… SERIOUSLY???
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Dear Clients, Colleagues, Associates, Friends and Family,
A few years ago, I was booked to deliver a parenting workshop at a school. Not a casual conversation — a real event. A room had been reserved, chairs arranged, parents had carved out their evenings, and a partner organization had trusted me with their audience.
I didn't show up.
No emergency. No car trouble. No last-minute crisis I could point to with any dignity whatsoever.
I had forgotten to put it in my calendar.
I found out when my phone rang. I still remember the exact physical sensation — that particular internal drop, like missing a step on a staircase you were absolutely certain was there. Then the heat in my face. The rushing in my chest. The immediate mental image of a room full of parents checking the door, checking their watches, someone stepping in to explain that... apparently there had been a mix-up.
There was no mix-up. There was just me, sitting somewhere I shouldn't have been, having completely failed to be somewhere I should.
What followed was not merely embarrassment — though there was plenty of that, the lasting kind. It was something more unsettling: a collapse of the image I had built of myself as someone dependable, organized, professional. Someone who simply does not—SHOULD NOT-- do things like that.
And the voice that arrived in the wake of that collapse was not gentle.
What strikes me now, looking back, is how quickly that one moment began to gather others around it. Within minutes, the forgotten workshop had found company: the newsletter that went out last week with a glaring typo in the title — despite, I counted, at least five rounds of editing. The email I sent just days ago in which I had, in my haste, copied the very person I was discussing. Not entirely in flattering terms. A story shared in what I thought was a safe circle that somehow, improbably, found its way back to exactly the wrong ears.
Individually, each of these is just a moment. An embarrassing one, but a moment.
Together, though, they begin to feel like something else. Like evidence. Like a pattern. Like, if you are not careful, a verdict.
I suspect you know exactly what I mean.
Strange isn’t it, how we would never dream of speaking to a loved one the way we speak to ourselves in those moments. Where does that relentless internal standard come from? And what does it actually cost us?
It turns out Alfred Adler had quite a lot to say about this — though he never quite phrased it this way. The expression I first heard years ago in a parenting class, and that genuinely irritated me at the time, comes from his student Rudolf Dreikurs. He said “We all need …
The courage to be imperfect
My immediate reaction was something close to: I beg your pardon? Since when is imperfection something to be courageous about? Isn't the whole point to try harder?
I understand it very differently now. I wrote about it on the blog: where perfectionism comes from, what the courage to be imperfect really asks of us, and what helps us you find ourselves mid-blunder and mid-spiral.
There is also a question at the end I'd like you to sit with.
Let's start there — with that relentless internal standard. Those "of course I should-s" that land so fast and so fluently after a mistake, as if they had been rehearsed. Because in many ways, they have.
That voice is never neutral. It doesn't sound like a flexible guideline or a gentle preference. It sounds like fact — like something that has always been there, unquestioned, simply waiting for the moment you fall short.
Most of us did not sit down at some point in adulthood and consciously decide what "good enough" would look like. Those standards formed much earlier, absorbed rather than examined — through the environments we grew up in, the expectations that surrounded us, the ways in which effort, success, and mistakes were responded to. Not always in words. Often in tone. In what got attention and what didn't. In what seemed, without anyone ever saying so directly, to matter.
For some of us, the message was clear: work hard, aim high, get it right. For others it was subtler but no less powerful — approval that came more easily when things went well, a certain tension in the air when they didn't. Even in loving families, there can be an atmosphere of expectation that quietly suggests that who you are, as you simply are, may not be quite sufficient without the proof of performance attached.
Over time, these things solidify into something that feels like common sense.
Of course I should have caught that mistake. Of course I should have known better.
Of course someone like me should not forget something like that.
But there is another layer worth bringing in here, because it changes the picture considerably.
From an Adlerian perspective, the experience of not feeling "enough" is not something that comes only from our environment. It is part of the human condition itself.
We arrive in the world entirely dependent — smaller, less capable, more vulnerable than everything around us. As we grow, we naturally compare, notice gaps, become acutely aware of what we cannot yet do, where we fall short. Adler called this the experience of inferiority — not as a diagnosis or a personal flaw, but as something universal and, in many ways, necessary. It is precisely because we feel that gap that we are moved to develop, to learn, to contribute.
The feeling itself is not the problem. It becomes one when it is no longer tolerable.
When "not quite enough" becomes too threatening, too tied to our sense of worth, we begin —often without realizing it — to organize ourselves around avoiding it. This is where perfectionism is born. Not as a genuine quest for excellence, but as a strategy for protection.
If I get everything right, I won't have to feel this. If I anticipate everything, manage everything, make no visible mistakes, I won't be exposed. If I never fully step in, I cannot fully fail.
Adler called these safeguarding tendencies: intelligent strategies, often developed early, that protect our sense of worth when it feels fragile. They are not irrational. Procrastination is rarely laziness; it is more often the difficulty of beginning something that feels like it must be done perfectly. Overpreparing is a way of reducing the risk of exposure. "I'm not quite ready yet" is, very often, a form of armor.
But armor has a cost. It keeps things out. It also keeps us in.
While perfectionism may reduce immediate discomfort, it also reduces participation. And over time, that is the real loss.
So what, then, is the courage to be imperfect?
As I said earlier, I vividly remember my own first reaction to that phrase — sitting in a PEP parenting class well over a decade ago. It landed as a contradiction, almost an offense. Imperfection was something you worked against. Allowing for it felt dangerously close to letting go, to lowering the bar, to letting people down. Including yourself.
It took years — and a fair number of memorable blunders — for that to shift.
If perfection were genuinely achievable, then with enough effort, enough discipline, enough vigilance, mistakes would eventually become negligible. And yet. Even with experience, even with care, even with the best of intentions, we still forget things we care about. We still send emails to the wrong person. We still share things we shouldn't have. We still fall short of the image we have of ourselves — sometimes in small ways, sometimes in ways that take our breath away.
At some point it becomes difficult to maintain the belief that the problem is simply not trying hard enough.
The courage to be imperfect is not about lowering standards. It is not permission to stop caring or to coast along eating bonbons on the couch (though honestly, sometimes that too has its place). It is something both more demanding and, ultimately, more freeing than either of those things.
It is the willingness to remain engaged in the presence of something we would very much prefer not to feel.
Because what sits at the center of these moments — the forgotten workshop, the ill-timed email, the story that traveled too far — is not just inconvenience or embarrassment. It is something more visceral: the experience of having fallen short of who we believe we should be. In Adlerian terms, it is the experience of inferiority, which is one of the most acutely uncomfortable states a human being can encounter. It has a way of narrowing everything, of pulling attention so sharply inward that we can become almost entirely self-focused.
When that happens, our instinct is not to stay with it.
We explain. We justify. We minimize. We withdraw. Or we become so consumed with how we appear, what this reveals, how to restore our image, that we lose sight entirely of what actually needs to happen next.
The courage to be imperfect is the willingness to interrupt that movement.
Not by pretending the mistake doesn't matter. Not by performing cheerful indifference to our own failures. But by refusing to let the moment collapse into a verdict — and then, slowly, turning attention outward. Toward what is needed. What could be repaired. What the next step is.
After the missed workshop, what actually mattered was not the preservation of my reputation as someone reliable. It was the phone call I needed to make, the apology I needed to offer, the rescheduling that needed to happen. The moment I stopped asking "what does this say about me?" and started asking "what is needed here?" — things could move again.
This shift — away from ego-based evaluation and toward the needs of the situation — is, I think, the most significant thing embedded in this idea. And it is why I come back, again and again, both in my own life and in coaching conversations, to this very simple question:
What would you attempt if you did not need to get it perfect?
Most people know the answer almost immediately.
And that answer tends to point directly to the places where courage — not perfection — is what is actually required.
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.
It is not a line about giving up. It is a line about participation. About understanding that wholeness does not come from having no cracks, but from being willing to keep ringing despite them.
So what actually helps?
Not eliminating the experience of falling short — that is neither possible nor, actually, desirable. But changing our relationship to it.
The first shift is perhaps the simplest and the hardest: noticing.
The internal response to a mistake is often so fast, so well-rehearsed, that it barely registers as a response at all. It presents itself as fact. Simply recognizing it — ah, there's my familiar script — creates just enough space to question whether what it is saying is actually true, or merely very practiced.
From there, another shift becomes possible: treating the mistake as information rather than as evidence of something permanent about you.
Not minimizing what happened, but asking different questions. What contributed to this? Was I overextended, distracted, under more pressure than I realized? Is there something here worth adjusting — in how I organize myself, how I communicate, how I pace my days? Seen this way, the mistake becomes something that can be used, rather than something to be defended against.
There is also the question of how we speak to ourselves in these moments.
Most of us can extend perspective and understanding to others almost without thinking — we take in context, intention, effort, the full picture of a person. And yet when it comes to ourselves, that same perspective tends to disappear entirely. The internal conditions that make learning and repair actually possible — enough safety, enough room to breathe — cannot exist in an atmosphere of unrelenting self-judgment. Extending even a fraction of the same consideration inward is not self-indulgence. It is what makes the next move possible.
And then, perhaps most importantly: where we put our attention next.
After a mistake, attention tends to collapse inward. We look at ourselves — at what we did, how we appear, what it means about us. But if we stay there, we stay stuck. We are, in a sense, looking down at our own feet — tracking every stumble, every place we didn't quite land — and that makes it very hard to move.
At some point, we have to lift the gaze.
Not to ignore what happened, but to reorient toward the horizon: the person involved, the situation at hand, the problem still needing solving, the contribution still possible.
Over time, these shifts accumulate. Not dramatically — the internal voice doesn't disappear. But it becomes less absolute. Recovery happens faster. And participation — that central Adlerian word — becomes less conditional on feeling entirely ready, entirely confident, entirely good enough before stepping in.
This is, not coincidentally, exactly the work I will be doing with a small group beginning April 2nd, in a program I'm calling Courage in Practice — because understanding all of this intellectually is one thing, and living it in real time, with real stakes and real situations, is something else entirely. If you'd like to know more, the information is here.
I also had the chance to explore some of these ideas recently in conversation on the Adlerian Network podcast, linked here, if you'd like to go deeper.
And if there is one thing I'd ask you to carry with you from this, it is simply the question:
What would you do — what would you say, what would you
attempt — if you no longer needed to get it right first?
Sit with that one for a while.
Next month, we are going to look at something that is, in many ways, the shadow side of this conversation: what happens when, instead of moving through our imperfections and finding our way back to contribution, we get stuck in the story of what was done to us. The seduction — and the real cost — of victimhood.
But that, as I said, is for another time.
Warmly,
Pascale | The Challenge Coach
