Patience

My Father in Heaven is so merciful to me. I prayed for guidance and help tonight with some struggles I have been having, my Heavenly Father gave me the answer. To start off here is a definition:

"Perfectionism, in psychology, is a personality trait characterized by a person's striving for flawlessness and setting excessively high performance standards, accompanied by overly critical self-evaluations and concerns regarding others' evaluations. It is best conceptualized as a multidimensional characteristic, as psychologists agree that there are many positive and negative aspects. In its maladaptive form, perfectionism drives people to attempt to achieve an unattainable ideal, and their adaptive perfectionism can sometimes motivate them to reach their goals. In the end, they derive pleasure from doing so. When perfectionists do not reach their goals, they often fall into depression.... Perfectionists desire perfection and fear imperfection and feel that other people will like them only if they are perfect. Perfectionism itself is thus never seen as healthy or adaptive. Perfectionism is not the same thing as striving for excellence. The difference is in the meaning given to mistakes. Those who strive for excellence can take mistakes (imperfections) as incentive to work harder. Unhealthy perfectionists consider their mistakes a sign of personal defects. For those people, anxiety about potential failure is the reason perfectionism is felt as a burden."-wikipedia.com

This defines someone I know very well....me... what I came to realize is that after years and years of being this way (I have been this way since I was in kindergarten) I finally just gave up on myself. I worked so hard at being perfect and it still didn't bring me happiness, nor happened, so I became discouraged with myself and even began to loath who I am. No matter the compliments, the encouraging words and confusion from others of my self perception I couldn't grasp who I was and my importance. I had failed at perfection and lost all faith in myself. When I was told to work on things I would get offended inside or hurt because that was just another thing to add to the list of things I wasn't doing. I no longer felt excitement about goals, I stopped making them. I lost interest in lots of things and loss complete confidence in myself with school. I felt lost, useless, purposeless. I have been through many things and I have come to realize this is why I haven't been able to move forward. I expected perfection in every thing that I did and therefor lost the joy of doing it unless it was perfect. I stopped wanting to try new things because I was afraid to do something I wasn't already fantastic at..... Let me just say, this is not the way to live... so the good part, tonight I was guided to the answer. PATIENCE. Patience is the ability to put our desires on hold for a time. We live in a world where everything is instant. Farmers are lucky that they have the opportunity to have such an attribute in the planting of crops. We all want what we want and we want it now. This is not God's way. We must know that all things we want that are worth it take time and effort. I want perfection and that will not come without the Lord and until the next life. With that Patience we must have another attribute and that is Hope. We must be seeking Eternal Life, the greatest of all the gifts of God. We know we cannot have that yet for we must finish this earth life first, but that must be the ultimate focus of our patience and all else will fall into place. I am so grateful to have come to realize the importance of patience and how much I need it that I might gain true happiness in this life. I feel there is hope shining brightly before me. Thank you Father for guiding my way.

Talks on Patience and Hope

http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2008/10/the-infinite-power-of-hope?lang=eng

http://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/continue-in-patience?lang=eng