#54: Soothe the overwhelm with the 1% question
Sometimes, there is such a massive gap between how things are now and how we'd like them to be that there's no point even trying to make changes because any change we make would be so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that it's too depressing even to think about. Better just to ignore the problem, because who has the energy for that shit, right? But also: how the hell are you going to get anywhere with this attitude?
Glad you asked, because there is a way. You don't have to give up on your big goals, and your efforts to reach them aren't doomed to insignificance either. You just need to change the way you think about them. It's painless, I promise.
Episode transcript:
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, friends! Do you want to hear some amazing news? I finally submitted my book manuscript to the publisher! Like, the final final final version. You know, the book I’ve been working on, tortuously, since 2015. I dedicated a podcast episode to how tortuous it’s been - episode #40: Why I took SO BLOODY LONG to write my book. And now it’s all done. It’s about swearing - why it’s offensive, and what’s wrong with doing it. It’s probably going to be called For F*ck’s Sake, with the odd asterisk thrown in, obviously. The plan is that it’ll be released in the UK and the US in the autumn, with Oxford University Press. Why am I telling you this? Am I just inflicting some shameless self-promotion on you? Well, no - there’s a lesson I wanted to pass on to you before getting on with this episode’s topic. The day after I sent the finished manuscript to the publisher, I decided I’d give myself some time off. Not the whole day, because there was stuff to do. But, some of the morning. I decided I’d get up at 7am instead of 6am (I know, I know, I really know how to spoil myself, don’t I?) and that I’d spend the time before my first meeting lounging around in my jammies, drinking coffee, knitting, and generally doing what the hell I liked. I had, after all, been going all-out for the last couple of months. I spent some very early mornings over Christmas banging out some words before the kids were up. Weekends poring over the laptop. Late nights followed after not enough sleep by early mornings. (I’m definitely not advocating this as a business-as-usual approach to getting things done by the way - prioritise your sleep and your down-time, people.) I’d definitely earned my lazy morning. But was I able to relax and enjoy it? Of course not. I had this completely senseless feeling of foreboding. A deep-seated conviction that I was doing something inherently terrible by sitting around. When I reflected on this, I could see that it was just daft. But that didn’t stop the feeling. My mind was stuck in guilt mode even when there was nothing to feel guilty about. Stupid brain. So, here’s a heads up. Your guilt - and I know you have plenty of it - doesn’t know what the hell is going on. You’re going to feel guilty, plenty of the time, when there’s no need. So, feeling guilty is no substitute for reflecting on what you’re doing and asking yourself what, if anything, you feel guilty about. Sometimes the answer is: nothing. Sometimes your guilt is like one of those annoying car alarms that keeps going off even when there’s no car thief within a 10-mile radius.
Right. On to today’s topic. I’ve started doing this a lot, haven’t I? Starting out talking about something completely unrelated to the focus of the episode. Anyway. I want to talk about your habit of binary, all-or-nothing thinking, which I’ve discussed fair amount already in various episodes. You know, thoughts like: I can’t be appropriately assertive, I have to choose between being a complete walkover and being an arrogant arsehole, and since I don’t want to be an arrogant arsehole, I’m stuck with being a complete walkover. And, I can’t strike a sensible work/life balance, I need to choose between living and breathing my work and being a lazy layabout, and I don’t want to be a lazy layabout so I’m stuck with living and breathing my work. I know that when it’s expressed in this way, it sounds like the sort of thinking that no sensible person would engage in - but, admit it, you do it all the time. There are various strategies we can use to resist the binary. In episode #4: How to hack your assertiveness with Aristotle, which was the episode I used to launch this podcast almost exactly 2 years ago, which is an anniversary that I’m not going to celebrate in any organised way because I’ve only just noticed it - anyway, in episode #4 I talked about how you can use appropriately assertive role models to help you steer the right course between being a walkover and an arrogant arsehole. Today, I want to talk about another strategy that I’ve found helpful, and that I’ve used with coaching clients. It was inspired by, of all things - and I think I’m remembering correctly here - a guided yoga nidra track by Jennifer Piercy on the Insight Timer app. I really like her tracks. In one of them, and I can’t remember which one - this is an annoying habit of mine, by the way, and I do it a lot when I’m teaching: referring to something that I don’t fully remember and then giving a vague apologetic description of how I probably mistakenly thought it went - anyway in this one episode, Jennifer Piercy was talking us through getting more relaxed, and then when we were lying nicely in the right position and were warm enough and so on, she said something like, ‘see if you can do something to make yourself 5% more comfortable’. And I thought, wow. What a fantastic, evocative prompt. If she’d just said, simply, try to make yourself more comfortable, I would probably have thought, ‘nah, I’m fine already, ta’. And if she’d said, ‘make yourself 50% more comfortable’, I’d have been, ‘lol, impossible, not even going to try’. But, 5% more comfortable? I think I can manage that. There was something so effective about the ‘you can improve things’ part of what she said combined with the ‘you need to do almost nothing to succeed here’.
Since listening to that, I’ve used this thinking myself, when trying to make improvements that can seem overwhelming, and I’ve used it in coaching sessions too. Sometimes, we know things can’t go on as they are - whether that’s work, health, domestic stuff, getting enough sleep, or whatever - but getting to where we’d like to be seems completely overwhelming. I regularly used to feel this way when I look around my home, which wasn’t ever an absolute pigsty, but which could definitely be better organised. For a long time, I would look around in despair, wishing that it looked like a minimalist paradise with no pile of unopened mail on the dining table and a coffee table that was at least somewhat visible beneath the tangle of knitting projects. And despite wishing it was tidier and knowing, at least roughly and in theory, what the process of ‘tidying’ would involve, I didn’t even try. The gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was too huge. Anything I did to try to get there - tidy a bit of mail away here, put a pile of yarn in a drawer there - would just make me feel worse, because it would be a drop in the ocean and it would make salient to me just how much work there was to do. So, I’d ignore it. Even though tidying one or two things away would take almost no effort, and even though tidying one or two things away for a month would mean having somewhere between 30 and 60 things tidied away. So, what was the problem? It’s like I said: the gap between where things were and where they needed to be was too huge. That’s what I was focused on. And because that’s what I was focused on, I was missing the potential in between. It was all or nothing, how-things-are or how-things-would-be-ideally, one or the other, and if not the other, then sorry but you’re stuck with the one.
But what if, instead, my approach to my messy home had been: is there anything I can do to make the place 5% more tidy? Actually, make that 1%: it’s less scary. Well, I can tell you: taking this approach, things were very different. The target was no longer ‘achieve a minimalist paradise’. The target was, maybe open that one letter from the insurance company that arrived last month and do something with it. Viewed in this way, there was no worry along the lines of, ‘I can’t do anything because doing something will make me think about what a huge problem this is so I need to ignore it’. Instead, it became a very easy win. 30 seconds, max, and then yay, the place is 1% more tidy.
This has been a helpful way of framing things in coaching sessions, too. A lot of the time, people wanting coaching are overwhelmed by some aspect of their life. They have too many projects and not enough time to get them all done by the deadlines. Or they’re not where they want to be in their careers - like, they’re not anywhere near where they want to be. Or their anxiety about their work has spun out of control, to the extent that even the notification sound when a new email arrives sends their heart racing. They want things to be different, but they don’t know how to get to where they want to be, or where they want to be seems unattainably far away. They have this sense of ‘where the hell do I even start?’ And like my tidying, what’s going on in this situation is a nasty contrast between where things are now - where, basically, they’re just all wrong - and where they need to be, ideally. I call it a ‘nasty’ contrast because even reflecting on it can be really stressful, because it highlights just how very unsatisfactory things currently are. It highlights how far there is to go, and how insignificant any effort to improve things is going to be, in the grand scheme of things. But fortunately, that’s not the only way to think about it. Instead, you can ask, ‘what can I do to make this situation 1% better?’ Then, the problem becomes much more tractable. If it helps, you can break it down and think about the detail - and that’s something that’s much easier to do when you’re thinking in these terms compared to fixating on the ideal. So, suppose you’re unhappy with your career, and it’s tainting every aspect of your life. Everything feels wrong, you feel like there’s a dark cloud following you wherever you go. And when you think of where you’d like to be, it feels depressingly distant, so distant that there’s no point even trying to make a change. Before you get to the point of asking how you can make the situation 1% better, perhaps you need to reflect a bit on what ‘1% better’ would look like in this situation. One thing it might involve is making today 1% more pleasant. Perhaps you could do that by treating yourself to a coffee. Or taking a walk. Or calling a friend for a chat. Suddenly, improvement is not something that there’s no point even trying because any effort you do is doomed to insignificance. Treating yourself to a coffee or taking a walk or chatting with a friend are not insignificant things - they’re things that will make you feel better. When I encourage people to think of things this way in coaching sessions, I often see the dawning realisation on their faces. The aha moment. Like a cloud departing. The sense of ‘oh yeah, there is something I can do today, right now - there’s a way into this problem’.
I’ve drawn a contrast between, on the one hand, the binary comparison between how things are now and how they ideally should be, and on the other, questioning what you can do to make things 1% better. But, in truth, it’s not either-or here, either. You can do both. You don’t have to give up on working towards big goals, whether that’s turning your house into a minimalist paradise (though actually I’m not sure that’s possible with 4 cats, 2 kids, and a knitting addiction), making your workload more manageable, switching careers into something fulfilling and rewarding, or whatever. It’s just that trying to motivate yourself solely by focusing on the ideal can backfire, because it highlights just how distant the goal is, and also because you’re telling yourself that you only get the payoff at the end. But this isn’t the whole story. You can’t achieve big goals in an instant, that’s why they’re called big goals. You get there incrementally, one small improvement at a time. So, don’t give up your big goal, but don’t turn the baby steps you need to take in order to get there into things so insignificant that it’s not really worth bothering with. 1% better, every day. And not only does that make it easier to motivate yourself, it also means you don’t have to wait for your reward either. If you can make things 1% better today, then yay, you go to bed with your life in 1% better shape than it was this morning!
Ask yourself whether you can do this, right now. Is there something, some easy win, you can do to make things 1% better in some area of life that you’d like to improve? What about focusing just on today: is there some way that you can make today go 1% better? Is there something you could do to make the next hour, or the next 10 minutes, go 1% better? I bet you can come up with something. And I bet you’re going to find it far easier to think of ideas than you would if you just carried on gazing wistfully at the distant life that you wish you were living.
I hope I’ve made the last 15 minutes 1% better for you, friend. Take care, and see you 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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