Love as Generosity and the Undoing of Perfectionism

Do you appreciate everyone’s contributions or are you looking for how their work is inadequate? Do you feel overly criticized?

When someone makes a mistake, do you see the person as a mistake, or can you look past it and still hold the person as worthy of love?

When you make a mistake, can you learn from it, or do you let your inner critic take over and cut you down?

Are you good at identifying what went wrong or can you shift perspectives and look at what went right?

Can you appreciate mistakes and learn from them without continuing to be critical of others or yourself?

Do you feel like you- and everybody else- has to do everything perfectly, or can you accept the fact that mistakes are a part of human nature and provide us with invaluable lessons for loving and learning?

Do you drive people away by having unachievable expectations of perfection and being constantly critical? Do you feel constantly criticized and thus inadequate and alienated?

Do you recognize perfectionism as a dominant value in the workings of American culture?

As stated by Tema Okun in the document “White Supremacy Culture” (dismantlingracism.org), perfectionism is a characteristic that shows up in our organizational cultures, is hard to identify and name, and can do damage and keep us from being a successful and positively impactful organization. It’s hard to understand our own culture. As they say, it’s the water we swim in. Taking a step back to reflect on it takes skill, but fortunately, there are resources to help us do just this, and as a people of faith who seek justice and liberation for all, this is an essential task towards that goal. When we speak of dismantling white supremacy and the patriarchy, we are speaking of a process that requires deep examination of our cultural values, their embodiment, and how they show up in our behavior. The process of getting us all free means understanding the culture that we live in that allows for the oppression of millions and, consequently, starves our own spirits.

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

–Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wow. Spend some time with those words from MLK. I read them last week and I’m still processing them!

So, where does that leave us? What shall we do? Thankfully, Okun provides us with antidotes in her document:

Develop a culture of appreciation, where the organization takes time to make sure that people’s work and efforts are appreciated; develop a learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer opportunities for learning; create an environment where people can recognize that mistakes sometimes lead to positive results; separate the person from the mistake; when offering feedback, always speak to the things that went well before offering criticism; ask people to offer specific suggestions for how to do things differently when offering criticism; realize that being your own worst critic does not actually improve the work, often contributes to low morale among the group, and does not help you or the group to realize the benefit of learning from mistakes.

Doesn’t this sound like a much more generous approach to being together? It requires a deliberate effort, yes, to break out of our usual patterns of being so critical of one another and expecting perfectionism. It requires compassionate communication about our mistakes and how to learn from them. It requires us to be imaginative and tender as we work around our own, and others’, mistakes, embracing one another’s humanity instead of using perceived imperfections to otherize and monstrosize and deepen the wounds of discrimination.

To be an organization, a church, a faith community, that brings more love, more hope, and more joy into this world in a positive and impactful way requires that we interact with each other in a more positive, supportive, and life-affirming way. It means we value our imperfections and lift up our shared humanity to the light and spirit of love. It means we free our own spirits of the inner critic and we stop expecting ourselves to be and do everything just right.

Reflect on those questions I asked above. Where do you see perfectionism showing up in your life and what are the consequences? What if you offer love and generosity and room to grow instead? How does that change who you are? Who we are together? Making the world a better place means starting with ourselves.