We have all been there, we know we ought to deliver that speech, go to that party where we don’t know most people or write another article but we just cannot seem to get ourselves to do it.
Why?
Well, sometimes we can’t really seem to put our finger on it. But though we know that logically it would be the best thing to do, there just seems to be a lot of resistance stopping us from taking the plunge.If we sit down and think about why we don’t feel like doing it, we may come up with a number of reasons and one of them I am sure is something along the lines of “what if it comes out bad?”, “what will others think?”, “If I do it, I must do it well!”
We have all at some point in life wanted to acquire a new skill, incorporate some changes or improve a certain area of our life. However, most of our attempts tend to start well but then end up running into troubled waters. Sometimes, we do not even get that far. We plan, strategize and fantasize but never get around to actually taking any action. This can occur due to a variety of reasons. However, what I have come to realize is that one of the most common obstacles that stop us in our tracks are our own notions and expectations.
Whenever we engage in any activity that is new to us or that we are not good at, we consciously or sub-consciously end up judging how well we did. Let us say for example that we are socially anxious and are terrified at the prospect of meeting new people. But we know that it has been hampering our life and that we want to be able to walk up to new people in social situations and engage them in conversation. So we decide to pro-actively work on meeting new people. When the weekend rolls around, we go to a party where we do not know a lot of people and try to start a few conversations. However, when we get there we realize that although we want to meet new people, there is a huge amount of resistance that is stopping us from going up and starting a conversation. Many a time the main reason that we feel this resistance is, because we have a feeling that this particular social interaction may not go as well as we expect or want it to go.
We have a conscious or an unconscious idea or expectation of how a social interaction that we initiate must turn out and our anxiety and resistance arises from the possibility that reality might not live up to that expectation and may turn out to be a letdown. In this scenario, the resistance to a large extent, is not caused by any external factors but rather by our own inherent expectations.
You see the real problem is that we know that if we do it and it does not go according to our expectations, we are going to experience negative emotions. Similarly, if we give that speech or write that article and it does not come out as we expected, we know we are going to feel bad. This is because we are drawing our emotional state from how good or how well we perform in that activity we are contemplating undertaking. We can see here that we let ourselves feel good or otherwise depending on how well the result or outcome turns out. If we perform “well”, we feel good and if we don’t, we feel bad and beat ourselves about it.
Knowing the fact that if it does not go well, we are going to judge ourselves and criticise ourselves harshly is one of the reasons that we are afraid of to give ourselves permission to jump in and try something.
As we can see, here we are judging ourselves on “quality”. As in how well we perform at the thing we are planning on doing and it is this criterion relating to the quality of performance that is creating a lot of the resistance. We know that if we attempt it and then not perform as well as we expected, it is going to feel worse than not trying at all.
Just think about it, isn’t that crazy? Of course, we would not want to do something hard if there is a very likely possibility that the reward for doing it is going to be:
Feeling worse than we are feeling now!
In such situations, what if instead of worrying about how well we perform or how well something goes, we begin to judge ourselves on a different kind of criteria?
What if we drew our emotions not from “how well” we did something but from “whether or not” we did that thing. Instead of worrying about how well a social interaction goes, we can feel good based just on the fact that we initiated an interaction, instead of worrying about how good our speech was, we can concentrate on whether we give a speech or not. With this frame of mind, we do not judge ourselves based on how well we performed but simply based on whether we attempted that activity or not.
Usually, when we are stuck in the old paradigm, we have an unconscious scale on which we rate the quality of our performance. This scale is usually something that is quite arbitrary that we have internalised and the more perfectionist tendencies we have the more arbitrarily high this scale is going to be. Unless, we reach a certain level on this scale, we don’t let ourselves feel successful.
Therefore, with this mindset, there are two kinds of pressure, one is the pressure of overcoming the initial discomfort and doing it and the other being that we should do it and not perform below a certain benchmark of quality.
When this is so, it is no wonder that we face a lot of resistance!
In these situations, there is one mindset that I employ, that drastically reduces my resistance. I initially found it from Stephen Guise’s book “How to be an Imperfectionist”. The essence of the mindset is that we remove this internalised scale of quality and turn it into a binary system.
Instead of a quality scale, suddenly there are only 2 options, if I break through the resistance and do it, it is a win and if I do not, then I lose.
With this mindset, all the worry and anxiety about how well we perform becomes inconsequential. Judging ourselves and drawing our emotions from how well we did is not allowed. It is a system where it is either a 0 (zero) which means we did not do it, or a 1 which means that we did it. If we do not do it, it is a failure and if we did it, it is a success. With this method, since as long as we do it we win, we get to feel great just because we did it regardless of how perfect or imperfect it turned out.
Of course, since we do not intentionally want to do something badly, our innate desire to do something well still kicks in. However, by reminding ourselves that doing it is the only criteria of success, we can prevent that often times irrational desire “to do well” or “do it perfectly” from making us procrastinate and postpone what needs to be done.
By making whether or not we do something as the only metric of our success, we are able to get rid of a lot of unnecessary mental noise, break through the resistance and do things that we would otherwise have stopped ourselves from doing.
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