Hey, this is Leo for actualized.org.

And in this episode, I'm going to be talking about overcoming perfectionism.

How to stop being so damn critical of people and life. One of the biggest personal development realizations that I've had this year occurred for me when I was at an Enlightenment retreat and we weren't really working on personal development.

We were working on

Enlightenment stuff and meditation type stuff, but just when you do a lot of

Enlightenment work, what tends to happen is that a lot of emotional baggage and

interesting revelatory insights, aha moments come up for you that are like more psychological and therapeutic.

And what I discovered there is I just got this very palpable sense of how hypercritical I am.

And that really this is a theme throughout my whole life. It stretches back really far

to my teenage years and maybe even before that this hyper criticalness critical of everything I noticed myself being critical of people, of physical objects, of products

that I buy, cars on the road, of women, physical appearance of both men and women.

Emotions, critical of other people's emotions, critical of my own emotions,

critical of my own emotions, critical of situations, standing in line somewhere in a traffic jam stuff like that

So I just got a real palpable sense of that and it made me see like oh, I'm a perfectionist. That of course, I'm a perfectionist.

And then also, in addition to that, not just seeing that, but also seeing all the ways in which the tentacles of this issue creep into every

facet of my life I saw this and this made me see like oh this needs to really be

turned around because I cannot go forward to

where I want to be in life if I don't turn this around. And it's hard because these are

very ingrained habits in us. I noticed in myself that first of all the problem is that it

just makes me miserable and it saps happiness. So directly it saps happiness

because when you're being critical, you're not happy.

It's almost by definition you're angry or you're frustrated or you're upset

...