind of fun.

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It is kind of fun, you know, and we'll throw it out there and it will be an improvement. And then later on will probably improve it later again,

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right? Exactly. And it's like we don't make edits. There's no edits on this podcast, right? I do that intro and I watched YouTube video and I was like, OK, this I can edit this song to put it into this space. And then I learned how to move the what were record right here? Yeah, overlay. On top of that, I was like, That's good enough. There was 100 more videos I could've watched was like, You know what? This is all I need. This is good enough and people are like, Oh, you all your music And I was like, I guess it does. It's enough and that's I had a couple people say, Hey, that sounds really good. Who were kind of like in the media, like, That's pretty good what

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I did right? Okay for rednecks doing

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good enough? Yeah, that's right.

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Would you repeat that again? So you know, and I think even if you say well, I don't want to do a new venture. I don't want a podcast. I don't wantto start a business or whatever. Listen, if you were parenting a six year old today, that six year old is gonna turn into a seven year old, and that's gonna be new with new challenges.

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You know, it is so amazing. People say, Oh, your kids are so good or man You almost really have this parenting thing down And it's It's amazing to me how challenging parenting a child is. Yes, even like you say about time they're into their six year were like We got that six year old because he was different than the other one and he was totally different than other. And she's different than this. It's like like you just with kids. It's so humbling. I feel like and sometimes humiliating because you would think by now it's like I look at my kids ago. I've had always practice with making babies, but I have always practiced with, like parenting. It's like I'm just not very good,

spk_1:   14:34
you know well, and that's why I always kind of laugh when I hear about a family. I just spoke to somebody yesterday actually He was like we had our first child, and they were such a people pleaser. And it was so easy. And they have just learned everything on their own. And then we had this second, if we'd had the 2nd 1st there would have been a second, you know, because I think it's just God just keeps his humble new opportunities, right.

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But if you if you have that perfection mentality, it just rubs everything the wrong way. You know what I mean? Like, you're

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not gonna

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be a perfect parent. That's

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what we tell our kids. Hey,

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you're gonna need some therapy after after we get list. After we get done with you, you probably need to work on this. This is this is right. So it's like, But you have to have space, otherwise you just never grow right. You never mature, right? Um yeah,

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and that's what you know. I know some people within the church have gotten hung up on Matthew 5 48 It says be perfect. Therefore, is your father in heaven is perfect. But actually, the Greek word for perfect actually has to do with complete and it references, like completing your spiritual journey, completing your development. And so all of those things

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your character

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mean your character is going to be refined and it's gonna happen through mistakes.

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Right? Right, right, right.

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So we hope that that has been encouraging for you. You know, guys, if you're looking at doing something, just do it and stop judging yourself. Your value is

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don't play on the interstate, okay? Calculated things like

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that. But your value is not based on your performance. You are valuable like we just want to like, hug everybody and tell you you were valuable and what you do matters. So don't get hung up in the perfection trap. You are also not alone. And we would love to connect with you and have you connect with the rest of the face that our community on Facebook on Instagram on our website and give us some feedback. Let us know if perfectionism has been an issue for you. Thank you. Have a blessed day