#50: You hate doing it because you think you're doing it wrong
Have you noticed how much time your inner critic spends looking over your shoulder and telling you how you're doing everything wrong? No, I bet you haven't - instead you're just completely mystified about why you've grown to dread your writing or your reading or your teaching or whatever else it is that you used to enjoy but now don't. It's not doing the thing that's the problem here. It's what you're telling yourself about how you're doing the thing.
Episode transcript:
Just shut up with telling yourself you’re doing it wrong.
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.
Hello, friends. Can you believe this is the 50th episode of this podcast? I’d been thinking that maybe I could do something special and fun to commemorate this landmark, but I just didn’t get around to it, and because the whole point of me being here talking to you is to push back against perfectionism, I’m not going to give myself a hard time about it. So, perhaps I’ll get around to a celebration of episode 58, or 63, or 92, or whatever, which would be appropriately imperfect. Or perhaps I’ll just forget, and we can never mention any of this again. And while we’re on this topic, imagine me giving you a little virtual high-5 in solidarity for those things that you haven’t got around to doing, and which you should definitely not be giving yourself a hard time about.
Right, let’s get on with it, shall we? I want to talk to you about loving what you do. And also about not loving it, and wondering why you don’t love it when you used to love it, and wishing you could fall back in love with it, and so on. I talked about this back in episode #33: I’m supposed to be doing what I love - what’s gone wrong? In that episode, I talked about motivation, and specifically, how external motivations like the promise of promotion and success if we work hard enough can actually kill our desire to do the thing that we started out being motivated to do for its own sake. So, if you’re struggling to understand why you don’t love what you do any more, you might want to check that out at some point.
In this episode, I want to offer a different answer to that ‘why don’t I love this any more?’ question that so many of you puzzle over. This comes up a lot. And it’s something I’ve grappled with myself too. I know how frustrating it feels. You sit down to try to write - or whatever else it might be - and you immediately feel anxious and want to escape. You might not even identify the feeling as anxiety. It might just feel like an urge to do something else - anything else, just not this stuff that you’re meant to be doing, and that you wish you wanted to do. What’s going on?
A big part of it, I think, and a big difference between the way things are now and the way things used to be back in the day when we actually enjoyed doing our research or whatever else ‘the thing’ is, is that we’re not content simply to do the thing. That’s not enough. What we expect of ourselves is to do the thing a certain way. To do it faster, or more attentively, or more carefully, or with more enthusiasm, or less reluctantly, or in a way that’s more like how our smart and charismatic colleague does the thing, or in a way that we get so into it that we lose track of everything else. I’ve heard all these things, and I’ve said a few of them to myself too. The problem is, you’re never going to enjoy doing anything if, while you’re doing it, you’re busy telling yourself that you’re doing it wrong, which is exactly what you’re doing at the moment. That’s just a recipe for hating the thing. Who can possibly enjoy doing anything when you’ve taught yourself to associate it with feeling like a failure?
Interestingly, I got to thinking in depth about this issue not while I was trying to get on with my writing, but while I was trying to do something much more mundane - I was doing some cleaning up around the house. I wasn’t really enjoying what I was doing, but it occurred to me that I was compounding the unpleasantness of the task by beating myself up about the way I was doing it. I was saying to myself things like, ‘You should have done this hours ago’, and ‘You’d be finished a lot faster if you didn’t keep stopping to look at stuff’ and ‘If you were better at sorting through stuff as you went along, you wouldn’t be facing this mammoth task right now’. The task I had to do was never going to be a barrel of laughs, but I was making it into something pretty intolerable by brainstorming creative ways of viewing it as a reflection on my failures as a human being. Like many of you - and I’ve said this next bit before, but it’s worth a recap - I didn’t even identify the things I was saying to myself as mean. They were just facts, and you can’t argue with those. But, would I ever say those things to another person? Of course not, I’m not a sadistic bully. Except to myself. So, there’s a useful starting point for us: if there’s something that you’re trying to get done, don’t say anything to yourself that you wouldn’t say to another person if you were trying to encourage them to get something done. And, conversely, all those nice, encouraging, motivating things you’d say to someone else you were trying to get to do something? Say those to yourself when you’re trying to do something.
So. Don’t be mean to yourself. And if you think the things you’re saying to yourself aren’t mean, have a think about whether they’d be mean if you said them to another person. What else?
Ok, the next thing is to think about whether what you’re expecting of yourself - in particular, the way you’re expecting yourself to approach a particular activity - is reasonable. Because it’s not like it’s never appropriate to expect ourselves to do things in a particular way, is it? Sometimes we need to do something quickly because we’re up against a deadline. Sometimes it’s important to do something super attentively because we need to get it right first time. And so on. So, how do you distinguish between those expectations of yourself that are appropriate and reasonable, and those that are unhelpful, unrealistic, pointlessly anxiety-provoking, and all the rest of it?
One technique here is, again, to consider whether you’d view those expectations as reasonable if they were expectations you were placing on another person, rather than on yourself. Lots of us find that we have a far more intuitive grasp of what’s reasonable in those circumstances.
Another thing you can do is to think about whether what you’re asking of yourself even makes sense. Asking the question is itself a step towards this: rather than simply beating yourself up without reflecting on what you’re doing, pausing to ask ‘am I being reasonable towards myself?’ introduces the hitherto alien possibility that maybe that critical inner voice isn’t as sensible as objective as it seems at first. And, to work out the answer, it can help to write things down. What are you expecting of yourself? Write it down, read it back, and think about whether it’s even possible. I’ve spoken before on this podcast about that time when I wrote down some of my own thoughts that popped into my head while I was trying to get on with my writing, and found that I was simultaneously telling myself to speed up and to slow down. A client I had recently realised during one of our sessions that, despite wanting to work towards the goal of falling in love with their work again, they were telling themself that unless the work felt hard and unpleasant, it wasn’t proper work. They hadn’t realised that they were demanding of themself something impossible: falling in love with doing something that they’d made, by definition, horrible to experience.
We can sum up that ‘does it make sense?’ question with the following question that you can ask yourself whenever you tell yourself that you’re doing things wrong, and it’s this. Is the right way to do this even possible? To answer that, you need to be specific about what ‘the right way to do this’ involves. And in doing that, you can get a sense of whether or not it’s realistic. I certainly wasn’t being realistic when I told myself that the right way to write my book involved simultaneously speeding up and slowing down. That client I mentioned wasn’t being realistic when they told themself that the right way to do their research involved falling in love with it while continuing to find it unpleasant. Obvious when you think about it, isn’t it? So, do that, then. Think about it.
Ok, so you definitely shouldn’t be telling yourself that you’re doing something wrong when it’s logically impossible to do it right. That’s obviously not realistic. But there are some more subtle ways in which what you’re expecting of yourself might be unrealistic. Here’s something super helpful I learned from the Stanford neurobiologist Andrew Huberman, whose podcast is, according to those rather creepy stats that Spotify compiles about us, my most listened to podcast of 2022. You know that experience of settling down to work on a task, and finding it really difficult to drop into the zone? Like, you wish you could relax into it and focus on it and immerse yourself in it, but instead it just feels uncomfortable and you just want to get away and pay attention to something else instead, but if you persevere for a while then eventually you can push through that stage and find the level of focus you need to get it done. That has always been a fraught experience for me, and I would beat myself up for being too distractible and lacking willpower and all the rest of it. And then I learned from the Huberman Lab podcast that this is just how focus works. It’s supposed to feel uncomfortable at the beginning. And by ‘supposed to’, I mean that’s the way it feels if you’re doing everything right. So, if you can hold off on attacking yourself and instead just accept that you’ll have this period of adjustment for 15 minutes or so when you can’t concentrate and feel a powerful urge to look at crochet patterns on Pinterest, and if instead you sit with it and sit through it, then you’ll get to the state of focus that you’re trying to reach. And of course, that ‘sit with it and sit through it’ is so much easier to do if you’re not telling yourself you’re doing it wrong and that you’re a bad person - if, instead, you accept that you’re doing everything right and this is just how it is, this is how your brain works. Of course you can’t turn focus and flow on and off like a light. Again, it’s obvious when you think about it - but often we don’t think about it, because our minds are too full of how wrong we are getting everything.
So, again, let’s summarise this with a question you can ask yourself when you decide to apply yourself to working on some task. You’ve already thought about what’s involved in doing this thing right, and made sure that what you come up with is logically possible - that was the last step. The next question to ask is, ‘How do I get to a state of “doing this thing right” from where I am now?’ Because what that question does is open up the idea that getting from where you are now to the state you want to be in is a process, something that takes time and effort, something you need to invest in before you even make a start on whatever it is you want to be doing. You need to help yourself make that transition. So, that might involve just powering through the first fifteen minutes of trying to focus that Andrew Huberman has told us are inevitably going to be uncomfortable. Or it might be something like taking some quiet time to adjust and recalibrate, as you might need to do if you’re about to walk into a party right after you’ve received some devastating news. Less dramatically, you probably need something similar before you teach a class, or have a conversation with a colleague about a sensitive topic, or before you give a presentation. Work out what you need in order to make that transition, and be generous with allowing yourself whatever that is. Because one thing I’ve noticed is that, a lot of the time, when we’re telling ourselves that we’re doing something wrong, what we’re expressing is basically impatience. We think we should be doing the thing right now, and because we’re not doing it right now, we think we’re never going to do it. Just slow the fuck down. We can’t always switch immediately to a particular task in the way we’d switch between different tabs on a browser. We’re more old skool than that. We’re more like those older computers where you had to put in a cassette with a game on it and then go away for 10 minutes while it all loaded before it was ready to play. That time you need to transition into a task counts as work too. It’s like a mental commute. So, don’t make the mistake of viewing it as yet more delay before you’ve even started on the work. The clock is ticking as soon as you start preparing to do the task, and that means that by the time you’re ready to get down to it, you’ve already made important progress.
So, back to that comparison between your attitude towards what you do now, and how you felt about it years ago. Perhaps it’s about your research: the way you feel about it now versus how you felt about it when you were an undergrad, or when you first discovered the topic and were exploring it on your own time. What was better back then? Well, a big part is that you weren’t telling yourself you were doing it wrong back then. You were just exploring, following your interest. Or you were studying in the context of expectations that were clearly defined and reasonable and non-contradictory: your lecturers, when you were an undergrad, were not saying things to you like, ‘Attend a lecture in Lecture Room 3 while simultaneously attending a lecture in Lecture room 15 half a mile down the road’ … at least, I hope they weren’t, and if they were, you’d have had no problem identifying that something impossible was being asked of you. But now, it’s all internalised and, to a large extent, unarticulated. The expectations are unreasonable, if they’re specified at all, which often they’re not. You can’t lift a finger without telling yourself that you’re doing it wrong. It’s not what you’re doing that’s the problem, it’s what you’re telling yourself about what you’re doing. Change what you’re telling yourself about the thing, and the thing becomes a lot easier to face. As the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, ‘we suffer more in imagination than in reality’. I hope I’ve said something helpful here about how you can work on making your mind a more pleasant place to hang out. Until next time.
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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