Simply Authentic...Your Soul Voice is Calling. A Big-Hearted Effort Trumps Perfection Any Day

A Big-Hearted Effort Trumps Perfection Any Day I joined a colleague for coffee this morning to discuss how we can support each other in business and perhaps even provide some joint services in partnership. All kinds of interesting possibilities surfaced, along with a discussion about a meeting we both attended not long ago. The featured speaker at that meeting was a gorgeous former meth addict who was sentenced to a year in prison, instead of rehab, for drug-related activity. She found solace in the prison library and went on to obtain her master’s degree, remain drug-free, and found a non-profit organization dedicated to helping a seriously under-served population of fatally ill children in south Africa. Her speech was touching, personal and straight from the heart. It wasn’t a professional caliber speech compared to many speakers (i.e., Dr. Wayne Dyer, Gary Zukav, Mary Morrissey, Dr. Michael Beckwith, Doreen Virtue, PhD, Neale Donald Walsch, Sonia Coquette, etc.), I have heard in the past. All the same, I was absorbed the entire time she was on-stage, and her speech touched me emotionally. According to my colleague, several people in the audience focused on the non-perfect aspects of the speech; “nit-picking,” she said. She and I noticed those aspects, but our focus was more on the parts which deeply touched us. There will be nitpickers wherever you go, whatever you do. It’s simply the nature of the human race. And we’ve all been the nitpickers at one point or another. I certainly have! Oh, well. Keep doing what you’re doing anyway. We’re all on a learning curve of one kind or another, and most of us are more forgiving of others in that learning curve than we are of ourselves. In The First Four Years, Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote: Now Laura had always been a pioneer girl rather than a farmer’s daughter, always moving on to new places before the fields grew large, so a gang of men as large as a threshing crew to feed by herself was rather dismaying. But if she was going to be a farmer’s wife that was all in the day’s work. So early next morning she began to plan and prepare the dinner. She had brought a baking of bread from home, and with some hot corn bread there would be plenty. Pork and potatoes were on hand and she had put some navy beans to soak the night before. There was a pieplant >> in the garden; she must make a couple of pies. The morning flew too quickly, but when the men came in at noon from the thresher, dinner was on the table. The table was in the center of the room with both leaves raised to make room, but even then some of the men must wait for the second table. They were all very hungry but there was plenty of food, though something seemed to be wrong with the beans. Lacking her Ma’s watchful eye, Laura had not cooked them enough and they were hard. And when it came to the pie—Mr. Perry, a neighbor of Laura’s parents, tasted his first. Then he lifted the top crust, and reaching for the sugar bowl, spread sugar thickly over his piece of pie. “This is the way I like it,” he said. “If there is no sugar in the pie, then every fellow can sweeten his own as much as he likes without hurting the cook’s feelings…” Everyone laughed and talked and was very friendly, but Laura felt mortified about her beans and her pie without any sugar in. She had been so hurried when she made the pies; but how could she have been so careless? Pieplant was so sour, that first taste must have been simply terrible. I know what unsweetened rhubarb tastes like, and I’m sure that first bite was indeed terrible. But it wasn’t the end of the world as we know it. Nor was my first attempt at beef stroganoff when I was in my early 20’s and finding my way around a kitchen. I’d watched my mother make this one of my favorite dishes and had a good idea of the routine. But when my dinner guests and I dug in, the sauce was so salty it was barely edible. What do you do? You have more salad and garlic bread, that’s what you do! You can add sugar, but you can’t take out salt. I later deciphered salt was in the seasoning mixture I’d used and salt was in the beef bouillon, before I’d salted the sauce! It was triple salted. Yuck. The only way to save that batch would have been to make a second large one with no salt and mix them together.  Lesson learned – I never did that again! This is how we grow and learn. We try things. Sometimes they work; sometimes they don’t. Parents make different choices with their second child than they do the first. The speeches you give six months from now will be better than the ones you gave six months ago. The next time you don an apron and whip up a chocolate soufflé might be the time you realize you’ve perfected it. So, keep going until you’ve perfected it, as long as you’re coming from your big heart. Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. -Maya Angelou If you found this post helpful, please share it with your friends! Authentically Yours, Laura