What's Best for You?

What’s Best for YOU?

This a question to ponder for a moment. Do you ask yourself this question when making a decision about what to do and how to spend your time? More likely than not, no. Maybe of course when we are making bigger decisions because we give conscious thought to it. But for most of our day, we are on autopilot!

And if we do ask the questions, we think we KNOW the answer but don’t often practice it in our daily lives. If we did, we wouldn’t probably feel the way many of us do with rising issues of metabolic syndrome, mental health issues, and burnout.

In a LIVE last night, I dove into this question and asked a few more to ponder. In the session, we end with a Loving Kindness Meditation (audio meditation).

Optimizing our Lives

In an effort to connect to, and cultivate a deep relationship with, our Inner Best Self or Inner Eudaimon, it’s important to consider the difference between optimal vs perfect. Often we assume we are striving for what’s best, hidden behind a cloak of perfectionism. This drive is not coming from our best Self but is a part created to protect parts of us. Perfectionism can be depilating and actually stops us from living our life fully.

As Carl Rogers pointed out, “The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.” And it requires a map that guides us in that direction. Unfortunately for many our map or guiding system has been programmed to include limiting beliefs that move us in the wrong direction. (more on that topic next week!)

Perfectionism vs Optimalism

In his book, Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar says, “the optimalism ideal is not a distant shore to be reached but a distant star that guides us and can never be reached.” That can be discouraging to some people because we want to arrive and be able to state “I won” at life. But the very idea may miss the point of life itself - the journey not the destination as the cliche reminds us.

He goes on to describe: “… psychologists today differentiate between positive perfectionism, which is adaptive and healthy, and negative perfectionism, which is maladaptive and neurotic. I regard these two types of perfectionism as so dramatically different in both their underlying nature and their ramifications that I prefer to use entirely different terms to refer to them.”

Perfectionism - REJECTS the constraints of reality

Optimalism - EMBRACES the constraints of reality

“Optimalists tend to be benefit finders—the sort of people who find the silver lining in the dark cloud, who make lemonade out of lemons, who look on the bright side of life, and who do not fault writers for using too many cliches. With a knack for turning setbacks into opportunities, the Optimalist goes through life with an overall sense of optimism.

Paradoxically, our overall self-confidence and our belief in our own ability to deal with setbacks may be reinforced when we fail, because we realize that the beast we had always feared—is not as terrifying as we thought it was.

Tal Ben-Shahar

Perfectionists on the other hand reject the constraints of reality which can look like many different things. People assume that the product in the end isn’t restrained by the resources available: that they SHOULD be able to do something regardless of the resources available. Perfectionists see WHAT they want, but ignore/rejects the HOW to get it as an important component of the process. Perfectionists believe that THEY should be able to do it even if they don’t think the same for others. Somehow the rules that apply to them