Do you sometimes struggle to live up to your own expectations of yourself? Especially in the lifestyle areas of things like living more sustainably, eating healthier, or even being the kind of mum, wife, husband, or business person that you want to be? Then this article is for you! I’m talking perfection and why perfection is not sustainable.
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Perfection, it can paralyze us, it can make us feel so guilty and affect us so much that we have the opposite impact to what we intended to have. Why am I talking perfection today? Well, it’s been on my mind for a while, probably because it’s something that I struggle with.
I want to try and practice what I preach, and perfection in all aspects of our lives isn’t sustainable. It can cause us so much grief and I see this in my own life but also in my clients and followers lives as well, particularly when we’re trying to live more sustainably or creating conscious businesses and trying to do that little bit more in the world. Even simple stuff at home like trying to put real food on the table for our families or removing toxins from our home. It all catches up on us.
We’re all so busy.
We’re all constantly being overwhelmed with information out there. I try not to contribute to that noise in the online space, I try to cut through it with simple and actionable information for you!
But I get what it’s like. My inbox right now has 14080 unread emails…
We’re overwhelmed and I see that this contributes to a feeling of paralysis. We’re getting swamped by this information and we don’t really know where to turn next. So I wanted to share my recent experience with you.
Now, I’m obviously passionate about sustainable living but I’m also really interested in healthy living and eating clean. So, I learnt a lot more about that topic, bought some more cookbooks and I really cleaned up my diet. To the point that when I was eating things that didn’t fit the mould of how I was supposed to be eating, I wouldn’t enjoy it. I was becoming stressed out when I was eating and bashing myself up about it. So, I was probably eating amongst the cleanest I had ever eaten in my life, but I was putting on weight.
I couldn’t drop the weight and my health was suffering, it just didn’t make sense.
I went to my doctor and he basically said I was stressed out and burnt out. I spent some time at the amazing Kangaroo Island Health Retreat with Sue McCarthy in December and she helped me relax about food again. I found out I was eating the right food just a couple of years ago, by eating real food as unprocessed as possible. She gave me permission to reintroduce gluten into my diet and to enjoy my dairy again (I love a good natural yoghurt).
Trying to follow all these rules in this clean eating online space was causing me so much stress. I let that all go and just ate healthy homemade meals using real ingredients. Lo and behold, clothes that I had tossed by just 2 months ago because they were getting too tight, actually fit me comfortably again and I’ve lost 2 kilograms.
Quite mind-boggling isn’t it?
But this is the impact that stress, anxiety, and perfection can have on our bodies. My example is from the healthy eating area but I can see how it can also apply to sustainable living. We may be doing our best to be more sustainable, reduce the toxins from our home, reduce the waste from our household, reduce plastic exposure to our kids, but if it’s creating so much anxiety and stress in our families or on ourselves, it’s not having the impact that we want it to be having. And it’s definitely not helping your health.
This is the message that I constantly tell my customers and members in my Self Sufficiency in the Suburbs and Home Detox Boot Camp courses. I want to help everyone see that perfection isn’t sustainable. But every now and then I have to remind myself of the same thing. If we are making these changes in our lifestyles to be cleaner and greener and healthier, they should be fun as well. It should be benefiting our families, not leaving us wound up like a rubber band ready to snap.
So I want to ask you, Is perfection getting in the way of you living a healthier and more sustainable life? Where are you so wound up that it’s starting to impact your health or having the opposite effect to what you’re trying to achieve?
Perfection isn’t sustainable when it is causing us stress and anxiety and something has got to give. At the end of the day it is your own health or happiness which will suffer. Lift your foot off the accelerator, take a breath, do what you can, and be kind to yourself.
Finally, doors are closing to my next round of Home Detox Boot Camp on Thursday February 9th 2017. If you want to learn how to rid your home of synthetic chemicals without the guilt, taking one step at a time, bite-size actionable pieces, without being overloaded with information then join here. You will receive lifetime access to the community and the program, which goes through step-by-step on how to create a healthier home environment without the stress and the guilt.
Want to learn more? Join me for a FREE live training event on Wednesday 8th February 2017 at 8pm ACST where I’ll be sharing the Five Main Toxins Found In Our Homes and simple steps you can take reduce the risk from these toxins. Click here to register.
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Laura Trotta is one of Australia’s leading home sustainability experts. She has a Bachelor of Environmental Engineering, a Masters of Science (in Environmental Chemistry) and spent 11 years working as an environmental professional before creating her first online eco business, Sustainababy, in 2009. She has won numerous regional and national awards for her fresh and inspiring take on living an ‘ecoceptional’ life (including most recently winning the Brand South Australia Flinders University Education Award (2015) for the north-west region in SA and silver in the Eco-friendly category of the 2015 Ausmumpreneur Awards). With a regular segment on ABC Radio and with her work featured in publications like Nurture Parenting and My Child Magazine, Laura is an eco thought leader who’s not afraid to challenge the status quo. A passionate believer in addressing the small things to achieve big change, and protecting the planet in practical ways, Laura lives with her husband and two sons in outback South Australia. 
