What's your real motivation for self-improvement?

Hey all,

I''m just throwing something out there that I come across in my efforts to respect myself while honing and improving myself. Does anyone relate to this? Eager to hear.

An ideal path of growth for me as a person would be one where I'm driven to refine myself and way of life for the thrill of it and also always respect myself in the state I'm in at the time, as in - "I'm fine now, growth and goals are in my nature and tomorrow I'll be a little different".

A part of me refuses to believe this, like - "If you accepted yourself for who you are now, why would you strive to be more? So clearly you shouldn't accept yourself too much, you'll stop developing. That's what improvement is about, being better than you are now"
It's like it doesn't really believe that a self-respecting person has a driving instinct to grow for the sake of growing.

So I often end up internally shitting on myself in order to make myself work harder to be better, and withholding the respect I feel is a fundamental right for fear that I stop progressing and stagnate. The lower my respect gets, the more I want to be good enough to win it back again, the harder I want to work and so the more I deny myself respect.

Of course all these attempts that are driven in this way leave me exhausted and shamed and any change I do get this way isn't very fulfilling or stable and eventually I just stop what I'm doing.

I know from a few experiences that when I accept my state as fundamentally fine as it is, I generally have MUCH more drive to explore and better myself, connect with people etc. the puzzle is how to solidify that outlook, I find it very challenging, that negative loop has a strong hold on me

Does anyone else notice/deal with this in themselves?

 

Yea man that's pretty much bang on, the perfectionist tendency is strong in me as is caring too much what others think and thinking that way has got me in a lot of trouble. Inner habits I'm trying to reign in at the moment. I had a pretty big burnout the past few years from setting the bar at total perfection, which was pretty unreasonable in hindsight but seemed to just be the thing to do at the time. Massive exhaustion and hopelessness, cost me a lot.

The thing is when I am most happy with life are the times when I'm content and never questioning my self-worth but also growing (I'm going to say in an unforced way), I generally am still working hard at goals but not because I have to, just because that's what I want to do. And when I am most unhappy I am trying really hard to change and improve myself. What's difficult is I often lose ability to distinguish the two modes and cane myself for a while before I can see what's going on.

I wonder if there's any realisation you had or any experience that meant you could switch off/ tone down the perfectionism, or does it just feel like a choice?

That kind of acceptance must be pretty cool to receive from a partner. Good find