Growing up, I always thought that if I could do everything perfectly, I would be safe and happy in life.

Throughout my life, I made absolute perfection to be my goal in everything I did. I prided myself on the fact that I hardly ever made mistakes, and things came easy to me.

And then, reality struck. One day I realized the truth that I could not do anything perfectly in life. Even the things I thought were perfect - I had cognitive disassociation about and was believing lies about my life as not to feel the pain of admitting that my life was not perfect!

I think everyone can relate to this in some way or another.

You will never achieve your goals in life if perfection is your goal.

Sure, you might hit some micro-goals - small milestones of perfection, but those big dreams will always escape you.

Perfectionism is a pursuit to validate ourselves. It proves to us and everyone else around us that we know what we are doing, and they can trust us - or so we think.

Underneath, we are lying to ourselves and everyone else about what is going on deep down inside us. We feel like a failure at nearly everything and are avoiding that feeling with everything inside of us to avoid pain or punishment!

Sadly, this is the cycle many people are on. I was on this cycle for years.

Failure is one of the greatest things we can ever experience in life.

When we fail, we give ourselves a chance to learn.

Perfection is a pipe dream. We will never achieve perfection. Even if you live a life that you think is perfect, it's the flaws that make it beautiful. Eventually, we all come face to face with our humanity.

Did you know that you will achieve your goals faster by embracing failure than avoiding it?

So often people believe that to reach their goals, they have to do everything perfectly.

We could believe this based on an experience we had as a child - or something else.

Ultimately we must embrace failure as a teacher, to guide us to the things we need to learn.

Failure is such an excellent teacher and is one of the best things we can experience because it points us to the truth!

When we try to pretend everything is perfect and live a facade, we will repeat the same negative deadly patterns in our life.

When we embrace the fact that maybe we don't know everything, and it's ok to make mistakes, then we can grow!

This week, please make a list of 3 things that you're avoiding doing out of fear of failure.

Pick one of them, the easiest one to do.

How bad would failure hurt? What would happen?

Why are you avoiding it?

What would the benefits be?

Start to make a declaration to go after this thing - and a plan to execute on your goals.

We can not accomplish anything when we fear to fail at it. But we can when we are ok with failure happening and learn to grow.

We must open ourselves up to learning instead of stuffing down the part of us that wants to learn, treating that part of us as an inadequate version of ourselves.

Listen to the voice inside of you that is pointing to what you need to do, and start making a plan to take action this week!

Failure will not define you when you embrace it as a teacher - learning to grow from the lessons you learn along the way.

No one is going to come alongside you to pick you up either after failure. You are the only one that can kickstart your life to go after your dreams.

Are you ready? You are worth it. Let's go this week.