You are perfect. And you could be more.
The great challenge of for any human is to try to hold at once two truths: I am perfect and I could be more.
I first heard something like this - or maybe read it - from the complexity theorist Jennifer Garvey Berger.
And I return to it often.
Any leader facing the complexity of the 21st Century will find themselves doubting.
‘Am I enough?’
‘Can I do this job?’
Those doubts - too often wrapped in old stories picked up from critical parents or teachers - are paralysing. They hold you back from your potential, and shifting those doubts can change things from this very moment.
The closer someone can come to embodying ‘I am perfect as I am,’ the more access they have to their Higher Self: the part of them that is most skilful, noble and wise. And the less they are run by a story from long ago.
But any human who stops there leaves their life’s great work undone.
Because not only are you perfect as you are… you can be more.
And if you don’t find out what more you can be, then you may never make the contribution you are truly capable of.
The great business not started.
The potential of your relationships unfulfilled because you stayed where you are now.
We humans aren’t simply rocks, with their fixed, majestic power. Perfect as they are.
Nor even sculptures: crafted for their beauty, invoking something in us. Perfect as they are.
We are the stream or the river. Perfect as it is. Flowing and constantly changing.
We are the stream or the river. And if the stream were to stay exactly as it is now, it would no longer be a stream.
We are the rosebud or the acorn, which only stops growing when it is dead.
If we lose ourselves in ‘I could be more’, then we forget we are perfect.
If we lose ourselves in ‘I am perfect’, then we forget we could be more.
Two things can be true.
Your job is to live both of them to their fullest.
To grow your self-love until you can see yourself for the perfect, beautiful, good human you are. A miracle of evolution requiring the long tail of some of the most successful beings ever: your ancestors. Survivor after survivor after survivor.
And to live into the possibility of who you could be. If you choose to.
If you lean into the edge of what is possible and then step beyond it. Again and again.
Love and courage.
My two favourite human qualities.
An act of either will touch my heart and my soul.
Perhaps because they speak to these two incredible aspects of humanity; these two great challenges: to love ourselves as perfect, and to be courageous enough to accept that we could be more.
Only humans have to contend with such a pair of paradoxical truths.
It is a dance for each of us.
A dance required of us.
Only those who dance it well will truly find out what they are capable of.
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PS My latest book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now. Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose
This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.