200. Perfectly Imperfect

Do you feel like no matter how hard you try at making change and doing things differently, that you’re always just falling flat on your face? You do really well for a few weeks and then the cupcakes are served, or your kids don’t come home for the holidays like you wanted and you just say, forget it.

And you eat the entire bag of Oreos that you bought ’cause you thought your grandson was gonna be there. So if this is you, or maybe you sabotage yourself with buying more fabric or I don’t know, it can all look in different ways. This podcast is for you. My name is Dara Tomasson, and this is the Quilters Coach Podcast.

Episode 200, yes, 200 and it’s called Perfectly Imperfect. 

Now, this might be. Such a difficult podcast episode for you to listen to, and that is why I’m saying listen, listen. Do not pause. Maybe you can, maybe you could go for a walk or maybe you can discern doing some strip piecing or something, but I want you to listen to this episode. You have to give this gift to yourself to be willing to be perfectly imperfect. 

All right. I, this is 200 episodes. There are 52 weeks in a year. I have been doing this podcast for over four years. It has not been perfect, and I have not executed it perfectly.

I’ve had lots of different podcast people. I just started doing this thing where I do it on YouTube so you can actually see me and I’m just doing it. And so this episode is going to be so helpful for you, especially for all my recovering perfectionists. 

Do you know how many denial clients I have are like, “I’m not a perfectionist,” and then I give them the quiz. They’re like, oh, whoops. 

So today we’re going to learn how to be perfectly imperfect and we are going to have it. the purpose of this episode is to give you so much relief. So much relief. Okay. That is my goal. So I want you to buckle up. I want you to commit to yourself. I’m going to be honest.

I’m going to allow myself to have an honest conversation now. I’m very consistent. And then I have an amazing quote by Brianna Weist. We’re gonna do the quiz together and then I’m gonna have some stories to share because. We all learn from stories and I love telling stories.

So the win I wanna share with you is actually just happened to me. I was on a consult with a lady. She has been following me for years. She watches me on my Instagram stories. She listens to my podcast. She knows that I’ve worked with certain quilters who have made huge transformations. But she has had a lot of self-doubt and it’s really frustrating for her.

But she finally, I was actually on a walk on Saturday and she messaged me on Messenger and so we started having this conversation and I said, well, let’s just have a conversation on Thursday. And she prepared herself all week and she committed and it’s so exciting for her. Understanding that it’s not that she’s not smart enough, it’s not that she can’t figure out calories, it’s that she doesn’t have the actual tools, emotional strategies to work through. 

I guess it sounds kind of fancy when I say emotional strategies, but like coping strategies instead of like opening and devouring the Oreos or stopping in at Wendy’s for a frosty in between errands, she’s actually. She knows it’s not it. It’s more than that, right? It’s more, it’s like, how do I cope when that person says that comment to me after pickleball? Or how do I stop ha replaying those conversations? And so I’m really excited for her to like get started inside the membership. All right, so let’s just do the quiz and if you wanna download the worksheet, it’s there for you.

You can also go to my website, www.daratomasson.com, (DARA, T-O-M-A-S-S-O-N). And if you go to the actual website there is the quiz there and you can take it online and then it will actually calculate your results and send those results to you. So the first question is, there is no room for mistakes.

So one is like, that’s not me at all, or 10 is that totally describes me. Five is like, yeah, some like 50. Okay. The next question, you have a very specific manner in which things should be done. So 10 is Yes. Very specific. There’s no in between. One is like, no. Five is. Hmm. 

You have an all or nothing approach. It’s either you do everything well or you don’t do it at all. There is everything in between is a no go. So if that describes you to a T, that’s a 10. If that describes you like 80% of the time, that’s an eight.

Okay. Number four. It’s all about the end result. You don’t care what happens in between or what it takes to achieve the goal. You just want to ensure that the end result is attained. Otherwise you’d feel annoyed or devastated. Now, this is the person that a typical, like, I don’t care how I’m gonna get that weight loss if I have to eat cabbage soup, or if I have to do total restriction for two weeks or whatever that is. That you would be a 10 for that. 

Okay, so you have, this is question number six or seven. You have extremely high standards. At one point, you become held back by these standards as you procrastinate and stop working on your goals, out of fear, you can’t reach them. Okay? How does that resonate?

All right, next one. Success is never enough. Even when you achieve X, you want. Two x, you are rarely content with the status quo, and you keep wanting to see more and better things. So how often does that describe you? You don’t even actually allow yourself the joy to take it in that you are so successful.

You constantly spot mistakes when others don’t see any. While this can simply mean that you are just very detail oriented, perfectionists often spot mistakes, issues from a mile away. Sometimes they seem self imagined. Okay? How often is that you? Okay? 

So you can go and and check that out. So just, and the link is actually also in here. Okay. All right. So let’s go to this quote by Brianna Weist. She said, “Everything in nature is imperfect, and it is because of that imperfection, that growth is possible if everything existed in uniformity, the gravity that created the stars and planets and everything that we know would not exist.”

So I was on a walk. Yesterday and I was listening to her book, the Mountain Is You. And it was very interesting to hear that because here I am walking in one of the most beautiful places. I remember when we first bought our house, actually we bought it eight years ago yesterday.

It was a Facebook memory and we met up with my husband’s coworker and his wife and she said one of the best things about Nanaimo is Westwood Lake. And it’s true. It is absolutely glorious. And actually yesterday I found a $20 bill on the trail. That was kind of funny, but it is just so beautiful.

 I’m, I’m listening to her share this idea that everything in nature is imperfect. And I was like, what? It’s beautiful here. It’s amazing. It’s glorious. It’s like magical. And like the buds are coming out right now and you can hear the birds and the water is just so calm. And then sometimes when I get there, the moon is just like peeking behind the mountain and there’s still some snow on the top of the mountain.

 It’s magical and beautiful and amazing. So it seemed like such a contrast when she said everything in nature is imperfect and it is because of that imperfection that growth is possible. 

And one of the things that she said that I didn’t put in this quote was she talked about how if we have fault lines, that’s what creates new mountains. 

As a human, we are unbelievable. we have backup systems, we keep trying to reproduce bodies and the complexities and all that. We just can’t. It really is amazing. And so I think about what does she mean about being imperfect?

Then there’s this section in the same book and she’s quoting Benjamin Hardy, who I am like a huge fan of he said, “Most people cram for tests while in college, but can you cram if you’re a farmer? Can you forget to plant in the spring slack off all summer and then work hard during the fall? Of course not. A farm is a natural system governed by principles.”

And then she quotes Stephen Covey, who says, “Principles are a natural law like gravity. It’s different than a value. Values are subjective. Principles are objective. We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from these actions are controlled by principles.”

How does this have anything to do with perfection and people pleasing? So Benjamin Hardy continues to say “The law of the harvest,” he said “The law of harvest is always in effect. What you plant, you must harvest. Furthermore, what you plant consistently over time eventually yields a compounded or exponential harvest. You often don’t experience the consequences of your actions immediately, which can be deceiving. If you smoked one cigarette, you probably won’t get cancer. If you spent $10 on coffee just one day, it probably won’t affect your financial life. However, over time these habits have drastic outcomes. It turns out that $10 daily, over 50 years at five percent’s compounded interest becomes $816,000. So when you make an investment, you don’t expect to see a return that day.”

“In the same way you can go to sleep feeling accomplished, knowing that you chipped away at your future just by adhering to your principles. Little things done repeatedly and over time become big things.” \

I wanted to talk about how I came to being the author of the 12 Step Perfectionist Recovery Program, and when I started teaching quilting, I would share with my students that I’m the president of the Perfectionist Recovery, and inevitably I had all these women. That would come up to me after my class and say, Dara, is that actually a real thing? Because I’m really struggling with perfectionism and I don’t make as much as I want to. I’m not as courageous as I want to. I don’t play as much. I’m in paralysis analysis, you know? I just, I’m not enjoying myself as much as I used to.

So I, you know, I would kind of joke a little bit, but eventually when I became a life coach and I started coaching women one-on-one, and I had actual coping strategies and ways to work through problems and ways to free our brain and not to be afraid of growth and actually use failure as a tool, I took a week off of work actually when I wrote this book, and the thing that has happened since that time is I have created an incredible community that is actually very humbling for me. Every day when I see women come to the call and I see them come and work through problems, and they are finally not quitting on themselves.

I had a conversation with a client today and she said, you know, I always tell my grandkids and I always tell my kids not to quit on themselves. She’s like, but I do it all the time. 

And so I asked her, I said, do you feel like you’re not worth it? That you have failed so much that you’re a lost cause? 

So going back to perfection, why do so many women struggle with perfectionism? It comes back to our basic need to be taken care of when we’re kids, when we’re babies, when we’re growing up, we depend on the tribe to take care of us. So whether the tribe is a family or foster care or whatever.

We need these adults to take care of us. So that’s why a lot of women are people pleasers because it’s like, if we do the work, if we bend, if we, do what they want, then they’ll keep us. They’ll keep feeding us, they’ll keep taking care of us, right?

‘Cause it’s harder for women to take care of themselves, especially. Back in those days. I mean, my grandpa great. Sorry. My great grandpa left when he was 14. His mom died. They lived in Nova Scotia and his dad got remarried and the new wife didn’t want his younger sisters who were five and 12 and they went to an orphanage.

So, so sad. And I did my family history and those girls, they, they never did get married. They never, And they didn’t actually thrive. They died younger ages than normal. And so my great grandpa, he 14 years old, took his bike, went to the World Trade Fair down in, I believe it was Cincinnati, and made his way on the trains.

In fact, he like snuck on a train and. A bunch of hobos saved him because the train conductor was like, oh, you don’t have a ticket. So these hobos, they got their money together and said, oh, I’ll give the kid a break. And he worked his way across and settled in Claire’s Home, Alberta. But it was a little bit easier for guys to go and do crazy things like that.

Whereas girls, it doesn’t, it is not as safe, and we had not have the same potential for making money or whatever. There’s. All sorts of reasons, but so we actually needed to make sure that we kept the approval. We couldn’t ruffle too many feathers. We couldn’t do that because we, it actually our, our safety, we needed to to get that approval.

So perfectionism and procrastination. ’cause if we procrastinate and we don’t do the thing, then we don’t get in trouble. Those are survival strategies, but we’re now adults. We don’t need that. However, 95% of our thought processes are patterns, are subconscious.

So just like when we start learning to drive a car, our brain says, oh, I notice a pattern. I’m going to automate this pattern. Our brains are always wanting to save energy. So when it says, oh, I know what she’s doing in the car. I’m going to help automate this. 

And it’s funny, my daughter just got back from, Tahiti. She was there for 18 months as a missionary, and the last six months she didn’t drive because her international driver’s license was only for a year. And so this morning she drove and it was kind of funny ’cause she was like, oh, I haven’t driven in a while. So it’s like her brain’s like, oh yeah, we have to remember these things.

So we have these. These coping strategies that aren’t effective. They’re not helpful, but they just run on autopilot. And so when people work with me or a life coach, we start to rewire. When I say rewire, it’s like we are actually going and exploring these negative habits, these negative like trip wires and say, oh, we don’t wanna do that anymore.

That’s not gonna serve us. This isn’t helpful. And then we create new healthy patterns. 

So as I thought about, what do I really wanna say? Like first of all, like this is a huge milestone for me. This is amazing that I have had 200 episodes. I have been showing up for just under four years, sharing with quilters, different ways to change their brain, I have so many more stories to tell and transformations to share and strategies and techniques and ways to help you. It’s amazing. There is no shortage. Of ways to change and to help. 

But I wanted, I was like, what would be this celebration message? And it’s doing things imperfectly and there’s a concept that I learned the life coach school, and she called it B minus work.

And when I first learned that, I was like, oh, that’s disgusting. And then she said, but your B minus. How different is your B minus to someone else’s B minus, like your B minus in this thing could be somebody’s A plus plus. Or your B minus in this thing could be someone’s D minus. Like we’re all at such different stages.

I’ll never forget. I was sitting at church in the mother’s lounge. Here I am, with my fifth baby. My friend, she’s now my friend, just moved and had her second baby and completely exhausted. 

And it was like, she was like walking zombie. She was so tired. And then there was this brand new mom who’d come in. So I’m the seasoned mom, five kids, we hadn’t been there that long. And then she is in the throes of it all, and then this mom was just one baby and just hilarious. She’s just like, oh, being a mom is so hard and it’s exhausting and. 

And it was so funny because when she left my friend, now she wasn’t, I didn’t know her. It was like, I think it was like the first time I had met her, she kind of turned to me and she was just like, who is she to say anything? Because she was like, she doesn’t know what it’s like.

So for this brand new mom. Her experience was so different and her capacity for coping and all of that was just so, so different. Every time I think about like when other people are judging other people or they think, oh, they, they are, who are they to complain? I just think, you know what, that first time mom, it was like she didn’t know it hit her.

And as a me, even with five kids, I just felt so much more calm because I’m like, I know what to do. I know what to do when a baby’s like this. I know what to do when a baby’s like that. 

I really want to just, help you to see that if you really want to live a life that feels amazing and awesome. We gotta let go of what we think perfect looks like, and we have to write the definition of perfect. 

I’m gonna tell you another story. So there’s a girl who I worked with four years ago. we were in this program together for learning how to sell life coaching. She’s probably sold over $20 million worth of life coaching and I was listening to her recently and she’s kind of a mess. It’s been interesting because she kind of got on a treadmill of selling and she was good at it, but what happened was, it was the treadmill. And so she just had to go faster and faster and faster.

And the next thing she knew she was running at a pace that she could not, it was not sustainable for her because the way that she created money and the way that she like set herself up was like, pressure, I gotta do this. I gotta build, build, build. I gotta pay all this money for Facebook ads. I gotta keep this up.

I, it’s like she could never just sit and be. Enjoy and take it all in. And it was, she had a breaking point and she was traveling a lot and she was doing all these speaking things. And she’s basically like in fetal pos and she, she’s very open about this. Oops. And she was just like, I, I got myself so riled up, like I just. I kind of lost like what it was all about. And it was interesting to hear her and her husband. they went away and they wrote their own definition of what does success look like. And it is been interesting for me to watch. I literally watched her make a million dollars. She sold one program in two days, made a million dollars.

It’s kind of when I think about the way that I lost weight, I’ve lost weight with love, with compassion, with curiosity. And I remember committing to myself and I said, I’m never gonna lose weight from weighing food, from tracking, from negotiating. I’m never ever gonna do that again.

And I remember just feeling so much, fear because that’s the way you’re supposed to lose weight. Right? Wrong. But that’s what I thought. And so I’m like, oh, am I allowed to do that? And so my story goes that I was like, okay, I’m gonna be loving, I’m gonna be curious. I’m gonna weigh myself every day. I’m gonna, commit to no sugar and flour for six weeks, and I’m gonna work through all those urges and then I’m gonna buy really nice food for myself and always make sure I have good food. And then after that, I’m gonna have one joy. I eat a week and it’s no big deal. And that the scale goes up the next morning.

It’s, I’m gonna use the scale as a tool and I just love myself and it’s gonna be, I’m gonna work this out. And so I did that and I lost 30 pounds and I was thrilled and I got a photo shoot and this girl was like an amazing photographer and I worked really hard to get my studio so beautiful. And I remember showing my husband one of the pictures, he still has that one picture as his screenshot.

And he looked at me, he said, you are so beautiful. And he showed all his coworkers, he was like, look at my wife. She is beautiful. And I believed it. I was like, I am beautiful. And I was thrilled. And I was 174 pounds. And I was thrilled because when I got married I was 164 and I just felt so great.

And then. That was in May of 2019, and by Christmas of 2019, I weighed 148 pounds, and I was like, what is happening? How is that? I didn’t even anticipate. I remember in like November or something, I was like, the one sixties, and I was like, what? I’m in the one sixties and then I was in the one fifties. I was like, I never thought I would see one 50 ever again.

Then to get to like every once in a while I dip down into the one forties and I’m just like, wow, this is wild stuff. But it wasn’t like I was intending to lose that weight and it wasn’t like I even thought I needed to, but I was just in this way of like loving myself and committing to myself and my body was like, actually, this is where we’d like to be, this is your, your healthy set point. 

So if you are feeling like you’re on this treadmill of how you think it’s supposed to be perfect and how you think it’s supposed to be, it’s probably you’re creating a lot of fear around, whatever goal you’re reaching. So whether it’s weight loss or whether it’s like becoming a quilting instructor or writing a book, or being really good at quilting feathers or working through your UFOs or like not spending so much on fabric, whatever that goal is.

So even the most beautiful nature, the way it got so beautiful was because of fault lines. And because one season has to die for another season to be, to be born, we’ll just tell one more story. So as I mentioned, my daughter was gone for 18 months as a missionary and she had so many different experiences and I’ve been imagining for those 18 months that we’d go on our walk Westwood.

And so I was so, so happy that I’m on this walk with her and there’s a couple that walks by and they have a baby, baby girl, big pink toque, she was wearing. And I just turned to them and I said, this is my baby girl. And I had so many different emotions and one of them was sadness of like mourning the loss of having that baby girl and never having another baby girl.

There was a feeling of like regret and shame. Like there was some ways that I raised her that I feel like, oh, I wish I was more patient. I wish I was more this. I wish I was more that I had kind of a wave of disappointment, but I was able to feel a lot of joy that I, I get to be a part of this, this girl’s life. And I hope that as you listen to this podcast and as we’re just sitting here talking together, that you can give yourself that same grace of Yeah, I did the best I could and, perfectly imperfect. 

I really want you to stop thinking you have to do things a certain way and just start and just like this woman that just joined my membership today, four years, she’s been on the fence. Is by letting herself be imperfect. 

So just like when we were, I don’t know if you were a mom or not, but you know, we did our best with what we had. And the same thing with me. My business, I’m doing the best I can with what I have and my a marketing genius getting there. 

Do the members and my membership feel love? I hope so. I sure tell them, you know what? I do my best and some, and we just have to trust that that’s gonna be good enough. 

It is amazing for me to think that this is 200 episodes, and it’s awesome to think about what’s my 400th episode gonna be about? What’s my 600th. What’s my 800th episode? What kind of person am I gonna be?

800 episodes? How much good in the world can I do? How much? How many ripple effects? Do not ever limit yourself, my friends. And if you want those coping strategies to help you, go and press that button right now. Book a free call. Like I said, I don’t know how much longer I can offer these free calls. I’m here to help you, and if not, I’m telling you inside my membership, we have so many opportunities to get help and support.

You are your best investment. All right, take care. Bye.