Present Over Perfect
Leaving Behind Frantic for a Simpler, More Soulful Way of Living
byBrené Brown, Shauna Niequist
Book Edition Details
Summary
Caught in a whirlwind of endless duties and sky-high expectations, Shauna Niequist once found herself drained and distant from the life she truly craved. "Present Over Perfect" chronicles her transformative odyssey from the shackles of ceaseless striving to a haven of peace and authenticity. Through candid essays, Shauna invites readers into her world, sharing the profound realization that true fulfillment emerges not from relentless perfectionism, but from embracing life's messiness and being genuinely present. This book extends a heartfelt invitation to pause the race, silence the noise, and rediscover the essence of who you are meant to be. If you're yearning for deeper connections and a life imbued with grace and simplicity, this is your guide to breaking free from the façade of flawlessness and reclaiming the beauty of the present moment.
Introduction
Picture this: you're standing in a hotel room in Dallas, staring at the ceiling, utterly exhausted. Your one-year-old and six-year-old are at home with your husband, while you're finishing another manuscript, testing recipes late into the night, traveling on weekends to speak at conferences. Your health is suffering, your heart has retreated deep inside your chest for protection, and you've become someone you don't want to be around. This was the moment when everything changed for one woman who had built a life she could no longer handle. This journey isn't about time management or having the cleaners come more often. It's about love, about worth, about what it means to be grounded in something deeper than achievement. It's the story of trading the exhausting pursuit of perfection for the revolutionary act of being present—present to ourselves, to the people we love most, and to the God who loves us unconditionally. What awaits you in these pages is not another productivity system, but an invitation to step off the treadmill of proving and pushing. You'll discover how to remake your life from the inside out, learning to say no to the things that drain your soul and yes to what truly matters. This is about finding your way home to yourself, to peace, and to a life marked by meaning rather than mania.
The Breaking Point: When Perfect Becomes Prison
On that Saturday afternoon in Dallas, with bags packed and another speaking engagement behind her, the author faced a moment of reckoning. She had been pulling a little red wagon through life, filling it so full that she could hardly keep pulling. The weight was destroying her, yet something kept driving her forward—a set of beliefs that equated worth with productivity, rest with weakness. The signs had been there for years. Frequent sickness, poor sleep, migraines, vertigo. Muscles that felt more like rock than tissue, circles under her eyes that looked like bruises. Her health was the acceptable sacrifice on the altar of being seen as highly capable, ultra-dependable, the girl who could handle anything. She had become a three-ring circus, performing as entirely different animals for different audiences, anything anyone wanted her to be. The breaking point came not through external crisis, but through internal recognition. Lying on that hotel bed, she knew with crystalline clarity that if anyone else wanted to live the life she had created, they were welcome to it. She was done. The very things she had been searching for—connection, meaning, peace—had been sacrificed in pursuit of an image that was slowly killing her spirit. This is how transformation often begins: not with dramatic external change, but with the quiet, devastating realization that the life we've built is not the life we want to live. The skills that supposedly served us well in the first half of life become utterly unhelpful for the second half. What got us here won't get us where we want to go.
Learning to Say No: Reclaiming Agency and Authenticity
The word that changed everything was simple: no. After years of indiscriminate yes-saying, she realized that all her yeses had actually meant saying no to rest, peace, and deep connection without even realizing it. Her broad and brave yes to the world had led to a shallow, exhausting lifestyle that bore little resemblance to the deep, meaningful existence she was searching for. Learning to say no felt like wielding a scalpel, slicing through the tender tissue of what needed to go and what should remain. It was awkward at first, sometimes too forceful, sometimes wrapped in so many disclaimers that people had no idea what she was actually saying. The hovering afterward was excruciating—was that okay? Are we okay? Because I love you, right? But slowly, muscle memory developed for what it felt like to say exactly what she felt, what she needed, what her limitations were. Some people peered into her face with fascination, as if her honesty and freedom was giving them permission to be honest and free as well. Others were decidedly not supportive, preferring that she continue over-functioning for their purposes. The most profound realization was understanding that disappointment is inevitable. Along the way, you will disappoint someone. You will not meet someone's needs or expectations. The question isn't whether you'll disappoint people—it's who you're going to disappoint and why. When you're grounded in God's love and clear on your purpose, the opinions of the outer circles matter less, and you can give your best energy to those closest to your heart.
Finding God in Silence: Faith as Refuge
For someone who had spent a lifetime outrunning silence, the discovery that stillness could be healing rather than terrifying came as a profound surprise. Prayer had become another performance, a way to report to God like an underling giving quarterly updates—working on this, will do better next time on that. The spiritual life had become yet another way to try and fail rather than a respite or healing relationship. The breakthrough came through relearning to pray like a child, bringing her whole fragile self to God without shame or hiding. She learned to picture a red cartoon heart—simple and bright—and rest in the reality of God's unconditional love. Not love that needed to be earned through performance, but love that existed before she was born and would continue far past the end of her life. In the silence, she discovered something shocking: she wasn't hollow inside, as she had feared. Instead of the emptiness she expected to find, there was strength, love, passion, and an unshakable core that didn't need external validation. The frantic energy that had driven her for decades was revealed as a way of avoiding this deeper truth about who she was. The practice of sitting with Jesus—not as an abstract theological concept, but as a person who loves and sees and knows her—became the foundation for everything else. When she began each day drenched in that love, the day was different. She didn't have to scramble or hustle. Fear dissipated, leaving warmth, creativity, and generosity in its place.
Present Living: Love as the New Fuel
The transformation wasn't instantaneous or dramatic in the way our culture celebrates. Instead, it was a quiet revolution, marked by smaller days and deeper connections. Life became less impressive from the outside but infinitely more joyful on the inside. There were fewer books being published, fewer events, fewer trips, fewer parties—but the space that remained was beautiful and peaceful and full of life. What emerged was a new way of being fueled—not by fear, anxiety, or the need to prove, but by love itself. This love was slower and deeper, less combustible and exciting than the adrenaline of achievement, but it burned within her heart with such warmth that she never wanted to return to the old fuel. The words came more slowly now, the process less frantic and jittery, and that felt exactly right. The basketball hoop that appeared in their driveway became a symbol of this new way of living. Dragged home from a neighbor's curb with a "free" sign, it transformed their daily rhythm. Before school, the whole family would gather outside—coffee for the parents, shooting baskets for the kids, neighbors wandering over to join the impromptu community that formed each morning before the bus arrived. This wasn't the glamorous life that magazines celebrate, but it was real and connected and grounded in what actually matters. Instead of racing through life like a firefighter responding to emergencies, she learned to move like a gardener—tending, nurturing, allowing things to grow in their own time and season.
Summary
The journey from perfect to present isn't about doing less work or changing external circumstances—it's about fundamentally shifting the source of our worth from what we accomplish to who we are as beloved children of God. When we stop using exhaustion and achievement as drugs to numb our deeper longings, we discover that the love we've been frantically hunting for has been within us all along, like a whisper, the very Spirit of God himself. The path forward requires both courage and compassion: courage to disappoint the voices that demand our constant performance, and compassion toward ourselves as we learn new ways of being in the world. We don't need to shrink and hustle to be worthy of love. We can be medium-sized, rest when we're tired, play for no productive reason, and discover that our souls feel their worth not through what we achieve, but through whose we are. This is the invitation extended to every weary heart: step off the treadmill of proving and step into the spacious place of being known and loved exactly as you are. There's no finish line to this work, no magical before-and-after moment, but there is the daily choice to ground ourselves in love rather than fear, to choose connection over competition, presence over perfection. The stars are there, burning bright, if we can just get far enough from the city lights of our frantic lives to finally see them.
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