Narrator (00:03): This recording is an offering of Networks for Training and Development's Online University. Gerry Arango (00:12): Hello and welcome to the Network's Healing Circle Calls for February 2022. Healing Circle Calls happened on the first Monday of every month. And you can listen live or listen later on the Healing Circle podcast. Gerry Arango (00:26): My name is Gerry Arango and I'm a longtime friend of Networks. And I'd like to start by saying that "I, myself, am made entirely flaw, stitched together with good intentions." This is a quote by a writer named Augusten Burroughs and it always makes me kind of smile. And I thought it was kind of a gentle way to look at what I wanted to talk about today. And I hope it made you smile a little too. I got my very first Kindle this past Christmas. I am more of an audio book girl, but I wanted to try a Kindle too. So I started looking at the books and I came across Brené Brown books, which I know that author. Gerry Arango (01:15): And when I came across one with a rather kind of intriguing title called The Gift of Imperfection . I thought about buying it, but I recognized the cover because you can see the cover on a Kindle. And I realized that my late husband Al had been given this book years ago before we even knew who Brené Brown was. And I knew we had it. I looked around the house and found it on a bookshelf. The book appeared to be untouched, even though it's been in the house for like 10 years. I wondered as I did when Al first showed it to me, why someone gave him that book, The Gift of Imperfection. But I think after reading it, I've grown to understand just by the title alone, as I think of him. And I know why maybe it was something as I looked at it, that I could stand to read too. Gerry Arango (02:03): I thought it might be nice to share it with you as I understand it today. So my imperfections are pretty obvious to me as part of my story of who I am, but you know what, maybe that's fine. That's not a bad thing because trying to please everyone and trying to perform for everyone and trying to appear perfect - no one is perfect. That leaves me exhausted. Brené Brown invites us to embrace the imperfections in our stories, by looking at them through what she refers to as guideposts. So I want to share the guideposts with you in a minute or two here. As I read each guidepost I know that they are true of me to a greater or lesser extent. Listen with me to what we've been asked to "cultivate," that's her word, in ourselves in order to be okay with our stories full of flaws, stitched together with good intentions. Our stories matter and our flaws and our good intentions matter , because we matter. Gerry Arango (03:03): I keep thinking about how hard it is to believe this, but we really don't need to please everyone. We don't need to perform for everyone. We don't need to try to be or to appear perfect, but we have to let go of some stuff to get to where we live like that. First I'm going to read through what we're asked to do to be okay with the imperfections, which is just the first part of each of the 10 Guideposts, because this part has two parts. I'm going to read the first piece and then I'm going to add in the author Brené's suggestion for what to let go out to get to them. If you say, "What does she mean by that?" as I'm reading them, you should know I'm saying the same thing, but chances are, maybe we both already know. Gerry Arango (03:49): You may have your own definition. I may have mine. Here's the first part of each guidepost. Just listen and give it a second. I will back. Gerry Arango (04:00): Number one, cultivate authenticity. Number two, cultivate self compassion. Number three, cultivate a resilient spirit. Number four, cultivate gratitude and joy. Number five, cultivate intuition and trusting faith. Number six, cultivate creativity. Number seven, cultivate play and rest. Number eight, cultivate calm and stillness. Number nine, cultivate meaningful work. And number 10 cultivate laughter, song, and dance. Gerry Arango (04:35): Do any of these resonate with your story? And do they kind of mean anything to you in your quest to just plain old like yourself - flaws, stitched together with good intentions - at all? For me, I feel like I've cultivated a bit of each of them in my many decades on the earth, but I find it really easy to slide back into the traits that the author is going to share, I'm going to share with you, that she said to let go of. Those are coming up in a second. Gerry Arango (05:09): If you read the guideposts in their entirety, they're going to sound like this. Some are pretty self explanatory and some I might elaborate on a little just to clarify, in my head anyway, the way I see it. For me, I'm thinking about working on maybe the two or three that I backslide on the most as a place to start in kind of finding the gifts of my imperfections. And so you've maybe seen what you'd like to do. So again, I'm going to elaborate a little bit more on what she was saying in some of these just to maybe make them clearer, it helped me. I hope it helps you. Gerry Arango (05:43): Number one, cultivate authenticity and believing you're okay just the way you are by letting go of what other people think. You know what it may surprise you, it always surprises me that the world will still spin even if you don't please everybody. Oscar Wilde once said, I like this, "Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken." Gerry Arango (06:08): Number two, cultivate self-compassion by letting go of perfectionism because no one, no one, no one, no one is perfect. That's me saying that part. I also say down with photoshopping and down with photo filters. There's a crack in everything and that's how the light gets through. You shouldn't even try to be perfect because no one is. Gerry Arango (06:31): Cultivate a resilient spirit by letting go of numbing your emotions and letting go of powerlessness. Something that works to me sometimes is realizing that no matter what has happened to me, I am not the first person to experience that tough thing. And sometimes realizing that can help with making a connection. Can I tell myself the things I need to hear? If something happened to someone I cared about, What would I say to comfort them? Maybe I should say that to comfort myself and realize that it's going to be okay, nothing that's happened to me hasn't happened to others. We're all in this together that way. Gerry Arango (07:16): Cultivate gratitude and joy by letting go of scarcity and fear of the dark. This one made me think about someone I knew who I said, "You should get a cat." And they said, "I thought about it, but the cat will die." And I thought you don't want to get a cat because it might die? Wow. I had a cat. It lived to be 20, okay, because cats live a long time. And I just thought how much joy that cat brought for me, and maybe I gave the cat little joy too, I don't know if cats like joy, have joy. Look what I would have lost if I was scared of what would've happened at the end or that bad thing that the cat would've died. It was such a wonderful thing to have this cat. And that was what I was happy about and joyful about and grateful for. I don't know, weird example, but yeah. Gerry Arango (08:08): Cultivate intuition and trusting faith by letting go of the need for certainty. And where that one really lend itself to the serenity prayer, asking for the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change, the wisdom to change the things, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Kind of, as simple as that. You can grow your intuition and your faith by just realizing that it's a connection that you need to make to the universe kind of. Gerry Arango (08:43): Cultivate creativity, number six, by letting go of comparison. Another story, I took an adult tap class late in life and I had never done any kind of tap before. I looked around and it seemed to me everyone there had tapped danced better than me and I'd taken dance, but I looked around and I saw a whole bunch of people who would tapped dance. And I saw a teacher who every now and then go, "Gerry you got it right." You know what I did?I quit. And how sad, because that creativity was shot. It was the end of my tap career before it barely even started. And it was because I was comparing and despairing that I wasn't as good as the others. And what a waste. When the recital finally came, there were only a handful of women on the stage in my class, like 10 or 15 had disappeared, too. Did we all compare ourselves and leave that opportunity? Gerry Arango (09:43): The seventh Guidepost is, cultivate play and rest by letting go of exhaustion as your status symbol and productivity as self worth. With my old job, that was big. If you weren't exhausted beyond words, you were not doing the job. Although, that wasn't really true. Gerry Arango (10:04): The next one, cultivate calm and stillness by letting go of anxiety as a lifestyle. I think this one I do every day and I think about every day, just make time for the quiet. It doesn't, come to you. You have to look for it. Gerry Arango (10:21): Number nine, cultivate meaningful work by letting go of self doubt and "supposed to." Value what's meaningful to you, Not what you're supposed to be or should be doing. Gerry Arango (10:35): Cultivate laughter, song ,and dance by letting go of being cool and always in control. Brené says, I like this, "Be awkward, stay awkward. It's okay." I always tell my students, that whole control thing, I tell my students that when they talk about, they'll say about controlling the class, I always say, "You know what, the only person you can control is yourself." Gerry Arango (11:00): Those are the 10 Guideposts with a little extra editorializing from me. Hope you were okay with that. I know I have a couple of ideas for the ones I'm going to take a stab at cultivating a bit more and I wonder about you. Gerry Arango (11:12): Our stories are made entirely with loss stitched together with good intentions. And I think that's just fine.if I were to combine what Brené Brown was saying and what Augusten Burrows was saying, I would say "Our story, with all the flaws and good intentions, they matter because we matter." I'm going to add a little Leonard Cohen in here because the light comes in through the crack. The Gift of Imperfection, I think it's a book to check out. It celebrated its 10th anniversary of publication last year. I don't know how I didn't read it before, especially because it was on my bookshelf all these years. I hope you give it a chance. Gerry Arango (11:53): Let's close by letting go ourselves of some things, whichever one you feel like really speak to you because we can like ourselves just the way we are, continue to tweak and work on things and just say this is what I want to do, and this is how I want to be in with my life. Try this with me as you're listening, I'm just going to put the "let go-s" now, close your eyes and make a fist. If you hear something that you want to let go of, open your fist, and let it blow away. So as you listen, think about it. You may want to let go of all of them or just a couple or none, but let's do it. Gerry Arango (12:47): Close your eyes, relax, make a fist, fill it with the let go and then see what you can let go of, whatever you want. Let go of what people think. Let go of perfectionism. Let go of numbing and powerlessness. Let go of scarcity and fear of the dark. Let go of the need for certainty. Let go of comparison. Let go of exhaustion as our status symbol and productivity as self worth. Let go of anxiety as a lifestyle. Let go of self doubt and "supposed to." Let go of being cool and always in control. Gerry Arango (14:10): I'm going to try it, you try too. Be yourself because everyone else is already taken. Gerry Arango (14:18): Thanks for stopping by and remember Network's Healing Circle Calls are always on the first Monday of the month at 8:00 PM Eastern time and we hope you'll join us for next month's call. Don't forget Healing Circle is also a podcast. You can listen to Circle Calls whenever you want on the Healing Circle podcast. Bye. Narrator (14:42): Thank you for listening. We hope the information provided was helpful. Don't forget to stop by our website and take advantage of all we have to offer. 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