In my first term of my graduate diploma in graphic design, I managed a merit and a pass in my first two modules. Shock horror! A B and a C?!
Well, quite. Given that my overall classification was determined by an average of my marks, I had already ruled out the possibility of graduating with a distinction, or the equivalent A grade.
This was a real blow; I struggled in the holidays to find the motivation to progress an independent assignment for our third module. In my eyes, my first attempts were simply not good enough. One of our tutors was an absolute stickler for typographic rules. Whatever I produced, she would spot my errors instantly.
As the first week of holidays ended, I knew my rest period was over, but I found myself stuck. I couldn’t do anything but scroll endlessly on my phone. Anything to distract myself from the project I needed to complete. As 2pm came and went, I wrote the day off and just about managed to eat something healthy and get some sunlight. The next day began much the same as the first, except this time, I managed to put a stop to my procrastination. Today, I vowed, would not be the same as yesterday.
But pausing caused a huge wave of fear to engulf me. It was paralysing. I had finally lifted the lid on my feelings and they were overwhelming. I couldn’t move for what felt like an eternity. Finally, I pulled out a journal and started writing, until the tears fell and I confronted my fear of failure head on.
Perfectionism can take a lot of forms but when it’s at it’s worst, it prevents us from trying anything remotely out of our comfort zone. The thinking goes: if I can’t do it perfectly, I won’t do it at all.
This leads to some highly exceptional performers in education and the workplace to following poor diets or living in unexpectedly messy homes. In some cases, perfectionists end up treating their loved ones with less care and respect than they deserve. The drive to achieve incredibly high standards takes so much work to maintain that when we get home, we haven’t got the emotional reserves to be considerate or attentive to the people who care about us the most.
So, perfectionism can lead to a life of extremes - excessively high standards in some areas of our lives and scraping by in others. We may choose not to start anything that we might fail at, resulting in always ‘playing it safe.’ This may well lead to a risk-free life spent wondering about the paths not taken.
So what happened, after crying it out? By the time I had confronted and acknowledged my fears, I was pretty washed out. I made a to do list for the next day and stuck a sign on the wall that said:
Anything you do is better than nothing.
By this reasoning, anything I managed to do was worthy of praise. This would get me past my constricting fears of failure until I could get myself into an established work routine. This worked really quite well. Soon enough, I didn’t even notice the sign on my wall. I simply got up and got on with the tasks at hand.
This was the start of what Dr Pippa Grange, a top performance psychologist who worked with Gareth Southgate and 2018 England Men’s international Football team, describes as clearing out emotional waste.
She writes that emotional waste can build up if it remains unprocessed, like plastic waste polluting the ocean. Examples of emotional waste include: worrying, blaming, resenting, hating, or circular ‘shoulds woulds or coulds’ such as ‘I won’t be able to do it, I can’t control it, I shouldn’t feel like this.’
Composting this emotional waste may take a long time. It may even stink! To break down our fears, we must acknowledge the ways in which fear has limited us and how it has affected our relationships. But a lack of air will make our emotional waste stink even more. Airing out our fears, by talking or writing about them, is part of the process of acknowledging our feelings. Unfortunately, the process of making excellent compost cannot be rushed. When it’s ready though, It will fuel the green shoots of your new and better practices, behaviours, narratives and beliefs.
So what should I do, if I want to clear through some emotional waste?
Dr Pippa Grange has a fantastic exercise that uses imagination to give our fears an image. It works for more than just perfectionism, which she describes as fear of failure. In this passage, she is talking to Jake, a successful athlete whose shame of being a gay man and his fear of rejection affected his relationships with his family, friends and teammates, leading to an increasingly isolated life. Here, Dr Grange helps him give an image to his fear (pp.145 - 147).
This was the starting point to re-story his life and feel stronger. He could revisit and reshape these images whenever he liked. Once he had named and described these feelings he could start the process of allowing them to pass. When he talked to his family and friends he could explain in detail how he felt, rather than the more blunt ‘I was scared of what you might think.’ This exercise promoted understanding and care from the people closest to him.
So if you find yourself stuck, or overwhelmed by fear, give this exercise a go. It might just start you on a journey where you can understand, accept and reshape the way you feel.
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