Imperfect Progress With Your Wellness Journey
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I want you to make progress. Baby steps are okay. It doesn’t have to be something that shows overnight success. Imperfect progress is still progress. Read more to find out why imperfect progress with your wellness journey is good progress!
What is Imperfect Progress?
It’s been years since I read Unglued by Lysa TerKeurst, but her discussion about imperfect progress resonated with me deeply. I actually blogged about it a number of times on my much older and disorganized blog, The Many Hats of an Orthodox Mom. Lysa says, “There’s this thing called Imperfect Progress: slow steps of progress wrapped in grace.” It’s okay to take baby steps and not make things about perfection. “Progress,” says Lysa, “Just make progress. It’s okay to have setbacks and the need for do-overs. It’s okay to draw a line in the sand and start over again- and again. Just make sure you’re moving the line forward. Move forward. Take baby steps… Then the change will come. And it will be good.” Lysa’s book focused on making wise choices in the midst of raw emotions. I think it applies to most everything we are trying to change. It definitely applies to your wellness journey!
Wellness and Imperfect Progress
This blog, however, is about wellness. It’s about making wise choices in the midst of the standard American diet and the standard American way of living involving our bodies and minds. But imperfect progress is appropriate here too and I’ll tell you why. There’s SO many of us, myself included, that try too hard to get things JUST RIGHT and achieve perfection in the things we do. But we are HUMAN. We have so much stuff on our plates and the world just keeps giving us more. How can we achieve perfection in anything let alone everything? Our wellness, though, needs to be a priority. That said, imperfect progress is not only okay- it’s essential. Too many times we give up on things altogether if we don’t achieve perfection or if it doesn’t become a habit or we don’t see absolute success right away. This blog is here for you.
You CAN Do This!
I don’t want you to walk away from this blog thinking ‘that’s too much’ or ‘I can’t do that’. I want to help you on your journey to wellness and in order to do that, we both need to accept that I’m not perfect and neither are you. Truthfully, I don’t expect you to read what I have to say and get up and go do whatever it is that I’m talking about. What I do want you to do is follow the blog, read what you want to, and take small steps forward to improve your overall wellness without striving to do it perfectly. If you have trouble with the concept of imperfect progress( and handling raw emotions), you may want a copy of Lysa’s book for your wellness basket!
Choose progress over perfection.
Tell me in the comments below what holds you back from working on your wellness journey? Do you think you strive too much on perfection and not enough about progress?
Time and focus and ambition are definitely some of the things that make it hard for me to work on my wellness journey. Even small steps seem challenging and having a vision of where I want to be makes the picture as a whole look like a huge hurdle. Having a day or two of unwellness sets me back and makes it harder to put a foot foward again. Definitely like to have things perfect even though I tend to embrace the small steps as something that is impressive. Sometimes I don’t see the progress I’m making until I look back at where I started because I’m not where I want to be yet.
You make a really good point. Sometimes our minds just focus on the big goal in front of us that we miss all the little steps we are making (imperfect progress) towards that goal. We all have setbacks and I totally understand how they make it hard to keep going forward. Hopefully I can share things to make that process easier.