Get Rid of Feeling Like a Failure for Good

South Asian culture tends to focus on the negative.  My Indian friends often laugh at how our parents asked for the other points when we earned a 97 on an elementary school exam.  In addition to the humor of this situation in the background lingers a dull pain.  Ultra competitive, shooting for the stars, Indian culture demands excellence particularly regarding grades and attending an Ivy League school.  My friend who went to Columbia often recounts her parents’ recurrent disappointment in her for failing to secure a spot at Stanford. 

Hence you can guess that feeling less than and not good enough is a chronic condition in our culture.  I find it is prevalent in today’s type A working women regardless of upbringing.  They yearn for perfection at home and at work while feeling as though they are failing at everything.

This feeling is quite shit*y.

How do we get rid of this feeling of failure?

Stop trying to be perfect. 

This helps us to rewire our brains and lower our overly high expectations of ourselves and others. There is no such thing as perfection as a human being.  We are imperfect by nature and need to accept that. By understanding the inherent err in human nature, there is automatically less to fail at!

Let go

Sweating the small stuff is a waste of time.  Cookie crumbs on the perfect porcelain island don’t matter.  We can’t control anything outside of ourselves.  We must relinquish our ownership of anything but us.

Acceptance

Resistance causes so much pain-a tenet of Buddhism. We must accept what we cannot change and only change what we can (things within ourselves).

Grace

We should give ourselves grace and take it easy as hard as that may be. So many issues we treat as do or die.  And they’re often not.  Aside from death and grave illness, shit’s just not that serious so we must try to lighten up.

 This list will help you get started in saying goodbye to your inner sense of inadequacy.

To work more on this and unlock the key to unconditional contentment and peace, email me at stresscleansemd@gmail.com.