THE GIFTS OF Imperfection

repeating itself, it’s hard to pretend that it’s just a coincidence. For example, no matter how to convince myself that I can function on six hours of sleep, anything less than eight hours leaves me

impatient, anxious, and foraging for carbohydrates. It’s a pattern. I also have a terrible procrastination

pattern: I always put off writing by reorganizing my entire house and spending way too much time

and money buying office supplies and organizing systems. Every single time.

One reason it’s impossible to un-see trends is that our minds are engineered to seek out patterns

and to assign meaning to them. Humans are a meaning-making species. And, for better or worse, my

mind is actually fine-tuned to do this. I spent years training for it, and now it’s how I make my living.

As a researcher, I observe human behavior so I can identify and name the subtle connections,

relationships, and patterns that help us make meaning of our thoughts, behaviors, and feelings.

I love what I do. Pattern hunting is wonderful work and, in fact, throughout my career, my attempts

at un-seeing were strictly reserved for my personal life and those humbling vulnerabilities that I

loved to deny. That all changed in November 2006, when the research that fills these pages smacked

me upside the head. For the first time in my career, I was desperate to un-see my own research.

Up until that point, I had dedicated my career to studying difficult emotions like shame, fear, and

vulnerability. I had written academic pieces on shame, developed a shame-resilience curriculum for

mental health and addictions professionals, and written a book about shame resilience called I

Thought It Was Just Me.

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In the process of collecting thousands of stories from diverse men and women who lived all over

the country—ranging in age from eighteen to eighty-seven—I saw new patterns that I wanted to know

more about. Yes, we all struggle with shame and the fear of not being enough. And, yes, many of us

are afraid to let our true selves be seen and known. But in this huge mound of data there was also

story after story of men and women who were living these amazing and inspiring lives.

I heard stories about the power of embracing imperfection and vulnerability. I learned about the

inextricable connection between joy and gratitude, and how things that I take for granted, like rest and

play, are as vital to our health as nutrition and exercise. These research participants trusted

themselves, and they talked about authenticity and love and belonging in a way that was completely

new to me.

I wanted to look at these stories as a whole, so I grabbed a file and a Sharpie and wrote the first

word that came to my mind on the tab: Wholehearted. I wasn’t sure what it meant yet, but I knew that

these stories were about people living and loving with their whole hearts.

I had a lot of questions about Wholeheartedness. What did these folks value? How did they create

all of this resilience in their lives? What were their main concerns and how did they resolve or

address them? Can anyone create a Wholehearted life? What does it take to cultivate what we need?

What gets in the way?

As I started analyzing the stories and looking for re-occurring themes, I realized that generally fell into one of two columns; for simplicity sake, I first labeled these Do and Don’t. The Do

column was brimming with words like worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, authenticity,

love, belonging, joy, gratitude, and creativity. The Don’t column was dripping with words like

perfection, numbing, certainty, exhaustion, self-sufficiency, being cool, fitting in, judgment, and

scarcity.