Corinne Austin | Personal Training

Redefining Perfect

It’s time we took the pressure off ourselves, and actually just began to enjoy living, in the moment, every moment.

 

So many of us are constantly striving for our own version of ‘perfect’.  A perfect level of fitness, perfect health, or even the perfect body!  And it’s stressful, and draining, and it’s not sustainable.  Perfect is not ever something that we should strive for for these very reasons.  It serves nobody well, and it never will.

 

When it comes to health, wellbeing, fitness or aesthetics, perfection – to many of us – is simply just a subjective, constantly-changing, painstakingly-sought-after yet unattainable destination.  It’s a constant comparison of oneself to a non-existent future/better person.  Perfection is a dream the majority of us won’t ever realise as, no matter where we find ourselves, or how many things we tick off as we endlessly seek perfection, the grass will ALWAYS be greener elsewhere.  There’ll always be something else we want, something else we feel like we need, something else we consider worth striving for.  We’d be living as racehorses, hooning and scrambling round the track searching for the finish line, except the finish line continues to ever-extend it’s position and remains just out of reach.

 

Rather than focus and throw all our energy into what our destination will be or framing what it looks like, we instead need to learn to ride, enjoy, and gain wisdom from the whole entire adventure as we strive to create our own best recipe for individual health and vitality.  This will most likely mean we do endure some hard slog and suffer some fails along the way – but this is the best way to learn!  On the flip side there’ll be plenty of wins and triumphs too – and those are there to encourage us and keep us on the straight and narrow.

 

If all you can do today is just one step towards better health, then that is all that matters – and we should say that THAT is perfect.  Every little step along the way – whether they be forward, back, sideways, or in the form of the cha cha –  is worth it.  Worth it because we’ll either loathe it, leave it, learn from it or love it.  And all of those things combined create adventure and excitement – because we don’t thrive on constant, we thrive on challenge and we thrive on change.  And it’s challenge and change that keep us improving upon the past and keeps life awesome.

 

So, if we were to redefine perfect as being an individualised work-in-progress approach to the goals that we are chasing, then perfection should be the notion of being enough right now but having a desire to keep bettering oneself.  And that, to me, sounds miles more plausible, nurturing and realistic.