#34: In praise of half heartedness
If you want something, you need to put in 110% to get it, right? Well, sure, if what you want is to turn yourself into an anxious mess. If you really want to achieve your goals, you need to take a smarter approach. You need to relax, stop trying so hard, and aim for just 'good enough'.
For the 'good enough' exercise mentioned in the episode, go here.
Reference:
Haugen, T., Seiler, S., Sandbakk, Ø. et al. The Training and Development of Elite Sprint Performance: an Integration of Scientific and Best Practice Literature. Sports Med - Open 5, 44 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-019-0221-0
Episode transcript:
You’d feel better and do better if you gave fewer fox, guys.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, imperfectionists. Did you miss me? Aw, that’s sweet - I missed you too. Now. How often have you had the experience of starting out the day or the week or the year telling yourself how much you’re going to get done, you’re going to nail everything, you’re going to be so productive, you’re going to be burning through your task list like a deranged conscientious demon, and then you’ve sat down to work and … suddenly it’s lunch time and you’ve spent the entire morning so intimidated by the standards you’ve set yourself that you’ve been reading Amazon reviews for a thing that you have no intention of buying? Maybe you’ve had a similar experience trying to do self-care too. You have a day off, you look forward to it, you tell yourself that you’re going to chill to the max, you’re going to enjoy yourself completely guilt-free, you’re going to relax so hard and release so much tension that by the end of the day your body will have pretty much turned entirely to liquid … and so you take yourself and a new novel off to your favourite cafe for lunch where you spend the entire time worrying that you’re not relaxed quite enough and maybe you should have gone to the cinema instead, or had a nice bath, or caught up with a friend. You might be able to hear me raising my hand here. I’ve mentioned these sorts of things before. They’re examples of perfectionism backfiring spectacularly. We set our sights so high and pile so much pressure on ourselves to perform that we can’t help but fail according to the daft standards we’ve set ourselves. But how do we put things right?
I’ve talked about this before, in episode #9: Cancel your productivity anxiety. I made some suggestions there about how you can recalibrate your expectations of yourself, and pointed out some inconsistencies that probably exist in your views about productivity - so, do check out that episode if you haven’t already. Here, I want to focus not on the expectations you have of yourself, but on the way you try to work towards meeting those expectations. Essentially, the message is this: trying too hard to achieve your goals, whether those goals have to do with productivity, self-care, or anything else, can be self-defeating. In other words, the harder you try to achieve what you want to achieve, the harder it becomes to achieve it. This applies specifically to goals that make you anxious; those that are going to make you feel bad about yourself if you fail. That might include goals relating to work, study, family, even hobbies and relaxation - but it’s probably not going to include - I don’t know - your goal to brush your teeth before you go to bed tonight, or your goal to finish that craft project, assuming that’s something you enjoy doing and that doesn’t make you feel anxious. In fact, you might not even think of things like ‘must brush my teeth tonight’ and ‘must finish knitting that sock by the end of the week’ as goals - but, in fact, that’s a problem, and I’m going to come back to this idea, because it’s going to be useful for us to have a rethink about that.
Here’s something I learned last week, and which I found incredibly interesting. In fact, it’s what inspired this episode. In sprinting, if you want to go faster, you need to relax and stop trying so hard. Usain Bolt, the eight-time Olympic gold medallist, multiple-world-record holding sprinter, has talked about the importance of relaxing and thinking about ‘anything else but the race’ when he’s competing. Michael Johnson - another former accumulator of gold medals and world records in sprinting - has said, ‘It sounds counter-intuitive because sprinting is highly ballistic but you have to be relaxed’. The science supports this. A 2019 review article on elite sprint performance found that, if you want to go as fast as possible, you don’t want to be sprinting at 100% intensity; instead, you need to aim at 90-something-%. Relaxation, it turns out, is an important part of performing at your best - not just, as you might think, something you grudgingly allow yourself as a reward only after you’ve done enough.
What if you approached your goals like this? I mean, is it possible that you might do better, and do it more easily, if you took a more half-hearted approach (or perhaps a 90-something-% hearted approach)? If you aimed for just good enough, rather than excellence? If you did that, then perhaps you might help suck out some of the anxiety that is tensing you up and holding you back. By slowing down, you allow yourself to speed up. What might that look like? Here’s a couple of thoughts.
The first is: although lots of us (me included) do this automatically and without realising, it’s actually kind of weird to think of goals as inextricably linked with excellence. When we tell ourselves things like, ‘I’m going to finish my thesis this year’ and ‘I’m going to spend the day writing’ and ‘I’m going to look after myself and relax today’, there’s an implicit assumption that we’re going to do those things excellently. ‘I’m going to finish my thesis this year’ is really ‘I’m going to finish my thesis this year and it’s going to be the best thesis that I’m capable of writing’. ‘I’m going to spend the day writing’ is actually ‘I’m going to spend the day writing clever stuff and I’m going to be focused and motivated the entire time’. Even ‘I’m going to look after myself and relax today’ is ‘I’m going to look after myself and relax to the max’. Just stop. Dial it in for once. Imagine you’re thirteen and your parents have told you to do the washing up and you’re going to make a passive-aggressive point by doing it as ineptly as you think you can get away with without actually getting grounded. Do it just to see what it feels like to separate ‘achieving a goal’ from ‘doing the absolute best job that it’s humanly possible to do’. I dare you.
My second thought about what it might look like to take a more relaxed approach to your goals is: you can draw some guidance from the way you think about those goals that you’re not anxious about. The ones that you’re so unanxious about that it wouldn’t even occur to you to think of them as goals in the first place. Goals like ‘I will brush my teeth before I go to bed this evening’ and ‘I’m going to finish this really enjoyable craft project by the end of the week’. You’re totally fine with those goals, right? You don’t mind doing them at all. In some cases, like with the craft project, it’s even a pleasure to work towards them; something you might save for yourself as a treat. I’m going to bet that with those goals, you’re not thinking about excellence at all. You’re not telling yourself that you need to brush your teeth excellently this evening. You just need to do a good enough job to keep them from rotting overnight. And you’re not telling yourself that you need to finish that craft project and make an excellent job of it. I mean, you want to be above a certain standard, because doing a reasonably competent job of it is probably part of the fun, but holding yourself to a standard of excellence is definitely not part of the fun, and you’d likely lose interest pretty quickly if you did that. I’m going to bet that, when it comes to things like tooth-brushing, craft projects, and other goal-directed pursuits that don’t eat you up with anxiety, you have a pretty intuitive grasp of what the space between ‘good enough job’ and ‘excellence’ looks like. That space is plenty big enough, right? You could even sketch out what that might look like on a spectrum. Try it, as an exercise. I’m going to make you a template and stick it on the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website - look for a link in the episode notes. Take something like tooth-brushing as an easy one to start with. Write a brief sentence to describe what a ‘good enough’ job looks like. That might be something like, ‘brush teeth for 2 minutes’. At the other end of the spectrum, write a brief sentence to describe what ‘excellence in tooth brushing’ looks like - maybe ‘brush for 2 minutes, floss, get out the UV light and scrape away any hidden missed bits, hose down with a pressure washer’, etc. And then explore a few points in the space between. So, just next to the ‘good enough’ description, you might have ‘brush for 2 minutes and then take 10 seconds to check for any missed bits in the mirror’. Somewhere further along you might have ‘brush and then floss’. And so on. Like I say: plenty of space between ‘good enough’ and ‘excellent’.
Now try the same thing with some of your anxiety goals. Take ‘Finish writing my thesis this year’. Do you have an intuitive grasp of what the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘excellent’ is here? I’ll bet it’s more difficult for you than the tooth brushing example. Because a goal like this is so tangled up with worries about excellence in your mind, even the very possibility of a merely ‘good enough’ job might be a novel idea for you. But have a go anyway. Write a sentence to describe what ‘good enough’ looks like, ‘another one to describe what ‘excellence’ looks like, and then a few more to sketch out some of the space in between.
Something that I hope will emerge from this exercise is this: you only ever need to do a ‘good enough’ job. Your thesis just needs to be good enough to pass, it doesn’t need to be so amazing that it puts your entire discipline out of business forever. If your goal is to spend the day writing, you just need to do enough so that you’re a bit further along than you were yesterday - you don’t need to churn out 4000 words of final-draft standard prose. And if your goal is to spend the day relaxing, you don’t need to end it feeling like you’ve crammed 10 years of spa breaks into 8 hours - you just need to do something that you enjoy marginally more than you would enjoy a regular day. Anything beyond ‘good enough’ is a bonus, not part of the goal. If you want to know how you can get that bonus content without holding yourself to it, go back to the tooth brushing, and go back to the craft project. Perhaps, occasionally, on a whim, you might decide that you’ll floss today, or you’ll pay a bit more attention than usual to that difficult-to-reach crevice. Great. You can do that. And you can do that without committing yourself to recalibrating your standards so that you always have to do that extra bit, every time, forever. Just do it and forget about it. Same with your writing, same with your time off. If you feel like doing a bit more than the bare minimum now and then, go for it. But then forget about it and accept that you probably won’t feel like doing that next time, and that that doesn’t matter. Good enough is good enough, always. The great news is that even with this new, laid-back attitude, you’re likely to be doing better than you were when you were going all-out in a fireball of only-the-best-is-good-enough anxiety. Perfectionism is your brakes. Dump it, and you won’t only do better, you’ll feel better too. Until next time, relax. But, you know - not too much.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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