Mike's message: Reflections on Being Imperfect on the First Birthday of our podcast

Hi, I hope you're keeping well. 
I was thinking about what we're doing around a podcast and we have released three seasons now. It's been a year since our first episode and we're almost 40 episodes in. To be fair, we only touched on a few of the ideas that we set out to discuss when the idea of a podcast just arrived in our heads really. In fact, we didn't even finish talking about those most important ones. 
Recording our thoughts as such was definitely stepping out of what we do every day and why I was initially struggling to open up about my past and being stuck in my head, having the feelings which I am still trying to name and I'm still learning to open up and I can see how imperfect those attempts are. This just makes me realise how on point was the name of our podcast. Calling us imperfect clinicians was just that. That's what we are. We are very imperfect. We also happen to be clinicians.
Every time I now think about issues we want to talk about, I'm learning so much about myself, about us, about people around me.
It makes me more aware, more understanding and I guess at peace with emotions around me. I wonder if you ever experienced similar things. Did it happen to you? Does it ever happen to you? 
I totally get that it might do. I think that the thing you see about looking into ourselves
and my point about it is in terms of philosophy as such, it's like you have a feeling you're
experiencing. You have an idea of it and then you bounce it off the reality. A lot of  eople
tend to kind of just go through them without hesitation. Sometimes it can take me two or three days, maybe even a week to think about what happened to me before or recently but the beauty of conversation is that those imperfect thoughts and ideas, those fractions of memories recalled are sometimes most valuable in self-discovery. It stays for me in contrast to everything being perfectly analysed, researched, experiences we sometimes come across listening to others or in books written by professionals. We're not professionals in brain cracking.
The beauty of imperfections of our own experiences are why it is worth for us all to make several attempts to open up, even to ourselves, to open up to ourselves. I'm still sometimes struggling to ask all the whys that we initially set out with. Often we see emotions unravelling before us and we don't stop to think about them. 
There are so many of our own states of minds, not all of them have the same soul or feel to us. That's why it is even more important to focus on those that really truly matter to us, matter to me, those meaningful ones with self-discovery.
You got to embrace those mistakes instead of trying to be perfectly planning our response to the world around us because, my goodness, there's so much more feeling and soul to our personal opening up that cannot be found in someone else's experience. I feel like we are enabling each other to look at those ideas and to inspire those who spend the time listening to us.
No matter how hard you try or how many books you read, there is always a benefit in applying what you know about yourself to feeling that it will happen to you. Sometimes we're missing those very important or defining moments of our lives because we're trying to perfectly nail every situation, which is just impossible. We don't want to miss those in between moments that allow us to truly understand ourselves. We need sometimes to let that perfectionism go, loosen the grip a bit, so that when those moments, those feelings happen, we are better prepared and ready to react in an
authentic way. Authentic to us, authentic by us and authentic towards the others. Sometimes trying to nail every situation rather than allowing ourselves for the imperfections. Those imperfections and making mistakes is the most important learning process. Learning from our mistakes is so powerful. I think it's one of the most powerful things that we can do for ourselves and it's so visceral. We are investing that time when we record our podcast, making mistakes, learning everything from scratch. I mean, making more mistakes, trying to reach out and find people who are struggling to discover their own ways, just like we are still asking ourselves. Not always opening up is easy or improves us straight away, but having the practice of doing so makes us simply better at it. 
That I think makes this process so pure and honest and so personal. Every time we discuss any of the subjects concerning us, people we love or people we work with, it makes us better as listeners. I think we can use all of those of our personal imperfections for our growth.
I mean, we also have kids and those questions that grew in our heads sooner or later would start appearing in their heads. And by bettering ourselves, we can support those around us too, no matter who we meet on our life journey. I'm so happy. I'm so happy that I can do it with you.
And I'm so happy that people tune in, listen to us and give us a chance to spend some time with them. 
I love every minute of it.