#75: Your progress tunnel vision
Yeah, I know you're diligently working towards that big goal, and that you STILL haven't got there yet. But are you stopping to reflect on your progress along the way, and to celebrate small wins? If the answer is no, then you're sabotaging yourself, chipping away at your motivation, and generally making yourself miserable. Progress tunnel vision can keep you stuck in a loop - but here's the Academic Imperfectionist with a lifeline!
For the Progress Temperature Check exercise, go here. Go here for the Goal Contract exercise, and here for the Wheel of Life.
Here's Rick Hanson's Psychology Today article, 'Recognize What Is Improving in Your Life'.
Episode transcript:
You’re making more progress than you realise.
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. Don’t these podcast episodes roll around quickly? I release one every two weeks, on Fridays, and every time it feels like just a couple of days since I did the last one. On the other hand, when I think of the last 2 weeks of teaching, commuting, and all the other exhausting term-time shenanigans, it feels like it’s been going on for months. Strange, that, isn’t it? When things are a bit of a slog, making progress feels painfully slow, like wading through treacle. But it feels slow not necessarily because it is slow, but because it’s just hard.
I got thinking about this last week when I saw a friend of mine who is going through a really tough time. I don’t see this friend all that often - it’s been every few months or so. We had lunch together and caught up on each other’s news. As we were saying goodbye, I said something like, ‘every time we’ve seen each other, you’ve made important progress towards getting to where you want to be’, and I congratulated them on this and urged them to stay strong and focused as they continued to work through things. My friend considered this for a moment and admitted that, although they agreed that I was right, this thought hadn’t occurred to them before. They thanked me for pointing it out. I kept reflecting on this for the rest of the day. It was surprising to me that my friend had somehow overlooked the huge progress they’ve made. We’re not talking wishy-washy, intangible forms of progress here - we’re talking concrete, measurable, practical things that have been strived for and achieved. How is it possible not to notice those things?! And yet, of course, I know the answer - it’s not that my friend hasn’t noticed those things at all. Instead, it’s because their focus is on reaching the end goal, and they haven’t got there yet. Every time they reach a milestone along the way, their focus is ‘I’m not at the end yet, I need to keep going’. It’s like tunnel vision: they’re so focused on the not-yet-achieved ultimate goal that the little wins along the way don’t get wholeheartedly appreciated. And understandably so: it was clear from our conversation just how difficult things still are, and how important it is to keep up the momentum. But what was also clear was how uplifting and reassuring it was for my friend to have someone point out how much they’ve accomplished so far.
Weirdly, as I was thinking about this over the next couple of days, my Google news feed kept showing me related articles on things like why it’s important to recognise progress in your life. It’s not weird at all, of course - I expect I was simply primed to notice them more than I might usually do. There was one by Rick Hanson in Psychology Today. In that article, Hanson tells us that it’s important to notice what’s improving in your life in order to avoid feeling stagnant or declining, which can foster learned helplessness, a state in which you give up and stop trying to improve things even though you could. And this reminds me of a conversation I have again and again in coaching sessions, when I urge clients who are working towards some big goal to pause and reflect on how much progress they’ve made, even if they haven’t yet arrived at where they ultimately want to be. Veterans of coaching who have been seeing me for a while already have a list of milestones they’ve achieved, which they are happy to share and celebrate. But those who are in the early stages of coaching often don’t respond quite as positively. At best, they’ll react in the way my friend did - it won’t have occurred to them to reflect on and celebrate how far they’ve come, but they’re happy to do it when prompted. At worst, though - and unfortunately this is pretty common, in my experience - they react with distrust and something like alarm. According to them, the time to pause and celebrate their progress is when they’ve reached their end goal, which might be months or even years in the future. They’ve got it into their heads that celebrating their progress along the way would be disastrous for their motivation. It would mean letting themselves off the hook, and they’d give up. The slobby versions of themselves would take over - remember slobby Rebecca from episode #62: Guilt! Guilt! Guilt!? - and they’d stop working towards their end goal and instead languish on the sofa eating pizza and dozing their underachieving way through the rest of their days. To them, progress tunnel vision isn’t a symptom to address. It’s positively desirable. It strikes them as a completely sensible way to approach working towards their goals - at least until I ask them if that’s the way that other people should work towards their goals. If their sibling or their best friend were working towards something big like a new qualification or career or a relationship goal, would they discourage them from celebrating milestones along the way? Of course they wouldn’t. So why do they think that they themselves should work towards a goal without any encouragement or celebration until they get to the end?
I’m talking about this weird attitude as if it’s incomprehensible to me, but in fact I’ve felt that way myself in the past. Save the encouragement until the end, right? That way, victory is all the sweeter! That’s assuming you actually get to the end, which you might not if you don’t allow yourself to recognise your progress along the way. Have you ever run a big race, or watched other people run one, even on TV? Think of the spectators that line the streets during a marathon, clapping and cheering and calling encouraging things to the runners as they pass, long before they’ve reached the end of the race. Does this sort of thing cause the runners to stop running, sit down at the side of the road, and pop open a tube of Pringles? Well, no - much as part of them might like to sit down and relax with some unhealthy food, the support of the spectators spurs them on, helps them dig deep and keep going, and helps them push harder than they were able to push during their training, when they were running alone. I wonder what it would be like if there were a marathon during which the spectators would stand in solemn silence as the runners slogged past, withholding their encouraging words until the finish line. I do hope nobody ever tries to find out, because my guess is that the runners would be less motivated to push on and do their best, not more. The encouragement and celebration along the way is important - it sends the message ‘what you’re doing is making a positive difference, you’re moving along, keep doing what you’re already doing and you’ll get to where you want to be!’ Without any encouragement and celebration, on the other hand - without allowing yourself to recognise the progress you’re making - you’re withholding from yourself useful feedback about how you’re doing. How could it possibly be more motivating to pretend that you haven’t got anywhere yet, that despite all your striving, you’re still on the start line? Why would you bother to keep trying, if that’s what you think?
Ok, so you’re just wrong if you think that recognising progress in your life is going to make you complacent and sap your motivation, but if we dig down and look at what underlies daft thought patterns like that, I think that what we find is a deep distrust of ourselves. That, and fear. The distrust of ourselves comes out in that suspicion that secretly we’re just lazy slobs, underneath all the striving, which we’re only doing anyway because we’re constantly badgering ourselves to do it in the all-stick-and-no-carrot way that requires us to withhold any positive appraisal of our efforts because that would be letting ourselves off the hook. My comments about the problems - the downright incoherence, actually - of trying to motivate ourselves in that way takes the ‘ok so maybe you are a lazy slob at heart’ part at face value. But, of course, you’re not, and you’d be better off if you didn’t think that you were. But maybe the fact that you think you might be and the fact that you’re so unwilling to celebrate your own progress are related. Because if the story that you’re telling yourself is that you haven’t made any progress towards your important goals, then you’re someone who’s just dallying around, maybe looking busy but without actually achieving anything, in which case you may as well be sitting on the sofa doing lazy slob things. And if you’re a lazy slob, then of course you don’t deserve credit for having made any progress. These beliefs are mutually reinforcing. If, instead, you were to reflect seriously on what you’ve achieved and the progress you’ve made, then maybe you wouldn’t be so tempted to think of yourself as a lazy slob, and if you weren’t so tempted to think of yourself as a lazy slob perhaps you’d find it easier to credit yourself with having achieved important things and made important progress. How do you break the cycle? Well, one way is to take your goals seriously by documenting them - not just the ultimate goal, whatever that might be, but also the milestones that you need to achieve along the way - so that you can avoid moving your goalposts and so that later on you can look back on what you set out to achieve and how you’ve got on. You can use my Goal Contract for this - you can find that on the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website, and by the way if you need help with how to avoid moving your goalposts, go and listen to episode #16: Stop Moving Your Goalposts. Another thing you can find on my Resources page, which will help you with documenting your progress, is the Wheel of Life exercise. Try doing that every 6 months or so, and keep hold of your previous versions so that you can look back on how you’ve done. I’ll put a link to both the Goal Contract and the Wheel of Life in the episode notes. But, what about if you haven’t yet built up an archive of documentation that you can use to reflect on how you’ve done? Is there anything you can do right now to help you appreciate the progress you’ve made? Well, yes there is. You can reflect, right now, on some of the good stuff in your life that you wished you had in the past. I’ve made a new downloadable exercise just for you, to help with this - it’s a while since I added a new resource, after all. It’s called the Progress Temperature Check, and there’s a link in the episode notes too.
What about fear? I mentioned that that’s often standing in our way when we’re reluctant to take stock of the progress we’ve made. Because, what if you don’t end up achieving the big goal you’re striving to achieve? Won’t that be even more disappointing if, along the way, you’ve been patting yourself on the back and telling yourself what a great job you’re doing as you work towards it, getting your hopes up? Isn’t it better to manage your expectations by pretending that you’re getting nowhere, so that you’re completely fine when you end up, you know, getting nowhere? Of course you want to avoid disappointment. Who likes disappointment? But, again, imagine taking this approach to a friend who’s working towards something big, or someone you mentor, or your child. Imagine having a friend who’s balancing a full-time job with studying for a qualification in their spare time, and who’s just got a good mark on an assignment. It’s demanding, what they’re doing, isn’t it? Work and study? What if they end up having to drop out? Better to remain silent when they tell you about their little win with their assignment. Perhaps you could say something like, ‘When you complete the qualification, then I’ll congratulate you - but I’m not doing so now because I don’t want to get your hopes up in case you ultimately fail or have to drop out’. Wow, what a barrel of laughs you’d be. Looks like your friend needs to find some less toxic people to hang out with. I know, I know - you wouldn’t really say something like that to a friend of yours - the very idea horrifies you. But perhaps you’re saying it to yourself. You need to stop. It’s ok to be afraid, and it’s ok to recognise that there’s some uncertainty about whether you will eventually achieve what you’re trying to achieve. That’s always going to be the case with any goal that’s worth having. But you sabotage your chances if you refuse to cheer yourself on along the way and celebrate your progress. There are much better ways to deal with this sort of fear. Instead of holding back from celebrating your progress in the hope of avoiding disappointment if you don’t end up achieving your big goal, be brave and look that possibility square in the face. You don’t need to take an all-or-nothing approach to your goal, where you either succeed or you fail miserably. What’s your plan B? And your plan C? Invest time and thought in answering those questions. Come up with a plan B that you can really get excited about - not as much, perhaps, as plan A, but even so. It’s not plan A or the abyss. When you realise that there are other options, there’s less to fear. On top of that, the milestones that you’re hitting along the way to your goal are very often valuable in their own right and not merely as stepping stones. And that makes them worth getting excited about in their own right. Here’s an example: every time I apply for a grant and don’t succeed (which is a very common experience, I’m afraid), I find that there’s some positive outcome from having done the application. Sometimes I can rework it for another application. But more often, the positive thing arises from having been forced by the application process to articulate my project in a certain way, which leads to new insights that make the eventual (sadly unfunded) project better than it would otherwise have been. Would I prefer the grant success? Well, obviously. Do I end up regretting having applied? Definitely not. There’s always something positive to carry forward.
What progress have you made recently, that you’ve been overlooking? Recognise it. Do something to celebrate it. I dare you. Even if it’s been a while since it happened. You owe yourself. Next time, friends.
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!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!