I just finished up a live panel on Instagram with two new friends, Kendra Gerein and Dayna, hosted by Stacey Molengraaf at Coach Launch. We talked about Spirituality & Coaching and it was simply amazing! If you’d like to listen to the full panel discussion, check it out HERE thanks to Dayna!

During our conversation (which was amazing by the way!) Dayna gave an analogy that had to do with eggs and as usual, something seemingly so small sparked a fire in my mind and I found myself zigging and zagging right back to the weekend when my daughter asked me and my boyfriend if we could all play school together.

“Can we play school for a little while? The kind where you bring a real snack and a real water and I am the teacher?”, she said.

“Ummm…YES!!! That sounds amazing! Let’s do it!”, I replied.

And so she went about setting up two desks, one for each of us, each with a fruit snack and some water poured ever so carefully into her tiny plastic princess tea cups. She photocopied a math test she made up that we would need to take, gave us a box full of pencils and markers to share, and set a book on each of our desks for reading time.

She introduced herself as “Miss Anna” and school began. After we completed our math test, did our independent reading, got yelled at by the Principal (my son joining in!), and enjoyed snack time at school, Miss Anna announced it was story time.

“Today, I will read you The Good Egg, one of my favorite stories.”, she shared as she sat her tiny body on a pillow, book in hand, ready to go. She turned the book so we could see the illustrations and began to read aloud, her voice strong and steady.

As my daughter read this story aloud that I had read to my kiddos countless times before, I found myself receiving it as if it were the first time I had ever heard it. What a gift it was to get to listen and take in the powerful message contained!

The Good Egg, by Jory John and Pete Oswald, is a story that reminds us of the importance of self-care, balance, and accepting those we love just as they are. It is about an egg that lives in its recycled home, the egg carton, with eleven other eggs. The egg talks about how it is “a verrrrrry good egg”, always doing it’s best and striving to be perfect. The egg shares that the other eleven eggs are not so good, always causing trouble, being loud, or doing things wrong and so it tries over and over again to remind them to be good, but they just won’t listen. In my own words, this makes the egg stressed out.

One day, the egg looks in the mirror and notices its shell has begun cracking from the stress of it all and so the egg makes the decision to leave its family and the comfort of its “recycled home” to go on a journey.

On the journey, the egg loses track of time while focusing on self-care including walking, meditating, journaling, reading books, and even painting. The egg begins to feel much better and much happier and when it looks in the mirror, it realizes its cracks have healed and it is once again whole. With that, the egg return to its family accepting the fact that it can not control the other eggs behavior, it can only control its own. The egg then declares that it is not a perfect egg and that is OK!

As Miss Anna read and I listened, I found myself thinking about my two little loves in their every day, striving to do things perfectly, striving to be the best at all the things, striving to not crack under all that pressure. I thought about myself as a child and my need for perfectionism and need to meet others expectations of who I should be or not be, what I should or should not be doing. I thought about the internal stress that came with that. I thought about all of the individuals I know that put on that perfect face and who, to the outside world, look like they are thriving, while all the while they are dying inside, feeling empty, alone, overwhelmed, and defeated slowly cracking from the pressure and stress of it all. Most importantly, I thought about that good egg.

I thought about the brave decision the good egg made to separate itself from its home. A decision to step away from the pressure, take a break, and go on a journey of self-discovery. That journey included self-exploration, self-care, and ultimately a new level of self-awareness for the egg. I thought about its ability to find balance, to heal its own cracks, and to return itself to whole once again. Most notably, I thought about how, with its new found strength, the egg found the courage to declare for all to hear, “ I am not perfect and that is OK!”

Who would have thought all of this would come from playing school on a Sunday evening? Who could have imagined I would have received this story in such a powerful way reminding me of such an important lesson in this life?

That’s the beauty of the Universe. It sends us messages and signs in the funniest of ways sometimes. It is our job to listen and remain open to receive them. Thanks to my daughter wanting to play school and have story time and thanks to me and my boyfriend for saying yes, I received the beautiful gift of being reminded that perfection is overrated, vulnerability and imperfections are awesome, and with a little self-love and care, healing ourselves is possible.

The next time you catch yourself striving for perfection, trying to deliver on the expectations of everyone around you except for yourself, trying to be “a verrrrrry good egg”, and ready to crack from the pressure of it all, remember the story of The Good Egg. Remember you have the gift of choice in this life.

It is OK to choose to take a break.

It is OK to choose to walk away.

It is OK to choose to give yourself the love and care that you need and deserve.

And it is for damn sure OK to choose to be a beautiful, sometimes messy, work in progress instead of perfect.

Give yourself the grace and space we so often need in this life and then sit back back and watch a miracle occur as you heal your own cracks from the inside out, returning to whole once again.