Support4Change Blog

April 12, 2007

Category: Lesson of a Recovering Perfectionist

By Arlene Harder, MA, MFT
 

Did you ever have a job you thought you finished but hadn’t? That’s what’s happened to me on my Childhood Affirmations Program website. Last fall Renee Payon-Wong diligently arranged almost 150 books on parenting into categories such as Strengthening Families, Child Development, and Learning Disabilities. Then she put the books and reviews into the six stages of childhood development so parents could discover which books applied to their child’s particular age.

I ASSUMED they were linked to the main resources page so they’d be easy to find. But I started to wonder what had happened when I checked my statistics and saw that we had almost 7,000 visits last month, and Zero books purchased from Amazon.com. I figured that at least a few of those readers should have been interested in some of the books.

That’s when I noticed that something had fallen through the cracks. It was me. I remember telling Renee that I would link her pages to the main Resources page. Then I completely forgot!

Last week I finally did what I should have done last November. But there’s nothing I can do to bring back the months when people could have bought books if they had known about them. So while I’m making a note to myself to be more careful in the future, I haven’t beaten myself up about it. And that’s why I’m listing this blog entry as another Lesson of a Recovering Perfectionist. I want readers of this blog to know that it feels good to finally get to the place where big mistakes can be thrown off without overbearing guilt. 

In any case, I’m also confessing my error in today’s blog in the hope that if you are a parent, or grandparent, or friend of a parent, you’ll know where to go to get good information on parenting skills. When you visit the site and buy a book, Amazon.com will give me a small percentage (not much, but at least a little) that helps to defray my expenses.

And if you read the book reviews on the right side of this page (and those in the page of Book Reviews and Excerpts on the Support4Change website) and if you decide to buy them from Amazon.com, that will also help defray my expenses.

Talking about this correction of my error today reminds me of one of the April 7th Things For Which I Am Grateful. [If you’re interested in how I got started doing this, see Morning Gratitude. Here is what I wrote today, April 12.

I give thanks for life.
I give thanks for a new toaster.
I give thanks for lists of things I have to do so I can complete one job and move on to the next without having to remember it all in my head.
… and much more.

Lists definitely make my life easier.

One more comment about this topic. The other day I was assorting some old emails and papers when I came upon one titled “Words of Wisdom by Mr. Rogers.” An email shared the commencement address Mr. Rogers gave at Marquette University in 2001. After is warm welcome, he said:

For a long time, I wondered why I felt like bowing when people showed their appreciation for the work that I’ve been privileged to do. What I’ve come to understand is that we who bow are probably — whether we know it or not — acknowledging the presence of the eternal: we’re bowing to the eternal in our neighbor.

You see, I believe that appreciation is a holy thing, that when we look for what’s best in the person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does. So, in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something truly sacred.

May you discover your mistakes before too much time has passed and may you acknowledge the sacred in every person you meet.

NOTE: See Index of Blog Entries to get, well, to get a list of blog entries. There may be something there you’d like to read.