It’s 6.40pm on Thursday night. I’ve just missed my boxing class because I’ve had to attend to urgent business at work. I’m annoyed because I lost my perfect streak of attending boxing classes… not only that – I’m not happy with the quality of my stretch sessions this week (there was more than one!) and I wasn’t able to take public transport once this week (It was raining for most of the week). Still, there I was, standing at the front door to my work parking lot staring dismally at the “Productive: Habit Tracker” app on my phone and swiping left to say “skip”.

My first thought was “Did I not choose doable goals?”. I wondered how, with the few goals I placed onto the app I could still have an imperfect week. The goals I chose were meant to be completely doable, bad week or not.

But before I could go down the blame train and tell myself how fail I was. My colleague said something to the effect of “You know, you don’t always have to be perfect.”

My mind paused, and all of a sudden stopped itself from descending down the “I suck so much” pattern. Suddenly, it was a learning opportunity – all week I’ve been listening to a podcast called “Crappy to Happy” and one of the things that really resonated with me was their topic of “Perfectionism”  – Particularly –  How stupid it is to expect perfection from ones self; and how often we let it derail good progress.

So this was not a perfect week.

I didn’t leave work EXACTLY on time everyday – but to be fair; I’ve left earlier than usual.

I didn’t always eat the lunch I brought from home. But this week I actually had PACKED lunch from home to toss aside! I was prepared!

I had a chocolate biscuit – it was HUGE! – ate a couple of Ferrero’s – not in ONE go; but I still went to the gym twice this week and also ate my healthy snacks of baby cucumber and yellow tomatoes first.

I was rushed and forgot my keys – and still found time to meditate and stretch.

So what if it wasn’t perfect!

The important thing is to keep trying. Cause an imperfect week of trying is clearly better than an imperfect week where I’m NOT trying!