Healthy Striving

Later today, Greenlights is celebrating our former intern, Meredith. She worked in the Consulting Department 30 hours a week while she completed her Masters of Science in Social Work. I remember the day that she turned to me (we shared an office) and said “So all nonprofits have problems, they’re just different types.”

I believe my immediate response to that was “yes, just like families,” but as we prepare to be nostalgic later this evening, I keep going back to her realization, and how much it seemed to free her.

When I first started consulting, I thought my job was to solve all of our clients’ problems and make them happy, functional, self-actualized nonprofits. You want them to be a shiny beacon of awesomeness that allows you to check something off a list saying “yes, that nonprofit is perfect now! Let’s move on to the next one.”

Clearly, that is a fantasy. That attitude leads to constant disappointment. It is an experience I’ve had to learn from multiple times, and it even goes back to my days in college when I was given the best hand-out ever by a concerned counselor: How to be a Healthy Striver.

This is in contrast to being a perfectionist, which is a limiting view of how things need to be. Perfectionists can only accept perfection; they have to have every word in the sentence perfect before they can move on to the next one. Everything someone says needs to be completely clear, and if someone is at all incorrect, we perfectionists must tell them and have them fix it. It’s exhausting, and rarely produces helpful results, since perfection is often impossible to achieve.

While it was hard for me at 19 to give up on perfection, I have since learned to love the freedom that comes from letting go of it. Being a healthy striver allows me to accept the world and myself the way we are, and while I aim for greatness, I don’t torture myself over it. I make realistic goals and work at a reasonable pace towards achieving them.  When I don’t have the perfect word to describe the exigency of an issue, I have the awareness to put in a placeholder and come back to it later.

I think this is an important perspective for nonprofits during hard times with limited resources. It’s not about doing everything perfectly, it’s about using your organization’s strengths to do the best you can. Being a healthy striver allows you to know yourself, know your limitations, and work around them instead of being halted by them.