Did you spot the error? Being perfect is impossible so why put yourself through the stress to achieve what you think it is? Being 'good enough' is fine! Children survive very well with 'good enough' parents. So, if you are stuck in the perfectionist cycle, try changing your thinking... 1. Get real. Accept that you are a fallible human being, who cannot ever lead an mistake-free existence. 2. Instead of demanding you be perfect, demand that you be imperfect. It makes more sense for you to think “Being human, I will make mistakes” rather than, “I don't care that I'm human, I must not make mistakes.” 3. Aim to do well but when you don’t, unconditionally accept yourself. When you make mistakes, think “I'm sorry I slipped up, but I'm human so what can I do to learn from this mistake without beating myself up?” 4. The bottom line is 'be perfect at being imperfect.' When you do, happiness is more likely. 5. You will still aim to do well, for giving up perfection does not cause you to give up your desire to do well. 6. You will find yourself more relaxed, peaceful and able to enjoy the ride. In other words, free from anxiety, you'll be on the royal road to relaxation and happiness. 7. You will feel pride in your successes and accomplishments without shame and embarrassment about your less accomplished moments. Live It . Here are five practices that can help you loosen the grip perfectionism has on you. Remember, breaking any habit and building a new one takes time and effort. 1. Identify three situations in which you fall into the trap of thinking you have to be perfect. For each, write what anti-perfection message you will give to yourself so as to confront the situation without perfectionism. 2. Use your mistakes as opportunities to learn and improve. When you make a mistake, say to yourself “I’m sorry I made a mistake, but I'm human. What can I do so I am less likely to make that mistake again?” 3. When you do find yourself making a mistake, remind yourself to nevertheless unconditionally accept yourself. Remember that your mistakes are merely your oranges, not the whole fruit salad! 4. Purposely make one mistake a day - wear socks that don’t match, make a spelling or mathematical error, or get a well known politician's name wrong. Observe that no cataclysmic consequences befall you. Just do not make mistakes that put you in danger, break the law, or violate your own ethical or moral standards! 5. Notice when others make mistakes. Note the “normalcy” of this and remind yourself that you are not a special case such that fallibility is forbidden to you. Going Forward You can have the best of both worlds - you can strive to do well, working to create mini-masterpieces across the canvas of your life; in the other, you can be realistic, refusing to expect yourself to be perfect and forgiving yourself when you make mistakes. In combining the two, you merge passion with peace of mind, a formula for happiness if there ever was one. Make the effort to let go of your perfectionism. You are worth it. PS Did you spot the error? As a recovering perfectionist, I am going to leave it...

What does Maya mean? Healthy love is being responsible for our own happiness. I am not responsible for my partner’s happiness. I am responsible for making sure that I am a whole person, I have a healthy sense of self-identity and that I can meet my own needs and self-worth. For healthy love to exist between partners, they must first understand and accept that happiness in a relationship depends on whether the people in the relationship have developed (independently) into a whole, secure person. Here are seven characteristics of a strong, healthy relationship: 1. A strong sense of self-identity People in a healthy relationship, think independently and are willing and able to articulate their wants and needs to partners. They are able to speak and act from an honest place within themselves. Partners can love themselves unconditionally, accepting the parts of themselves that are easy to love as well as the parts that are not as easy to love. Healthy partners love their own lives while still being open to growth with a partner. 2. The ability to compromise Partners who are open to the idea of seeking mutually gratifying solutions to conflicts are more likely to have a strong, healthy relationship. Healthy partners can acknowledge the validity of their partner’s wants and needs and, even when they do not agree, still respect areas of difference. A cornerstone of compromise is finding solutions that are agreeable to both partners and healthy relationships are marked by an ability to consider situations from a partner’s side of things. 3. Appropriate trust This characteristic is one that can be determined at the beginning of a relationship. When both partners are available to begin a relationship, not still attached or otherwise holding on to a previous relationship, trust can be fostered. When trust has the opportunity to grow, partners feel more safe and may be better able to share their innermost thoughts and feelings with each other. They believe in their partner’s ability to listen and help, and there may be a mutual sense of faith that neither will be blindsided by surprises they don’t expect. Trust cultivates a stable relationship with predictability, reliability, and accountability. 4. Communication Being able to express your own feelings or opinions, knowing it’s fine to disagree and saying what you mean and meaning what you say are all aspects of effective communication. When we are able to communicate effectively with our partners, show compassion and concern for each other and talk about problems and listen well, we effectively create a road map for a partner to be able to understand and meet our needs. Without this map, we might endlessly wander trying to find out partners, coming close to meeting their needs but never quite succeeding. 5. Loving detachment Seeing a partner as a capable person is a critical component of healthy relationships. Couples can often confuse the concepts of whether their partner is good at something and whether they are simply capable of doing something. Believing these are the same thing can lead to conflict in a relationship. In reality, most people are capable of doing most things. However, sometimes partners may not be “good” at the things we want them to be good at. Loving detachment means we believe our partners have the ability to take care of themselves and their lives on their own. Allowing and encouraging our partners to have separate interests and maintain meaningful relationships with other people, and respecting their ability to do so, is an important part of loving detachment. 6. An understanding of the reality of love Love is created, and it requires work. “Love at first sight” is romantic, and we may want to believe in it, but in reality, that’s just not the case. Love is not something that is acquired one day by chance. It must be developed with trust, shaped with effort and fostered with understanding and patience over time. 7. An awareness of our attraction to familiarity Have you ever heard the saying “We marry our parents”? We may not realise it, but many people partner (and eventually marry) someone who reminds them, in some way, of one or both of their parents. This is not necessarily a conscious decision. It’s simply that we tend to be attracted to and connect with people who are comfortable and familiar. So, whether our experiences with our parents are positive or negative or a little of both, we often are drawn to similarities in the partners we choose. If we are aware of this, and in tune with how our relationship with our parents has affected us, we are often better able to understand the type of person we might be attracted to. We might be fulfilling a desire to live out what we have learned as children or to fix what was broken in our childhood through our current relationships. Though we might logically know dysfunctional relationships with our parents cannot be fixed by our current relationships, we may still struggle with this emotionally. Identifying and working on ourselves to resolve any issues remaining from childhood will not guarantee a healthy relationship, but doing so may put us on the road to a better one. Having a healthy relationship with our partners comes down to one thing - having a healthy relationship with ourselves. When discussing healthy love with the people I work with, I make it clear that I believe a healthy relationship with the self is necessary to have a healthy relationship with others. This healthy relationship with the self includes developing and maintaining a solid self-identity, recognising our needs and being able to meet them on our own and allowing our partners to live their own lives while sharing their lives with us.

What makes a healthy relationship and what is abusive behaviour in relationships comes up frequently in the counselling room. In a talk about understanding and practicing the art of healthy relationships, Katie Hood reveals the five signs you might be in an unhealthy relationship -- with a romantic partner, a friend, a family member -- and shares the things you can do every day to love with respect, kindness and joy. "While love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time," she says.

Maya Angelou is my 'power person.' When I need some encouragement or feeling anxious - yes, therapists can feel anxiety too - I call upon my inner Maya to support me. "What would Maya do?" I ask myself and I know she wouldn't take any rubbish! So I take a deep breathe, imagine Maya alongside me and I get on with it. She was a sassy woman with style, humour and talent. And she was kind. Love her!

I find this mesmerising! The swaying of the trees accompanied by the bird song. What an amazing world we live in - awe and wonder! Connect with the present, breathe slowly ensuring your out breath is longer than your in breath and let your body soften - relax your shoulders, your jaw, your tongue and your hands...

If you can catch a possible negative thought - especially before it escalates; assess, challenge and reframe then you will be creating positive neural pathways. Don't forget 6 positives for every negative. If that is difficult, start with 3. Don't forget it takes 60 times before it becomes a habit so keep at it! You don't have time for this!

I love the School of Life clips. Yes, this may have been better to post in February but kissing is important all year round! Regularly exchanging a kiss with your partner may seem a trivial matter, but in truth, it creates a vital point of connection which might help to save a relationship over the long term. Kissing, perhaps, should be taken seriously! Today, the most widely accepted theory of kissing is that humans do it because it helps us choose a quality partner. When our faces are close together, our pheromones mix — exchanging biological information about whether or not two people will make strong offspring. Women, for example, subconsciously prefer the scent of men whose genes for certain immune system proteins are different from their own. This kind of match could yield offspring with stronger immune systems, and better chances for survival. Still, most of us are satisfied with the explanation that humans kiss because it feels good. Our lips and tongues are packed with nerve endings, which help intensify all those dizzying sensations of being in love when we press our mouths to someone else's. Experiencing such feelings doesn't usually make us think too hard about why we kiss — instead, it drives us to find ways to do it more often.

Some things may be equally essential but nothing is more important than a healthy sense of self-esteem, or self-worth, and loving yourself. Why? 1. Life becomes simpler and lighter. When you love yourself more then things simply become lighter and easier. You won’t make as many mountains out of molehills (or out of plain air) as you used to or beat yourself up or drag yourself down over mistakes or temporary setbacks. 2. You’ll have more inner stability and self-sabotage less. When your opinion of yourself goes up then you’ll stop trying to get so much validation and attention from other people. You will set healthy boundaries. You become less anxious and find an inner stability even when your world might be negative or uncertain at times. The increasing self-esteem and self-love also makes you feel more deserving of good things in life and so you’ll self-sabotage less and go after what you deep down want with more motivation and focus than ever before. 3. You might just be happier.

Are you one of those people who dreads Valentine's Day? Whether you are single or in a relationship, we have all kinds of reasons for wanting to skip February 14th - there’s too much pressure to be romantic; it’s all about money and gifts; single people are made to feel like failures. It would be easy to say Valentine’s isn’t worth the trouble! But I think we can all make this an event we actually enjoy instead of dread. Here, Matthew Hussey talks you through some of the big mistakes people make when approaching the day (and their whole dating life). Avoid these 5 traps and you’ll be on your way to fulfilling love at any time of year...

Want to be a quarter more productive and get a positive boost while you're at it? Start setting smart goals! This fun video will not only explain what a smart goal is, but how you can set your own to work and live better.⁂ Produced by Flikli I often talk about setting SMART goals. Coming from a teaching background, I often find many people set themselves too challenging a goal, or it is too woolly or vague, or just not realistic or achievable. SMART is a way of checking your goals- make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Defined! One of mine is: On Sundays and Wednesdays, I will have an early night. Is it SMART? Sure is!

It's great to set specific, achievable goals, but actor and martial artist Bruce Lee makes the point that sometimes, it's okay to not reach that goal. If you've worked hard and made progress, that goal has still served its purpose by giving you something to aim for. Is it better to be a little optimistic than overly realistic if you really want to achieve? Though if you want those goals to really work, it's best to create multiple milestones, or baby steps, along the way to help you out. As that other favourite quote of mine states "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." Lao-tzu.

Jung was the founder of the idea of a collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a group-mind that we all share; something we are born with that contains humanity’s shared concepts, called archetypes. Archetypes are things like having parents, finding a partner, having children and confronting death. Jung was also interested in the way we use myths to tell stories about these archetypes with a shared meaning. What we can gain insight about, what shifts from our unconscious to our conscious, can only serve us well. It gives us the opportunity to notice thoughts and feelings, make links and, consequently, make changes in our behaviours. Hopefully leading us towards a more authentic life.