#86: Every Academic Imperfectionist episode, summarised
I've been thinking: how might someone summarise the main bits of advice from all 85 (so far) episodes of this podcast? Gather round the virtual campfire, friends, and let's talk about those things that I can't seem to stop banging on about. They are:
The reverse Golden Rule (don't treat yourself in a way that would be too disrespectful or unkind to treat another person)
Understand your inner critic
Being mean to yourself doesn't help you
Reject binary thinking
Episode transcript:
Here’s my best academic imperfectionist advice crammed into a single episode.
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! Looks like it might finally be summer here at Imperfectionist Towers - this episode was prepared in the garden while drinking tea and surrounded by sunbathing cats. Right now I’m sitting next to poor old Minnow, our grumpiest cat, who didn’t have a great life before he came to live with us, and who it turns out is once again diabetic, after being in remission for a couple of years. You know those articles you sometimes see about how you should adopt the elderly, sick animals that nobody else wants because they will be forever grateful to you? Well, you definitely should adopt those animals, but Minnow is a striking counterexample to the gratitude thing. He’s never been grateful. He grumbles and growls at the other cats, he bites if you touch him in a way he doesn’t like, he doesn’t like cuddles, and I’ve heard local mums warn their toddlers not to pet him. Somehow, though, he manages to win people over. A lovely neighbour of ours, who sometimes feeds our cats when we’re away, told me that he’s her favourite, and she’s been known to give him extra meals because he gave her the predictably dishonest ‘No one ever feeds me’ look. He repays her devotion by eating the food she leaves out for the hedgehogs who visit her garden, and vomiting it back up on her driveway.
If you’re sitting there waiting for the seamless segue into this episode’s topic, there isn’t one, I’m afraid. I just thought I’d tell you about Minnow. I guess he does have some relevance, though: if you’re prone to people-pleasing, you might want to make him your new role model.
So, what are we focusing on in this episode? Well, I’ve been thinking. You know those websites that give short summaries of books so that you don’t have to read the book - because who wants to read, right? Bo-ring. I found one, the other day, of my own book, For F*ck’s Sake (that’s the book title, not just me sounding off). There was a bullet point list of ‘key takeaways’, followed by a list entitled ‘inspirational quotes’, which I got about halfway through before I realised that they weren’t actually quotes from my book. Anyway, I’m not going to deny that it’s sometimes useful to have a book summarised. Sometimes a summary can help you decide whether you want to read the entire book, and sometimes you can read the summary instead of reading the book, because let’s face it, we don’t have time to read every book that might potentially be interesting or useful to us, especially if you read at an absolute snail’s pace, like I do.
This got me wondering how someone might summarise this podcast for the benefit of someone who doesn’t want to listen to it - unimaginable, I know. What are the core themes, the main ideas? Over the course of, where are we now, 85 episodes (not including this one), and god knows how many coaching sessions, there are definitely pieces of advice and helpful framings that I find myself using again and again. So, why not bring them together in a single episode? It occurs to me that this topic would be a great one for the hundredth episode of the podcast, which is not too far off, but whatever. I’m worried that if I decide to put it off until episode #100, I’ll probably forget all about it, and then realise my terrible mistake around episode #103 and wonder whether to just do it then or whether to wait until the next big milestone - all of which is a waste of silly perfectionist energy, so let’s get on with it.
So. What are the key pieces of advice you get from listening to this podcast? By a long stretch, the first one that pops into my mind was: Would you say that to a friend? This idea comes up, in one form or another, in most of my episodes, or so it seems to me. It takes a few different forms, and it serves a few different purposes, so let’s unpack it a bit.
The first way this idea emerges is in the belief that you shouldn’t be treating yourself in a way that you’d think too disrespectful a way to treat others. It’s sort of an alternative to the Golden Rule - the idea that appears in the Bible as ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, and in Confucius as ‘what you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others’, and in Buddhism as ‘hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful’, and in Hinduism as ‘do naught unto others what you would not have them do unto you’ - you get the idea, it’s pretty universal, and thanks here to Paul Walker and Ally Walker for collecting the various formulations I’ve used here, along with others, in their Philosophy Now article, ‘The Golden Rule Revisited’. The assumption underlying the Golden Rule is that people are inclined to be nicer to themselves than they are to others, and while that’s undoubtedly true - we humans can indeed be incredibly selfish - things are reversed when it comes to our inner critics. Many of my coaching clients, and many people who have got in touch after listening to this podcast, or who have attended talks I’ve given, attack themselves with harsh, ungenerous, mean, disrespectful words that they would never dream of directing to another person. They tell me that they’re lazy, stupid, a disappointment, a loser, and when I say, ‘Hmm, don’t you think you’re being a bit harsh on yourself?’ they say, ‘What are you talking about? It’s just the truth’. It’s only when I ask, ‘Would you say those things to a friend, or a colleague, or a sibling, or a child of yours that was in a similar situation?’ that they pause and admit that of course they wouldn’t, they’re not a sadistic bully. So, one takeaway from this ‘Would you say that to a friend?’ advice is, obviously, that reversal of the Golden Rule: do unto yourself as you’d do unto others, or don’t do to yourself what you’d regard as too disrespectful to do to another person. But it goes a bit deeper than that, too. That question, Would you say that to a friend?’ also prompts the recognition, often for the first time, that you have an inner critic, and that your inner critic has an agenda.
Which brings me on to the next thing that, I think, forms a core piece of advice on this podcast: learn to understand your inner critic. When you say things to yourself, especially when you say negative things - I’m a failure, I’m not as good as those other people, I’m a fake, I can’t get it together - you’re not in fact just telling it like it is. You’re not faithfully representing reality. I mean, why would you even think that in the first place? You’re emotionally involved in your own life - you’re just about the worst person who’s capable of commenting dispassionately on it. The way you think about yourself and your life reflects all the fears and anxieties and insecurities and baggage you’re carrying around with you. So, the nasty stuff you say to yourself isn’t reality, it’s just a take. That emerges strikingly when you compare the way you talk to yourself with the way you talk to others. You end up thinking things like, ‘Well, I thought I was just being honest with myself when I told myself what a loser I am for not getting that job I applied for, but now you mention it, no, of course I wouldn’t call my best friend a loser if they didn’t get the job, so maybe there is something off about the way I talk to myself’. It can be liberating and empowering to realise that the voice of our inner critic is not the voice of the truth. Our inner critic is just one perspective, and there are others. You can, as I’ve said before, learn to tune in to your inner mentor: that kind, supportive, encouraging voice that you don’t bother to listen to but that you’re easily capable of hearing if you train yourself. Whatever you’d say to your friend who doesn’t get the job is what your inner mentor is saying to you. So, while your inner critic says to you, ‘Ugh, what a loser, you’ll never succeed in this field, who are you kidding?’ what you’d say to your friend in that situation is more along the lines of, ‘This says nothing at all about your merits, every single smart and talented person out there has a long list of failures before they finally got what they want, try not to take it personally but I’m sorry it didn’t work out this time, how about we go for chocolate cake to cheer you up?’ Recognising what’s going on - that you have an inner critic who views your life through a lens of fear - can help you gain some distance from the negativity and become your own cheerleader.
But, hang on a second - why would you want to be your own cheerleader? Being mean to yourself is your superpower! You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t keep kicking yourself constantly! There’s no way you can let yourself off the hook! Come on, you must recognise this one: the bizarre but very pervasive view that the key to success is being horrible to yourself. I’m always on about this one. The advice in a nutshell is: Being mean to yourself doesn’t help you. I know you’re afraid that the moment you give yourself a break, you’ll stop trying, and the next thing you know you’ll need to be rescued from your own unwashed bed by a team of people in hazmat suits who’ll spend two weeks chipping away at the pile of litter and Doritos dust that has accumulated on top of your lazy, slobby, good-for-nothing body because without constantly saying awful things to yourself you’ll revert to being the human-sized all-consuming amoeba that deep down you know you are. Honestly, I don’t know where we all get this idea from, that being mean to ourselves is somehow necessary to our success. How many self-help books have you read that tell you to talk shit to yourself non-stop if you want to realise your dreams? How many Oscar acceptance speeches involve the recipient thanking all those people from their past who doubted them and told them what a fucking loser they are and how they’d never make it? How many autobiographies of successful people have included stories like, ‘I noticed that the more time I spent insulting myself, the better my life became’? And what’s more, would you say that to a friend? If you were assigned a junior colleague to mentor at work, or if you’re helping a child with their homework, or if you’re trying to teach anyone anything, would you go about it by saying horrible things to them about how terrible they are, how everyone’s disappointed in them, how every success they’ve enjoyed so far is due to their somehow managing to deceive other people into believing that they’re a worthwhile human? And if you did do all that, would you expect your nasty words to spur them on to ever greater achievements? Obviously not. I get that, for some reason, the idea that everything will fall apart if you start being nice to yourself is really compelling, but take some time to feel your way into the idea that maybe you are absolutely fucking wrong about this. You should be kind and supportive and encouraging to yourself, partly because being kind and supportive and encouraging is exactly what you need to keep working towards achieving the things you want to achieve, but also - and mainly - because adopting a nasty, bullying attitude to yourself is just as destructive and unjustified as adopting that sort of attitude to another person. Meanness doesn’t work. Stop.
Okay. Time for just one more core piece of advice that I’m constantly banging on about on this podcast. Here it is. Reject the binary. Reject all-or-nothing thinking. You know, that way of thinking that leads you to believe that either you’re working yourself into the ground or you’re a lazy piece of shit. And either you beat everyone else to that dream job or you’re a loser who will never amount to anything. Either you’re a complete walkover or you’re arrogant. Either you succeed or you fail. And - because these things are all related - either you constantly whip yourself with horrible words or you turn into a complete slob who stops trying and will eventually need rescuing from their own filth by those guys in hazmat suits. Binary thinking keeps us stuck in unhelpful patterns of thought and behaviour because we convince ourselves that changing our ways will just involve swapping one undesirable thing for another, so what’s the point? The way out is to learn to see the nuance. I’ve talked before about how to do this, all the way back in episode #4: Hack your assertiveness with Aristotle. Aristotle saw desirable patterns of behaviour - the virtues - as falling in the middle of a spectrum, with different undesirable behaviours - vices - at either end. So, courage is a virtue, and it lies on a spectrum between cowardice and recklessness. Friendliness lies between obsequiousness and cantankerousness (I love these words). It can be helpful to think of our own undesirable traits in these terms, as vices that lie at one of of a spectrum, and then we can explore what the mid point of the spectrum might look like, given that we definitely don’t want to leap all the way towards the other equally undesirable end. As I said back in episode #4, binary thinking is what keeps people from working towards being appropriately assertive. They don’t like being a walkover, but they’re worried that if they try to change that, they’ll end up being arrogant, and they don’t want that either. But thinking instead of being a walkover and being arrogant as the extreme ends of a spectrum opens up the possibility of attaining a healthy balance between them: assertiveness. Give this a go, next time you think of yourself as trapped in the binary. Are you afraid of taking a break because you don’t want to be a lazy slob? Well, if overwork and being a lazy slob are the extreme ends of a spectrum, what might the middle look like? Would taking a break for 20 minutes make you a slob? How about taking a day off after you meet the deadline you’re working towards? There are endless possibilities. Getting the balance right isn’t always easy - according to Aristotle, it can take years of practice to develop the virtues - but it’s possible, and you’re a smart person, you can work it out.
So, there you go. Academic imperfectionism in a nutshell. You never need to listen to another episode of this podcast now. Seriously, though, please come back next time, don’t desert me. Bye for now, 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!
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