Assignment #4- Haley Noehren - Perfection isn't Always Ideal

I came into high school with a mindset that I had to get all A's, and that those A's had to be at least 95% or above. While this was a good motivator for me to keep myself focused on my schoolwork, I also began to see that it was only worsening my perfectionist tendencies. Nonetheless, I stuck with this mindset through Freshman year, and survived. But I wasn't prepared for the jump from one to three AP classes, and the effect of thinking that everything had to be done 101%  correctly would have on me Sophomore year. In AP world my notes were 11 pages long and I was repeatedly told that it was excessive. All Freshman year I believed that if I didn't over-prepare that I would fail, and that would result in me getting a B on a test, and that was the end of the world. Sophomore year taught me differently, and made me re-think that belief. I learned that no one has time to do everything, and therefore no one can do everything perfectly. I therefore decided to change my belief that I had to over-prepare and always do great on everything, or else I would be a failure. I decided that I would do everything to my best effort, and learn that sometimes things just don't work out and that's ok. I had to teach myself that failure wasn't the end of the world, and that if I did bad on a test or quiz to instead use it as motivation to do better the next time.

While I did discard my belief that perfection was the only option, I have to admit that it's not completely gone yet. The outcome of a rocky start to Sophomore year was a wake up call to reality. It forced me to realize that maintaing perfection was impossible, and it's ok to not always be the best. It's better to fail and learn than to fail and beat yourself up over it. It took me a while to realize that, but once I did it completely altered my belief on how I should approach my school work