Benjamin Eppel, Period 6, 11/30/22

 Atomic Habits & Growth

• At this current point in time, what specific standards have you set for yourself? 

• How and why did you come to craft these standards? 

• How do you demonstrate resilience toward achieving these standards?

• How do you assess yourself?  What adjustments do you make? How often?

I set very high standards for myself a lot of the time. I expect perfection from myself even though I never truly achieve it. There are many points in my life where I constantly say or do something wrong. Whether it be schoolwork or a personal relationship, I constantly feel like I do not do enough. I know that nobody is perfect and that expecting perfection from yourself only brings you down, but it is a common problem for many others too. This is why I am writing about this, to tell people that they are enough. Even though I have very little room to talk, I have experiences that can change some people’s minds about themselves. 

As a child, I was bullied a lot. I had a lot of friends, but many kids would bully me and this had to do with my inability to talk to new people as I was very socially awkward. It was hard for me to introduce myself to others and my “people skills” were non-existent. As I grew older, I was meeting new people all the time and had to just learn to adapt to it. I still am not the best at talking to people but the development I had in my people skills was tremendous. I feel that practice makes perfect, or well, almost perfect. My point is that if you feel like a part of your life is not to your liking, getting out of your comfort zone and working on the issue can only bring you positivity. Even if you are not able to get to a point where you are satisfied, the fact that you know you did everything you can and actually worked on it shows great development and is a skill that is essential to your life. 

I set myself up for failure every time I am looking to achieve perfection. I learned that sometimes I need to learn to lower the expectations I have for myself because I will always be disappointed in myself otherwise. That is not to say that I set low expectations for myself, but I don't expect perfection. Learning not only to do this but accept this was very difficult for me as I was admitting to myself that I am not going to do everything perfectly. But I think that’s okay. Nobody is perfect and thinking otherwise is naive as we are not machines. We are humans. And there is beauty in mistakes as we can learn from them, and I know I definitely have.