#347: Embracing Your Perfection

Embracing Your Perfection

Today we are going to talk about something you may have never considered before, which is embracing your perfection. I'm gonna tell you all about what that means in today's episode. Listen in. Hello, how are you doing today? So today we're gonna talk about embracing your perfection and hearing that, like I think about me hearing that maybe 10 years ago, and I would've told you, you're crazy. I'm not perfect. And if you are hearing that too, I wanna share with you that this is the episode to listen to, because I'm really going to talk to you about how we are raised in structures that deny our true selves and who we truly are, and the knowledge that we innately have, and how you can begin regaining that self-trust, regaining your true self. And this is work that I've done on myself over the years, and I'm still doing, but I don't look at myself as a flawed human trying to be perfect, trying to just get better, even though the name of this podcast is called Be a Better Lawyer, right?

 

This is something that is innate inside of us, that we have all of the answers. And I'm gonna talk to you about that here today. And sometimes I, I get asked, how do I create these podcasts? How do I come up with these ideas? So I wanna share with you a little insight into my process for those of you who are, you know, creating content, creating those, those things for your own people that they're interested in or that you're interested in. And this is how I do it. So there's those episodes where, you know, I have a mental process and a strategy that I offer you where I'm sitting down and I'm thinking about how do I recreate this process for you? Using my own life experiences, using my client experiences, and then putting it together in kind of like a how to, right? And then there are episodes where I play with a concept that has come up in my life or in a life of my client.

 

Something's come up in a call and I sit with that topic and I just see what else springs from that. What seed is what's gonna come from that seed of a concept? And these are more philosophical episodes, like the one you're listening to here today. I love doing both, but if you enjoy episodes like this one, I want to invite you to tell me that on Instagram or LinkedIn, and I'll do more of them. You can find me on Instagram at dina dot cataldo, or you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm also under Dina Cataldo there, <laugh>. So this is how this episode came up. I was speaking to a client and I noticed a pattern over a few sessions that we had worked together in, and he was telling himself how flawed he was, and he repeated this over and over again. And he would say that he has these character flaws just so it's a matter of fact, I have all these character flaws and you know, I gotta, I gotta fix them.

 

And anytime he felt shame, anytime he felt bad that he didn't do something, quote unquote right, the way he was supposed to do it, anytime he called himself a control freak, right? Like that negative connotation of I'm, I'm gonna control freak. He'd call himself all of these different identifiers, all these different names. And I started to just sit with it and watch the context in which he talked about it. And I asked him about it, and he said, you know, I, I really just think this is just how I am. We're all flawed. And that if I don't feel bad about it, in other words, if I don't feel shame about whatever it is that I'm doing that's bad, then I'm not gonna be able to change myself. And that's a really common thing to believe. I know I believed that for a long time.

 

I didn't think it consciously, but I believed that if I felt bad enough that then I would change. If I felt bad enough, then I was okay. I was safe. And I think I picked that up from when I was a kid at some point where I just, I, I picked up that I needed to feel really bad about whatever it was that I did in order to be deemed good. Again, <laugh>, right? It's just one of those things you pick up when you're a kid. It's just this false belief. And when we do that, it really prevents us from making change because we're stuck in change. We keep thinking about the past. And this, this whole bit started a conversation around what it meant to not be perfect. And I asked him if he believed in a higher power, and he said that he did.

 

And in his view of the world, a higher power actually makes us flawed intentionally does that. And I, and I asked why. I said, why would, why would the higher power do that? And he said, well, that's just something that they could do. They, they could just mess with you. He used a more colorful <laugh> descriptor, but yeah, they could just mess with you because that's just what they do, like the higher power does. Right? And that really fascinated me. I'm always interested in hearing other people's perspectives of, you know, what they believe. And for me, I believe that we are actually made perfect. We actually are placed here on the planet perfectly. Let, let's, let's break this down a little bit. Okay? So if I want, I'm curious what you think a higher power is, if you believe in a higher power, what, what you think that higher power has intended by placing you here on the planet?

 

For me, I believe it's remembering that I am God, that I am that powerful creator in my life. That I am here to remember that I am one with everything. Pretty fascinating, right? Like, that's my perspective of it. And so, one of the things that I got curious about, and what I started thinking about, well, what is a flaw? And that flaw, as I was talking with my client about it, to him, it was anything that, you know, he deemed like he shouldn't be doing, whether it was how he talked to a person or, you know the way that he did something in his business, whatever it was, right? So when you think about a flaw, then that might mean anything you do, that you quote unquote should not be doing. Well, how do you know what you quote unquote should not be doing?

 

Right? How, how do you know that you're doing something bad or wrong? Right? Well, it's from the structures that we are brought up in, because we could have a sense of right and wrong without those structures. We don't know because <laugh>, we <laugh>, we have all of these structures from the moment that we come into this world. But what I do know is that in the structures that we have, whether they're our parental units, whether they're our teachers, whether they are our religious institutions, whether they are our governments, the, the political environments that we're in, the the, the news that we're exposed to, right? All of these are structures, and then we are taking on what those structures have told us are things we should be paying attention to, things that we should and should not be doing. And oftentimes we'll get conflicting information. We might get information from our parents that says one thing is right and wrong, and then we go to school and we learn something else, and then we talk to our friends and we learn something else, right?

 

So inherently those structures do not have all the answers, and we know that to be true because there are conflicts among what people tell us. And then it's up to us to then decipher the truth. So let me back up a step, because what I had said earlier is we don't know if we'll be able to figure out right or wrong because we always have these structures. But I wanna revise that just now, because if we are able to discern right and wrong for ourselves between the conflicting information that we're receiving, then we already have it within us to figure out for ourselves what is best for us, what is in our best interest. And that is something that we lose touch with when we are solely looking towards those structures for, for advice and telling us how we should be in the world. And a lot of this, especially when you look at, I don't know, especially, but when you look at religious institutions, there's a lot of, you need to be this way and that way, or you're considered bad and you're gonna go to hell and all of this.

 

And so you need to fix yourself so that you can be saved. But if you really look at how that dynamic works, you end up feeling lots of shame. And the religious institution ends up having a lot of control over you because they're saying, you need to be doing these things. You're not doing them, you're gonna go to hell. And I know in the Catholic faith, I'll just speak to that one, I know that if you don't go to confession and you don't clear, clear yourself and tell a priest all of the things that you've done bad and you don't feel bad enough about them, then you're not gonna be saved, right? <Laugh>, you're not going to have that, that clear conscious. So it's so interesting when you start looking at these institutions that teach us that we are flawed, that we have these issues, and we need to, you know, feel shame.

 

We need to feel really, really bad. And that is how we are going to change ourselves, how that actually inhibits change. I find this fascinating because as a master certified coach, as somebody who studies psychology, as somebody who studies human nature, I know that when we feel shame, when we feel all of those things like a tell ourselves that we're bad, that we're not good enough, that we need to work harder on ourselves, that that feels horrible, and that that is not going to allow us the shifts that we need to make. In fact, it keeps us stuck, or it keeps us in this hamster wheel motion. I see this a lot with the lawyers that I work with who are overwhelmed and they feel like a hamster in the wheel. That's something I hear all the time from them. And it is in large part because of the amount of shame that they feel for not getting more work done.

 

And so this carries over into every part of our life. You're gonna start seeing this reflected when you start looking for where am I feeling shame? Where am I feeling like I'm not enough, I'm not doing enough, I'm not capable enough, I'm not, all of those, not enoughness, that deficit that we're carrying when we tell ourselves those things, it doesn't lead to new habits. It doesn't lead to more peace and wellbeing. It really leads us into this hamster wheel. So one of the things that I wanna offer here is that when you are looking at yourself as inherently flawed, as if there is something wrong with you, and you're not connecting with that idea that you're coming here, perfect, right? That you're coming here as you're meant to come here, you're being in the world as you're meant to be here, that there's a couple things that can be true at the same time.

 

One is, it doesn't mean that you don't look to find ways to enhance your wellbeing, to improve yourself, to feel better, to have more peace, right? That it doesn't mean that we're not looking to find, find ways to connect with that peace. It's the opposite. That's true. We're placed here to remember and to connect with that piece. So that's, that's the piece that I wanna offer to you. And the example that I wanna give to you, that is a personal example, is that when we are reconnecting with our true selves, that requires us to learn lessons, right? Not that I'm not perfect the way I am, and there are things that I want to learn so that I can feel more connected to myself, I can reconnect to who I'm really meant to be in the world, releasing the structures that I grew up in, releasing what I thought it meant to be me.

 

And that really is identifying myself as when I landed on this planet, when I was born, I was perfect, and then I took on all these structures, and then I took on all of the weight of those structures, whether they were fears, anxieties, anger, all of those types of emotion, Dr that the, the overwhelm, right? You go into the legal profession and you feel overwhelmed. What structures did I take on? And how do I release those structures? So the process of us remembering ourselves is releasing those structures so that we can come back into connection with that powerful creator that we are, that we've lost touch with, that we no longer trust ourselves to have the answer, because we've looked outside of ourselves to these structures for so long for the answer. So coming back to this example, and I've talked about this quite a bit in this podcast, is I had a lot of anger that I started noticing around the time I was a lawyer, right?

 

Like it was somewhere in there, I noticed this and I had had it all my life, but that's when I really started to pay attention to it. And I needed to learn how to release that anger so that I could find peace within myself no matter what was happening around me. Now, that is not an easy task, okay? If you've ever tried doing that, when you've got, you know, kids running around or you've got, you know, things that have to be handled in terms of, you know, parents who have medical issues, you know, that that is not an easy task. But where I started was, is simply noticing that I had it and how I was reacting in my day-to-day life. And one thing I noticed it loud and clear on was when I was driving to the office that I would feel this anger rise up in me.

 

I would feel this tension rise up in me, and I would begin to believe that people were inconsiderate and there were just horrible people. And I would just rile myself up. And I did not like that. I didn't like that feeling, and I knew where it came from. It came from me growing up in a household where my dad was very angry, <laugh>, right? He had a lot of anger. And I picked it up as, that's just the way you're supposed to be. It was just a structure I picked up. And little by little I started to notice how the structure was impacting me. I started to see how impatient I was, and I got that from my dad, right? I started to see that I wasn't as kind to people as I wanted to be. And I picked that up from my dad too. Like, so fascinating when I started looking at it, like, oh, this is the structure that I need to release in order for me to be more of who I really am, which is a person who is inherently at peace, inherently kind, inherently at one with everyone around me.

 

Now, you might not feel that way right now, and that's okay, but I wanna ask you this. Do you feel better when you're angry or when you're at peace? And if you feel better when you're at peace, why I wanna offer to you. That's because peace is our more natural state of being, and that we've picked up so much from this structure that it has inhibited us from feeling that peace. And looking back, I can see where at the time I would tell myself that there was something wrong with me. So I also had this belief that I was flawed at one point. And I think we all believe that to some extent, because we're raised in this culture that tells us we need to follow other people's rules to be good. So this is a natural thing. If you're noticing this, this is a natural thing, but where are you getting that information that you're not good.

 

It's from the structures. So if you release the structures, you can see where you can begin to become your real self again, right? You're not being told by others whether or not you're right or wrong. You are centering yourself, and you're saying, okay, in order for me to feel peace, what do I need? And you make it happen, right? We inhibit ourselves from connecting from our true self. When we continue to follow the old structures, I mean, we can learn a lot of good things from the structures. We can learn things like vegetables are good for us and sugar is bad for us, right? But when we believe that we're flawed, or another way to say it is that we're not living up to our potential, right? This was one of my favorite things for me to tell myself. So if you're telling yourself this, know that that's inhibiting you from becoming that person reconnected to your true self, right?

 

You are telling yourself you're bad or wrong for not doing something, and you inhibit yourself from becoming the entirety of your being, that spirit that lives within inside you. You're, you're inhibiting yourself from connecting to you the true version of you, not this structured you. And I know from my personal experiences that we are more than this physical body, that we are not just these three dimensional beings, that we are actually so much more and so connected with the universe because we are the universe. It's all with inside of us. But as long as we believe that there's something wrong with us, I stick myself, I keep myself in this 3D box of a human form, and I forget who I am being, which is a, being connected with everyone and everything around me. So if I keep myself in these structures, I forget who I am.

 

And so it's up to me to keep reminding myself that I am not beholden to these structures, to tell me what is right and wrong. And when I finally got this right, when I finally got this, it allowed me to see the perfection within myself, to embrace the perfection within myself. And I, I brought up some of this, not all of this, because I, I wanted to really sit with this and let it come out in this podcast, but when I brought up the fact that my client was saying all of these things to himself, like, I'm inherently flawed. I've got character flaws, you know, I know that I shouldn't be doing this. All of those things that we're bringing up shame for him. I, I asked him to do an exercise I'm gonna give to you too, which is to simply notice when you're doing it, and then ask yourself, or just say to yourself, you don't even have to ask yourself anything.

 

Just say to yourself, huh, that's interesting. It's interesting that I would say something like that to myself, just to bring it to your intention attention. Not to bring up any shame or any guilt that you have. You know, if, if when you tell yourself that I should be doing something, you're not having any judgment of yourself here, it's just an acknowledgement that you're talking to yourself in that way and noticing that. It's interesting, getting curious about it. It's interesting. I would talk to myself in that way. And what's the worst that could happen? That you do this instead of beating yourself up? I wanna ask you that if you're having any resistance to this. Because if you are not judging yourself, then you leave yourself open for change. Now, what you might be thinking, and this is what my client said to me, is that if he didn't judge himself, then he would be letting himself off the hook and not learn his lessons.

 

And I wanna offer to you that you can learn lessons without being mean to yourself, without being harmful to yourself. And that we pick up this needing to be mean to ourselves. Not letting ourselves off the hook, quote unquote, from the structures that have told us that we are bad and wrong unless we behave this way and that way. I have done both, okay? I have been learning lessons for quite a while now, 44 years, and I've done it both ways, right? I've, and when I say learning lessons, it means unraveling the layers that the structures have placed between me and my true self. That's what I mean by learning lessons. And when I learn lessons while beating myself up, which is what I did for quite a long time, I slowed the process down. I wasn't nice to myself, and it did not feel good.

 

When I started being kind to myself, I started noticing I was making much faster progress. And I liked myself more. And the people around me liked me more. They were nicer to me because I was nicer to myself. And because I was more forgiving of myself. And you know, all those layers that have accumulated over time with the structures and releasing them, I was seeing that I was also more forgiving of other people because I no longer looked at them as if they were flawed or they had issues or they had problems. I could see, oh yeah, this is the structure, this is the structure that has imposed all of these beliefs on us. And they're just in their own process of releasing the layers. Just like I'm in my own process of releasing the layers, and I don't know what their process is gonna look like or how long that's gonna take.

 

So that is something that really helped me and made my life so much easier. So I wanna ask you this. What if the horrible thing that you think about yourself is not true at all? Whether you know, whatever it is, whether you think you're flawed, whether you think you're not working hard enough, whether you think you're not making enough money, <laugh>, whether you think you're not, whatever it is, fill in the blank. And if you can't get on board with that, which is totally cool, what if you simply stop telling yourself those horrible things about yourself? What if you just stop talking to yourself like that? What would be different? How would you feel differently? How would you show up in the world differently? Think about this. If you watch the news at all, which I don't recommend, but if you do, then I want you to pay attention to what the structure of the news is.

 

It's negative news, right? It's the equivalent of saying you should be scared because you don't have enough, because you're in deficit. Because you should be worried about this because, right? Just like if you are telling yourself negative news all day about yourself, I'm not good enough because I have a deficit, because I'm not enough. Because you're gonna have that playing, right? What would be different if you watch the news and instead of telling you all the bad things, it told you, all the good things it, it told you things like, oh my gosh, people are being really kind to each other today. People are, you know, creating peace in the world today, which is happening. It is true, but no one talks about it. There was somebody who apologized to their neighbor today, which is true, but you don't hear about it 'cause it's not on the news.

 

You hear about regular people giving to good causes, helping one another, which is happening, but you rarely hear about it in the news, except during the holidays, right? Because they have hair holiday drives. You hear about random acts of kindness, like my neighbor who is amazing and will cut tree limbs for me, or a neighbor down the street who opened up an A can of artichoke hearts for me the other day. Like, those things are happening, but we don't talk about it. It's not on the news. You hear about people changing their lives, people who are apologizing to one another, people who are having conversations with one another, and it, those things are happening, but they're not in the news. We don't have our attention on them. Imagine how different our outlook on life would be if we did place our attention on those things. Other things could be happening in the world, but you're not focused on them 30 to 60 minutes every night. Instead, you're focused on how amazing people can be to one another. Can you take yourself to the place where you are no longer talking horribly to yourself and are now embracing the good in you, embracing the perfection that is already inside of you, that's already manifesting itself in the acts that you are currently doing? Maybe it's not

 

True that you're not flaw, that you're flawed, right? Maybe it's not true at all. Maybe what's true is that you are an amazing being who sometimes has reactions to things that sometimes get stuck in the structures that have been provided for you over the years, and you haven't released those structures completely. And then as you release your structures, you move forward and you become more connected to yourself. Maybe that's what's true, because when we think we're flawed, it's the same thing as believing we're not good enough. That there's something wrong with us, that we're not enough, that we don't have the capacity, capacity to do a thing. And we weren't born believing this. And I know that we weren't born believing that we're not good enough, that we're bad, that you know, oh, we should be better. You know, we, we need to get better at being better.

 

I, I know this for a fact because I have a memory of being a baby inside my crib. I was put down for a nap and I had a book, one of those picture books where you had kind of like these black and white blobs, <laugh> of faces. And I had toys, and I'm sitting in my bed and I started flipping the pages. They're like these really thick pages of this book. And I remember my mom coming in and looking down on me and smiling, and my dad walking in, and he was doing the same thing. And I just felt like this piece. And they took the toys outta my crib. They took the book outta my crib, and then they laid me down to sleep. And in that moment, I was not feeling shame. I was not worried that I wasn't good enough or that I wasn't loved or anything like that.

 

I wasn't telling myself I was bad for looking at the book or playing with a toy. I just felt peace. I just felt total acceptance of the present moment. There was nothing there that was not good enough or not capable or flawed. And that is how we come into this world. And then we're structured. When we get older, we start accepting without questioning that our parents don't know everything, that our teachers don't know everything. That our religious institutions don't know everything. That our governments don't know everything. And that they cannot care for us the way we think they're supposed to care for us, the way we're taught, that they're telling us that they're caring for us, that actually we have the ability to decide right from wrong for ourselves. We have the ability to decide the right path for ourselves. How many times have you learned in your life that they didn't have all the answers?

 

How many times have you followed their directions only to be unhappy with the path that you are on? Those are things that only we can decide. And as a coach, one of my desires is to never, ever be a structure for someone to say, oh, you're gonna tell me how to do things right and wrong. I'm there to help give you guidance so that you can find your own answer. That is my, that is how I want to do my job. I don't want to be a structure where you feel bad because you're not doing a thing. It's like, no, let's take a look at that. What structure has created that? And how do you release it? How can you release it? And that's what I help you with, right? I know that you have all the answers already, because all of my clients have the answers.

 

I am there to help them, find them for themselves. Maybe we brainstorm a little, maybe we're talking through how to create the year that they want. We're planning goals for a lot of my clients. And how do they wanna structure their year so it's fulfilling and it feels good, and they feel at peace and they have connection and they're achieving higher monetary goals. How do you do that? We brainstorm. We go through mindset. We talk through exactly what we're talking about here, which is what are the structures you're currently believing and how do you release them so you can take your life to the next level, right? That is what we are meant to do. That is my belief, is to release these structures to then get to the answers that are already inside of us. Now, the structures you've gotta remember, they benefit from being structures.

 

They benefit because they gain control over us. We give our power to them, and in exchange, they tell us what we need to know to be safe. <Laugh> the illusion of safety, right? They tell us how we're supposed to be, oh, if what's good and bad, what's right and wrong. And then we get this false sense of, oh, somebody else knows better than us and we can just follow them. But that's giving our power away to them. That's giving our control to them. So to find the answers within you, no matter what it is, whether it's deciding what you wanna do next with your life, deciding how you wanna move forward in any endeavor, it's to get quiet. And remember, the structures create a lot of noise. The news is part of that. You know, they're telling you, here's what's right and wrong. Oh, you're not doing this thing, even ads.

 

Oh, you're not wearing this perfume. You should be doing this thing. You're clearly not good enough if you're not doing X, y, z. So I wanna offer to you that yes, society's gonna create a lot of noise, and you've gotta create a way to get quiet. That's why I have timepiece for lawyers is because I know the benefit of getting your time under control is creating space for that quiet so you can reconnect with yourself. And as long as the structures control you with fear, with telling you what's right and wrong and you believing it, you're not gonna be able to release the layers of that structure. You're not gonna be able to be that powerful creator for yourself. So when you start to discover for yourself what right and wrong is, what feels good to you, what you want for your wellbeing, you get out of their agenda and you start living your agenda.

 

You start living into the life that you want, the one that you are meant to have, the one that you were born into, but simply have had structures prevent you from living into it more fully. And that has been my work over the years for myself, is releasing these layers. It is worthwhile work. It is the most amazing thing that I have done for myself, because it has built my ability to connect with myself and my higher self, more than I ever have before. And it has allowed me to do things that previously felt so scary because the structure was telling me, I shouldn't be doing that. You're risking your safety, you're bad, wrong, this, that, and the other if you do this thing. And instead, I stopped believing that, and I started living into what I knew was best for my wellbeing. And this episode is really about inspiring you to do the same thing.

 

If you enjoyed this episode, if you wanna hear more of these kinds of episodes, come find me on Instagram, Dina Cataldo, or on LinkedIn, Dina Cataldo. And if you wanna work with me, I have two ways you can work with me. One is my 12 week group program called Timepiece for Lawyers. And the other is private one on one. One-On-One coaching where you and I work through releasing the layers so you can achieve your goals with more ease. You can find more information about [email protected]. Alright, my friend, I hope you have a beautiful rest of your week, and I will talk to you next week. Bye.