Hi, this is the Love Your Life show with Susie Pettit, certified life and wellness coach. Join Susie as she helps you with your wellness and mindset so you can live a life you love. Let’s go Warriors.

Hello, I am Susie Pettit, certified life relationship and wellness coach, and I welcome you to the Love Your Life Show podcast. I am absolutely thrilled you are here. I feel so excited about what we’re talking about today. This is a great episode for you to click on.

I am four hundred episodes in, and what we’re talking about today is what I have seen after these four hundred episodes and decades of coaching people, that I noticed, there are two things that change people’s lives more than anything else. Last week we talked about the first one, the importance of noticing the difference between what’s happening in our lives and our thoughts about what’s happening in our lives. Our human brains don’t know there’s a difference. No one stopped us—most of us—and said, “Hey, what you’re thinking and what’s actually happening are not the same thing.” Most of the humans we’re surrounded with still don’t know this, actually. We walk around believing our feelings are caused by life itself. This distinction is a foundational piece of emotional intelligence in what I spent episode four hundred and one on, it gives you agency. It helps you feel more in control of how you experience your life. And it is one of the top two things I wanted to dig into.

Now let’s talk about the second thing. Just as big, just as life changing. And you know what it is, is that there’s no perfect person. Perfection doesn’t exist. You know this, right? No one is all good or all bad. No one is always kind. Always thoughtful. Always patient. Always loving. Humans are not made this way. No matter what you believe, religiously or spirituality or anything you follow, underlying all great traditions is we are here on earth to mess up.

We accept it in babies. No, we like to see them hit after their toy is taken and we’re like, “Yep, they need to build that skill,” or they fall to the ground in tears when someone eats like their last bit of cake. We’re like, “Yep. Guess they need to skill up a little there.” These are humans being human. We don’t expect them to be perfect. We see they’re messing up as an area where it’s like, “Oh yeah, that’s where we can skill build.” Showing us their emotional intelligence skill hasn’t yet caught up with what they’re experiencing in life. This happens. We’re like very accepting of it. I don’t know what the heck happens to us at like age twenty when we’re like, “You’re cooked, you’re done. You better be perfect now.”

Okay. But yet, Warriors, this is what we want to shift this messing up and learning for. It happens our whole life. We are in life school. We are here to mess up. Messing up shows us where our next bucket of learning is. Messing up is part of it because there’s no finish line of perfection. I know you’ve heard it all before, so have I. Self love, self acceptance, self compassion, blah blah blah. And yet I am spending time in this four hundred and second episode highlighting something so many past episodes have highlighted. Because I know in my deepest heart that there is more here for you, my dear listener, to learn and accept and for me to learn and accept.

As little kids. Many of us spent time believing that if we did something bad, we were bad. This is deep patterning. This leads us to try really hard to never do that bad thing. We don’t want to be bad, right? Instead of understanding that everyone does bad things and everyone does good things, this is what Humaning is about. The bad shows us where there’s learning to be done. The good allows us a moment to pause, pat ourselves on the back and feel kindness and open heartedness with ourselves. Be like, “Yay you! Look at you instead of freaking out at your husband. When he did that, you took a breath and you just calmly, you know, you didn’t react. Yay!”

I’m quite sure many of us could do with a little more. Pausing to pat ourselves on the back a little more self praising. Especially us women. A little yay me moment before we take off looking for the next thing we’re bad at. Because this is what I’m highlighting here. There will always be something. Have you noticed that you get better at active listening? Like you listen to my podcast on active listening and you’re like, “Yeah, great.” And then you realize you’re not so great at reflective listening or you get better at active and reflective listening and you discover, “Oh wait, I tend to ramble in emails and when writing,” then you get better at emails and writing and you realize, “Oh wait, I’m really uncomfortable with spaces in conversations and I always rush to fill in the space.” So you get better at that. And oh my goodness, do you see what I mean? This is earth school. This is the design of it.

There will always be something, my sweet listener. And this is a profound and life changing understanding, settling in to the understanding and the knowledge that there will always be something for you to work on, a skill for you to build up something that’s not perfect and that’s okay. There will always be something we’re not skilled at, something we do poorly, that we’d like to do better, an area we could always improve because that’s what Humaning is about. There is no perfect human. It’s our imperfections that show us where the learning is.

How might it change things if you truly believed that? Can you take a deep breath in and maybe feel the love and warmth in realizing nothing has gone wrong? Thinking back to that eight year old, maybe you have a kid yourself that when you see them throw a tantrum because they don’t get the toy in the store, you’re like, “Okay, yeah, that’s my next thing to teach them. Emotional regulation.” Can you maybe feel that love and warmth and acceptance with yourself that you’re not broken? You’re not some flawed human who needs to work so hard so people don’t see how messed up you are.

Because we’re all messed up. And yet, do you know that’s one of our deepest fears and a fear that most of us have is that if people really saw the real us and saw how messy we were, there’d be trouble. Like if we stopped spinning. Stop managing, stop performing. Stop taking care of everything. Oh my gosh, they’ll see the real us. And what’s the real us? Messy. Unskilled. Snippy. Impatient. Awkward, socially awkward, saying the wrong thing. Distracted human.

You know what else is the real us? We’re messy. Yes, and magnificent. Unskilled in many things and deeply skilled in many things. Snippy and short in some moments, and incredibly patient and loving in others. You, my dear listener, are both awesome and awful, messy and magnificent, as am I. Nothing has gone wrong. We’re not broken. There’s nothing to fix.

Sure, at different points of our journey, we can get deliberate and skill up. Like when I used to yell as a mom. I didn’t like that. So I learned new skills. But did that make me a bad mom? No. I’m incredibly loving mom who sometimes yells or when I was emotionally distant in relationships. I didn’t like that. So I learned new skills. But did that make me a better person? No. It made me a more skilled person, not a more worthy person. Same messy and magnificent model. Same imperfect and perfect me. Perfectly imperfect. Same lovable, silly Susie and the same lovable, imperfect you.

Can you see how if you really work to understand and believe this, it could change you so much instead of operating from an old belief system that says, “I’ll like myself when. Like when I lose the weight, when I stop overreacting, when I become more patient, when I stick to that damn plan, when I finally get it right, then I can exhale.” There is no finally, there is no arrival point when you suddenly become a fully polished human with no rough edges that simply does not exist, and waiting until you get there to accept your amazing, wonderful self means withholding love from yourself for your entire frigging life. And that hurts me. And it hurts you. Not in a dramatic way, in a quiet, heavy way, in the way you talk to yourself when you make a mistake, in the way you replay conversations at night in the way you beat yourself up because you think you should be further along than you are.

But what if nothing’s gone wrong? What if everything has happened? Exactly how it’s happened? And you’re the exact human you need to be in this moment. This is what Humaning looks like. What would that be like? What would that feel like instead of that heavy background of like, “Oh, let’s look, let’s be on the lookout for what’s gone wrong.” We’re in that accepting place.

Let me give you a simple example. Yesterday I walked into a room and forgot while I was there. And it probably happened fourteen times yesterday actually. And I stood there thinking I was like, “Susie. Susie, Susie. Think like it was just right there in your head a second ago.” Okay? And I sort of chuckled at myself. Old Susie, before I really embodied this belief, I would have been like, “What is wrong with you?” and felt shame, like, oh, your brain is broken again. Gosh darn it, there is your ADHD. It’s like something’s wrong and felt such shame. Whereas this accepting version of Susie laughs knowing she’s imperfect and is like, “Oh, there you go again,” and feels light hearted, as if I’m a toddler who just fell over again trying to walk. There you are, doing that human thing and I move on. No drama. No self-attack.

Okay, how about another example that’s a little more ick. Like when I’m short or snippy with my husband. It happens. Not because I’m broken, not because I’m a bad wife. Because I have a human nervous system with past trauma and triggers, and I’m interacting with another human nervous system. So what happens when I do this with my sweet Paul? I notice it. I repair it, and I learn from it all because I’m not in shame. I’m like, “Oh God, that was not your finest sweet Susie. Let’s see, what do I do that is emotional adulthood.” Not perfection, not shame. I’m accepting the both and that I’m a loving wife who sometimes sniffs. This helps me feel soft towards myself. Which leads me into acceptance, which leads into change. Different type of mindset. Than shame.

Shame is you did bad and you are bad. Shame shuts us down. Shame makes us want to hide. Okay. Doesn’t lead me to repair with Paul. Acceptance opens me up, lets me be vulnerable. Be like, “Wow, that was really unskilled of me. Sweetheart, I am really sorry.” Plus, warriors, can I just tell you it feels so much better. I’m a friend to myself. I have such a better relationship with myself, I accept that I make mistakes, but I’m not a mistake. I accept that I do bad things, but I am not bad. When you accept that you’re messy and magnificent, awesome and awful, everything softens. It literally feels like freedom to me. Not freedom from being human. Freedom from believing you’re broken. You’re flawed. That if they see that part of you, it’s all over. Are they doing that? Unskilled or dumb thing is a problem? No. That’s like, “Oh, right. That’s where my next lesson here in life school.”

So this week, my dear one, I want you to notice something. Notice how you speak to yourself when you mess up, you’re going to mess up. Messing up happens multiple times every day. Notice the tone. Notice the words. Maybe consider and ask yourself, would I speak this way to someone that I know is trying to learn a new skill? Like they’re learning piano and they mess up? Would I be like, “What the heck?” Would I speak this way to someone that I knew? They’re learning this new skill or I knew they were supposed to mess up? How about you try something new? Try kindness, not fake positivity. Like I wasn’t fake positive, fake positive. When I walked in the room and forgot what I was doing or where I was snippy with Paul. Just simple kindness. There you are, being human.

You’re not broken, my dear listener. You’re in life school. You are messy and magnificent. You are awesome and awful and I love all of it. All of you. And I encourage you this week to lean into that love. So that’s the second thing.

Thank you for being a part of the love your life family. I’ve come on here four hundred and two times every week to try to help with this whole human journey of ours. Humaning is hard. As I said, we weren’t taught these things, especially these two main things I’ve highlighted in this past episode. Humaning is hard and we weren’t meant to do it alone. We don’t know these things. Fundamental things that when learned and practiced, our lives change. That’s what I have dedicated my life for. I am here for that and I am here for you. Make sure you’re following or subscribe to the show, please. I’ll keep coming on here for you. You matter to me. Let’s go.

Thank you for listening to the Love Your Life show. If you want to hear more from Susie and support the show, be sure to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. Also, leave a review and share this podcast with friends and family. Go get em, Warriors.