Why Acceptance Beats Perfection Every Single Time

What happens when the details slip through your fingers and you decide not to beat yourself up about it? Like when you show up to an event on the wrong day or forget if you put an appointment on your calendar. In this episode of The Empowered and Embodied Show, we explore how self-awareness and acceptance open the door to something bigger: self-liberation.

We share stories of letting go of judgment, refusing to waste energy on frustration, and finding freedom in the messy moments of life. Along the way, we talk about limiting beliefs, the ripples our choices create, and how embracing mind, body, soul, and strategy wholeness gives us back our energy and ease.

If you’ve ever felt stuck in the “shoulds,” this conversation is a reminder that it’s not about the details... it’s about the freedom that comes when you let them go.

Key takeaways in this episode:

• Acceptance gives you freedom and energy.
• Self-awareness is just the first step toward self-liberation.
• Wholeness means aligning mind, body, soul, and strategy.
• Letting go of judgment creates more joy and ease.
• Your choices create ripples that impact others.
• Inner change fuels collective change.

Key moments in this episode:

00:00 Welcome & Introductions

02:09 Attention to Detail – when calendars, events, and memory go sideways

05:21 Shifts in Self-Awareness – noticing yourself in a new way

08:31 The Journey to Self-Liberation – why awareness is just the beginning

09:52 Understanding Self-Liberation – what freedom really means for us

14:15 Acceptance and Wholeness – embracing all parts of yourself, even the messy ones

20:58 Self-Liberation and Acceptance – how letting go gives you back energy and ease

24:50 Freedom from Social Conventions – breaking free from the “shoulds”

29:39 Integrating Self-Liberation into Daily Life – practical ways to live this out

36:35 The Ripple Effect of Personal Work – how your shifts change more than just you

39:25 Embracing the Process of Self-Discovery – honoring the journey, not just the destination

Join Kim at the Drop the Mic UnSummit - Sept 15-18, 2025.
https://dropthemic.teachery.co/buy?a=nYpjqnTp

Join a circle of changemakers committed to leading with purpose, presence and ease inside Kim's Rising Visionaries mentorship program.

Reclaim your career and confidence during midlife through Louise's Rise & Redefine program.

If you’re loving this show, come check out the Feminist Podcasters Collective, where creators like us are uplifting diverse voices and driving meaningful change. If you’re looking for new shows to fill your feed, head to https://feministpodcasterscollective.com to explore everything we have to offer.

Transcript

Empowered & Embodied Show

Episode: 176 

Title: Why Acceptance Beats Perfection Every Single Time 

Release Date: September 9, 2025 

Hosts: Kim Romain and Louise

(01:33) Kim Romain: Hello, hello, hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Empowered and Embodied show. I am one of your co-hosts, Kim Romain, joined as always by my lovely and silly co-host.

(01:42) Louise: I love the end. That's me, I'm Louise. I'm giggling because maybe we need to do some behind the scenes, because how we enter into the show from the green room is often in mid-sentence and it's just, "Just go." And today it was a little more like, "What does that look like? What is go?" And it's like, "Yeah, you hit the button and we go into the next room."

(02:09) Kim Romain: We've only done 170 of these. You can't expect me to remember what to do every time. We started our conversation in the green room today talking about, "What are the details?"

(02:16) Louise: Yes, we did. Yeah, I'm having this battle. I don't think it's even a battle, because my attention to detail is just not existent. It's not like I'm battling to get it back. It's just left the building completely.

(02:42) Kim Romain: And I responded with, "What's a detail?"

(02:45) Louise: No!

(02:47) Kim Romain: I don't know that I even know what that is anymore.

(02:49) Louise: It is absolutely mind-blowing to me, and how I even created a business in the first place, how I used to run million-dollar projects when I can't pay attention to finishing an email or even reading the details of an email. I went to the wrong event this week. It was like the details of the date, the time, and the place completely, completely left me. I knew the who, the rest of it was gone. Of course, I had the place right, the day, the time. It was interesting because that's not a place where I come from. And so a lot of humor, a lot of laughing, a lot of grace and self-compassion this week for that. I'm not being too worried. I'm sure one day detail will come knocking on my door and I will invite it in to stay.

(03:55) Kim Romain: Is it that you never have attention to detail, or is it just generally harder now?

(04:04) Louise: I have told myself that if I pay attention to detail, it will stick in my brain and it will be okay. That's not working for me. So that's a strategy that just doesn't work. Task lists, sticky notes, those kinds of things, clearly not working when I put the thing wrong in my calendar. I can follow my calendar, but there's something there. So it's, I have detail for the things that I want to have detail for? Am I gravitated towards a certain area that feels really juicy? Not necessarily. The things that are going into my brain currently, I think are getting stuck there. It'll come back. I know it'll come back. I'm sure I'm seeing it and I'm putting it in there somewhere. I'm just not retrieving it in the way that I'm used to retrieving it.

(04:57) Kim Romain: So, stuck but not sticky.

(04:59) Louise: Yeah, yeah. It's always funny when you were like, "What's detail?" And I'm like, "I don't know anymore."

(05:06) Kim Romain: No clue. As you're sharing all this, I'm really, really, really curious because it sounds like there is a shift in how you are experiencing yourself.

(05:21) Louise: Yes, I hesitated because it is a shift. It's not that it's amplified or that I'm more self-aware. I believe that it's in how I'm self-aware.

(05:38) Kim Romain: Tell me more.

(05:43) Louise: So, a lot of the personal development work that I've done in my life has come later. And I think that's true for a lot of people, right? When we're young and busy and growing relationships and families, my focus was on other things, not personal development. What I've noticed with myself as I came into personal development, around 15 years ago, was that this idea of self-awareness focused a lot on the chatter that's going on inside. It was like, "Who am I internally?" We've talked before on the show about my bus and the kids with bologna sandwiches. That's kind of how I've been starting to become more self-aware. Somatically, Kim, you and I have done a lot of work on what things feel like. To me, that absolutely is self-awareness. What I'm noticing now, and maybe it's my place in life or how I'm approaching what's happening to me, it's not so much that it's like, "Here's a new piece of information." It's more like, "Here's a new piece of information, and I don't know what to do with it, and it just is." And I don't have to know what to do with it. That's been a change for me. Before it was like, "Here's new information. Here's what I can do. Here's how I implement it and integrate it into my life." And now it's like, "Here's new information," and I just have information. And I don't know. And I feel like that's okay. I don't have to know how to start to integrate it into my life in this moment. I don't know how to navigate some of these things, but I'm still aware that some of these things are happening.

(07:55) Kim Romain: So why is it even important to have the self-awareness? Where are you going with this whole self-awareness journey?

(08:01) Louise: Isn't that the point?

(08:05) Kim Romain: Is it the point? Is awareness enough, or is there something else that we're doing and utilizing awareness as a tool on that journey?

(08:07) Louise: Isn't it? Yes.

(08:16) Kim Romain: Yes, both.

(08:16) Louise: I think so. That's really interesting to think about it as a tool to move you. But towards what? Towards more self-awareness?

(08:31) Kim Romain: No. I mean, personally, I think it's the ultimate journey to self-liberation, which has stops along the way. Self-awareness is a tool towards self-liberation. Self-awareness can be a pit stop, like a first stop as well. And then we have a little bit of self-actualization. We have these little places along the way where we're moving towards, in my opinion, the ultimate, which is self-liberation, because that to me is the pinnacle purpose of doing this exploration. Otherwise, if we're doing this exploration, we're just gathering data and we're never using it for anything other than to just have awareness, have consciousness, which is fine. We can have awareness. I don't think that that automatically gives us the ability to have consciousness. I think it's again, another step.

(09:41) Louise: I got excited there while you were talking because I'm like, "What does that even mean when you say the goal is self-liberation? What is that?"

(09:52) Kim Romain: Okay, so I have a definition for you. Liberation is freedom from social conventions or traditional ideas. This is according to the Oxford Languages Dictionary. When we liberate ourselves, we're being liberated from a place where our liberties are severely restricted. Now that's like an external liberation. We've seen a lot of that in the world, particularly recently.

(10:30) Louise: Somewhere.

(10:30) Kim Romain: Yeah, every fucking where it feels like. And every liberty that we have been experiencing, at least during our lifetimes, seems to be continuing to be restricted or attempts to restrict on that external level. Internally, we do this as well. We restrict our own liberties, we restrict our own freedoms internally all the time. A very basic way of talking about it is when we talk about limiting beliefs.

(11:06) Louise: Mm.

(11:07) Kim Romain: Our beliefs, how we show up in the world, what we think, how we react—those are all of the limitations we're placing on ourselves. Now it's a hundred percent impacted externally, but there is a huge amount of what we experience internally that is impacted from the external. But we have the ability to shift the narrative, the direction of our own freedom internally. And so that to me is self-liberation. Awareness is a stepping stone, is a tool towards getting to that place of self-liberation where we are not only at the whims of that external desire for liberation. It doesn't change that we're being restricted externally. It changes our response and our reaction to that restriction.

(12:04) Louise: I love that you brought up limiting beliefs because it's something that I can grab onto, right? These are things that are actually holding me back from being who I want to be or living the life I want to live. There's an awareness that comes, not with just "We all have limiting beliefs," but it's about, "This is my limiting belief." And now I get to write a new story. I get to put that limiting belief down and I get to work on what that is so that it's no longer holding me back from getting to a place where I want to go. So I love that example because we do this in all kinds of ways in all places in our lives where we're holding ourselves back from getting what we truly desire.

(13:07) Kim Romain: Yes. I hear that and I go, "Yes, and..." because that's one aspect, right? That's the mental component of it. The overabundance of ways that we can shift our mindset. Everybody's going to tell you how to shift your mindset right now, right? Shifting your mindset doesn't get you self-liberated. Shifting your mindset doesn't get you to that place of freedom.

(13:26) Louise: Sure. Just shift your mindset.

(13:36) Kim Romain: The freedom, peace of mind, ease, calm, groundedness—all of that comes from different layers, mindset being one of them and limiting beliefs being one aspect of mindset.

(14:11) Louise: So tell me more, what are the other aspects? How else do we move towards this idea of self-liberation?

(14:15) Kim Romain: The simplest way to talk about it from my perspective is a place of wholeness. It really is mind, body, soul, and strategy. And strategy is kind of that external part. There's the internal mind that we were just talking about through mindset and beliefs. There's our body that has wisdom, that's the somatic stuff we talk about, being embodied—it's in the title of our show.

(14:48) Louise: You...

(14:48) Kim Romain: There's our soul, which has its own core purpose, its needs, its own direction. It goes deeper than the mind and the body. And then there's that strategy where we connect out into the world. So how do we interconnect all of those aspects of self and those sometimes quite competing aspects of self? There are parts of me that want this and parts of me that want that. It's not always perfect alignment. We are not built that way. Human beings are complex. And the more we acknowledge that complexity, the more we come to accept that in this moment, for this time, this chapter in your journey, attention to detail isn't something that's accessible. How do we accept that aspect of self and still know that part of ourselves is focused on details? When you're working with a client, you are pulling out the details.

(16:01) Louise: I am.

(16:04) Kim Romain: So it's not that that's gone, it's just not accessible in a certain way. So how do we accept those competing aspects of self to come to a place of wholeness? And that place of wholeness is that place of freedom.

(16:09) Louise: Yeah, you know, this is such a cool conversation because I was just talking to a client this morning, and our conversations are usually very tactical. They're someone who needs that accountability, who wants to use our time to be very strategic and very focused on, "Am I doing the right things at the right time for the right reasons?" And our conversation today was very much focused on this idea of freedom through acceptance. The amount of joy that I saw in my client today blew me away because they were in a very different state last week. In inquiry, it was like, "What's different? What has changed in seven days to have this visible, vibrating change in your life?" And it was around acceptance. It was an acceptance of "I am not this type-A hard-ass personality that just pushes and grinds and that's the only way that I achieve success." And the conversation was, "I am laid back. I am hard-working on the things that matter, and I have time for my family, I have time for myself, and I have time to be whole. Because when I'm whole, I get to actually show up in each one of those places as my best version of myself." It was awesome to see that shift and to be able to witness it in a way that was really deep. And I think acceptance, that word acceptance has a sharp edge for some people.

(18:16) Kim Romain: For sure. So, a client I've been working with for years, she's an amazing leader in the design space. There are some aspects of self that are really hard for her to accept. And yet when she sees the totality of self, which we go back to a lot, because we get so laser-focused on those aspects we don't want to accept. "This has to change. I'm not worthy. I'm not good enough." And so everything else that is part of the whole gets diminished. We played a game of percentages. I'm like, "Let's just think about this all in percentages. What percentage of your life is actually touching this thing that sucks so much that you don't want to accept?" And what she realized is there was less than 5% that was actually touching that, and it was taking up 80% of her energy. So again, we played some games of, "How do we touch into some of these other aspects that you actually feel are taking up bigger space, but are showing up smaller?" That's part of that self-liberation. It's that we have a tendency to diminish self because of external forces, who we think we should be, and what we feel we need to be bringing into the world. The world is hard. Not every aspect of life is hard right now. So where are those places where we can touch in? If you're focusing on attention to detail, and that's frustrating, then what are the aspects that aren't frustrating for you that also still exist?

(20:58) Louise: Well, for me, this acceptance piece around attention to detail is that right now, I'm just not letting it get me frustrated. I'm just not. I don't want to put my energy there. Frustration is an energy leak. When we're frustrated, it means we're doing something when we want to be doing something else. And when we get stuck in this place, it just sucks our energy and our attention. I'm just refusing for it to get me frustrated. When I drop the ball and don't connect with someone for a week because I forgot to get back to them, I dropped the ball, 100%. My deepest apologies. And here's the ball. How do we pick up and how do we keep moving? I can't get stuck in it. When I went to the event a week early, I had a beautiful conversation with an entirely different organization. I met two lovely women, joked about getting information wrong, and had a great moment. I hopped back in my vehicle, had to fight rush hour construction traffic again with some great tunes, and thought about how I was going to spend my evening now that it was free. I just refused to let it suck energy away from me because that's not who I want to be.

(23:24) Kim Romain: In that acceptance, you experience freedom.

(23:27) Louise: Absolutely. Freedom from this judgment of who I am in this moment. A younger version of myself, there would have been unkind words said to me by me. There would have been frustration. I would have beat myself up for hours, had a terrible sleep, and woken up and really thought very little of myself, "How do I think I can run a business when I can't even put something in my calendar?"

(24:05) Kim Romain: A deep hole.

(24:06) Louise: That is a very deep hole. And I just, I didn't have a hole. I had freedom. I had space. I had capacity to do something that evening. But even in the moment, I had freedom to talk to some fantastic folks at this non-event event for a few minutes. I listened to some great tunes. It wasn't my event.

(24:28) Kim Romain: It was an event, it just wasn't your event.

(24:32) Louise: It's this refusal to let this moment in time bother me. I'm just refusing.

(24:50) Kim Romain: Yeah, so let's go back. "Freedom from social conventions or traditional ideas."

(24:56) Louise: Yeah. My traditional idea is that I'm not capable of running a business because I can't put something in my calendar. I'm free of that judgment. I actually don't carry that judgment anymore. That has nothing to do with who I am as a coach and as a speaker. Me showing up at the wrong event has nothing to do with anything other than I got it wrong for a second.

(25:33) Kim Romain: It's the power of acceptance, which is again, a tool. There was some self-awareness in your story. You were aware of what was happening. You also used the tool of acceptance to get to a place where it didn't stick. And that's where we start to experience freedom. Because we're not allowing those social conventions and traditional ideas that live within us to stick or to be sticky.

(26:22) Louise: Absolutely.

(26:22) Kim Romain: It's not there. It's just saying, "Yep, this sucks right now." Right? Maybe for you it was embarrassment, frustration, whatever that feeling was when you showed up. That's true, that's real. We want to honor that. "I felt that," but we just don't want it to stick. It's not pushing it away. It's not putting glitter on it. It's not dressing it up and putting a bow on it. It's saying, "Yes, and it sucks. And I'm embarrassed. And I'm frustrated." It's both.

(27:22) Louise: Yeah, it's a refusal to waste my energy on something that's just not important. I have no control over it. It's not that it's not important in the totality of things, but it's not important in this moment. I'm not going to put my time or energy to that, to getting stuck. It's a refusal to repeat those patterns of stickiness. And then it's also, I don't want to lose this either. Because through acceptance, I'm not saying that I'm going to now continually not care that I get things wrong in my calendar. It's, "What am I going to do with this newfound acceptance?" How am I going to actually now integrate this into my life? So there's an integration piece, but I think you were calling it strategy. What do we do with our self-liberation?

(29:39) Kim Romain: When we step away from these internal shackles, that's what keeps coming forward. And I was trying to come up with a different word, and I couldn't. These internal shackles. It's okay to have things stick. I want to normalize that. It would be fantastic to walk around saying, "I'm self-liberated, the shackles don't hold me anymore." I don't know that that's possible. Because the collective will continue to try to restrict us. And we are in a time of high restriction, but the collective has always had restrictions. Until such time that the collective doesn't have restrictions, we're going to continue to have to do this internal work. And once we understand that that's the work that we're doing, it's just like raising our consciousness, right? It's giving us the ability to be in the world in a different way. It's not that we're not going to feel pain and sorrow and suffering and frustration and anger. All of that is going to still exist. And from a self-liberated space, less of the external forces are keeping us in that continual state of self-restriction. It's these layers, and we're going to continually be playing in those layers. The goal is that we have the understanding that we can switch into it faster. We can switch into that place of acceptance. We can switch into that place of, "Okay, so I'm being told this. Now I can be pissed off that that's what I'm being told. And now I'm going to move over here and do this because I have the freedom to do that." I don't have to constantly do the work of, "Am I worthy enough? Is my team ready?" We're not doing that. That's significantly diminished because we've already been working on the self-awareness.

(32:28) Louise: When we can have the freedom to more quickly, with more ease, pivot, "Well, that's that, and here we go," and "This is what's important," because we can do that so much quicker, so much cleaner, where less of it sticks to us, the more we practice it, less of it sticks to us, the quicker we do it, we get to a place where now we have so much more energy and abundance to offer what's important in the world. This is where I think we need this now more than ever. When we actually work on ourselves and we find this ability to have more capacity for the things that do matter, that's where we change the world. That's how we do it. But it starts with servicing ourselves. I know it can sound really odd to say, but it's really true. When we can do that, we actually get to do more.

(34:37) Kim Romain: Yeah. The reality is we cannot fix the world from the outside. We have to fix it from the inside first. This concept of self-liberation, even the concept of higher consciousness, means that we're doing the internal work in service of the collective. And it doesn't have to be in service of the whole world. It can be in service of whatever aspect of the collective. Because that can feel really overwhelming when we start talking about, "I'm in service of the world." What you're doing it in service of is your unique way of being in the world, your unique brilliance that you're bringing into the world. And each of us has a different place that is needed. We need builders, we need healers, we need wisdom keepers, we need all of these different aspects to help us move from where we are now to where we're headed. I don't want to get to one moment because then it's done. I know that our existence would be in question if we're all leading to one thing. Now I'm not saying that I don't want world peace. Of course I want world peace. And we all need to have inner peace if we're going to have world peace. We can't have it any other way.

(36:35) Louise: I've always seen that the work that I do in the world creates ripples. That's all I need to know. I've seen it a handful of times where the work I do with a client changes the world for someone not directly connected. It is amazing to me that that can happen. I only needed to see that a handful of times to know that I'm making a difference. I know that when I'm in service of my clients and we do really great and amazing work together, they actually go out and create their own ripples, which creates more ripples and more ripples. That's all I need to know. And that feels really good. And I think whatever people need to be able to know that the work we do in the world is important work, in whatever space you're in. Once we know that and that it makes a difference, then that's part of, for me, that's part of like, "Well, of course I want to be doing that." Of course I need to learn acceptance, learn to get rid of the goo. The puzzle pieces start to come back together once I kind of have that. I see those ripples and I see the shores that they hit or the other water that they impact.

(38:30) Kim Romain: It's not lost on me that we started this conversation talking about a challenge with being able to hold onto details, and I hear you talking about the ripples and knowing how you impact one client and how that's going to go out into their world. It's just not lost on me that it's not about the details at all. And so maybe you're being given a gift at this point to remind you it's not about the details because your gifts are greater than that.

(39:03) Louise: And that's, I think that's the beauty of when you're in community, when you're in a space, when you can be heard, you get to have those words ripple back to you as well. What would you like to leave our listeners with today?

(39:25) Kim Romain: This idea that we are always in process and that it is "Yes, we are leading to something." So whether you're working on self-awareness, whether you're practicing acceptance, or whether you're just practicing getting up and getting through the day, whatever you're working on in that moment, that's yours. We have the ability to build on what we already know and what we've already learned. If you're struggling to get through the days right now, getting up every day is building on itself and leaning into a little bit more self-awareness and then leaning into a little bit more acceptance. That's where you're going to continue to build your way towards this place of what I talk about, which is self-liberation, this place of freedom from the pressures that we're all feeling right now.

(40:19) Louise: Yeah. You know, for me today, it was really around this idea of, "You can only control what you can control," but it's like, "Yeah, like, thank goodness." And so that's what it is for me is absolutely knowing that how I want to be showing up in some situations, I just want to be showing up as me, and I want to be as me as I possibly can be. And that's with all of the little bumps and bruises and flaws or whatever that is along the way. Because it just leaves me so much more capacity and space to be doing things that are so much more important.

(41:20) Kim Romain: Yeah, when we're not trying to manhandle our lives, it gets a lot easier.

(41:24) Louise: Yeah, so true. So, what do you got going on in the world?

(41:32) Kim Romain: I'm excited. I am relaunching an aspect of my Strengthscape blueprint that I'm really excited to bring to people. It really lends itself to this conversation of allowing ourselves to know how to step back into wholeness and to have some tools to do that. How about yourself?

(41:54) Louise: I love that. So I've just opened up my wait list for my fall cohort of Rise and Redefine, where we come together and figure all of this stuff out and figure out that midlife transition. How do we bring more ease into that? How do we stay more centered in some pretty chaotic times, both internally and externally, so we can get to that place so much more.

(42:22) Kim Romain: Louise, thank you so much for this conversation today. It was really fun.

(42:26) Louise: Yeah, it was. Thank you, Kim. And thank you, listener. We hope you have a wonderfully unsticky day.

(42:33) Kim Romain: Bye, everyone.

(42:33) Louise: Bye for now.