You’re doing it again, aren’t you? Making it impossible for yourself.
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, friend. Exciting news here at Imperfectionist Towers. We have a new cat! He’s called Kiwi, and he’s extremely handsome. The other 3 cats haven’t exactly rolled out the red carpet, but everyone is rubbing along together. I’m going to put a link to a photo of him in the notes for this episode in case you’d like to meet him.
On to item 2 on today’s agenda. Here’s something I see a lot of in coaching sessions. Clients talking about that elusive ‘flow’ state, and how much they want to be in it, and then in the next breath they talk about how they feel guilty about prioritising the projects they value, especially if they enjoy doing them, because how selfish, and isn’t success supposed to be hard, something you only earn after crawling your way across the emotional equivalent of broken glass?
It sounds crazy - but I empathise. I do this too, and not just with writing and other academic-related stuff. A few months ago I got into barefoot running. There are people you can meet online who are really into this - like, fanatically so. One theory goes that running without shoes on is good for you - gentler on your joints, less likely to lead to injuries, and so it’s often something that people get into when they’ve been running regularly and plagued with injuries, and so take off their shoes as a last resort. But that’s not really why I got into it. I never had a problem with running in shoes. I first tried it as a temporary measure because I’d hurt my foot (in a non-running related way) and couldn’t wear my usual running shoes, but I kind of got hooked on the challenge of it - the discomfort, and the constant mental challenge of having to manage that, became part of the fun. In fact, I’ve only run once in shoes in the last couple of months - and when I arrived back home I felt a bit deflated and short-changed because my feet weren’t battered. If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing painfully and with great difficulty, right? With running, just as with writing. Much as we exalt that flow state - that experience of being ‘in the zone’, being completely absorbed in an activity that feels simultaneously challenging and yet somehow almost effortless - something about progress coming too easily sets our alarm bells ringing. And that - that conflict - is a problem. I mean, it’s fine if you want to seek out and experience flow states to get your stuff done; and it’s also fine (weirder, but still fine) if you want the process to be somehow difficult and unpleasant. What’s not fine, though, is wanting both these things at the same time. What’s not fine is being motivated to seek out flow states while also being motivated to make progress as difficult as possible. Being like that is trying to make things not only difficult for ourselves, but impossible. You can’t both be and not be in a flow state. That’s just logic.
It might be that you do this, but never realised before that you do it until I mentioned it just now. That realisation is a pretty common experience, at least for people who are working with a coach. Also common is reacting to this sort of realisation by thinking, ‘Oh yeah, that’s exactly what I do, and it’s ridiculous, how could I ever have been so dumb?’ So, let me just stamp on that before we go any further. Stop it. You’re not dumb at all. Your inner life, just like everyone else’s, is an impossible juggling act where you try to do the right thing by reason - by, you know, not holding completely contradictory beliefs, that sort of stuff - while also trying to avoid feeling anxious, and emotionally uncomfortable in other ways. And so when you uncover what look like contradictory motivations and beliefs, that doesn’t mean that you’re an illogical maniac who should just give up now. All it means is that you’ve identified an area of tension between what you believe and how you feel. Well done you for discovering that - it’s not always easy to pick apart the tangle of our anxieties, beliefs, fears, boundaries, defence mechanisms, and all that. But now you’ve discovered it, what can you do about it?
Well, I talked about what to do when we discover that we hold contradictory beliefs in episode #28, which was entitled, Moore's paradox: When what you believe about yourself doesn't make sense. So, you might want to go back and listen to that if you missed it the first time round. Here, though, I’m talking about something related but different: contradictory motivations. Wanting to make it as easy as possible to get things done while also wanting to make it hard. Now, there’s something sensible at the root of this. You know that saying, ‘If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is?’ Well, something analogous applies to the stuff you have to get done - your writing, or whatever else it might be. We’re not talking about mindless tasks here - opening a box of cereal or working out how to turn on a tap, or some other simple thing. We’re talking about challenging stuff. Writing a thesis. Doing well in a job interview. Building a business. Whatever it might be, it’s something that you care about and want to get right, and the fact that you’re thinking about it in that slightly anxiety-laden, what-if-I-fail type way shows that it’s at the edge of your comfort zone, it’s stuff that you can do but also something that stretches you. And because it’s challenging, and because you’ve done challenging stuff before, you’ve learnt to be suspicious of stuff that seems to come too easily. We’ve all had that nasty experience of coming to the end of a task and thinking, ‘well, that was much easier than I thought it would be!’ and then realising with horror that the reason it was so easy was because we completely forgot to do a large and important part of it. We finished sitting an exam and realised too late that there was an extra section on the last page, which we failed to notice. Or we finish work earlier than expected and then realise that we completely forgot to attend an important 2-hour meeting that morning. Your toes are curling just thinking about this, aren’t they? When we’re talking stuff we care about, this sort of experience is the stuff of nightmares. The point is this: we’ve taught ourselves to be suspicious of things that seem easy. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is; and if it feels too easy to be possible, you’ve probably completely ballsed it up. You’ve probably done it wrong, or failed to follow instructions, or you’re neglecting your kids while you’re doing it, or you’re just being rampantly selfish by focusing on your own projects instead of the needs and desires of other people in the first place. So, when it comes to writing, or other challenging tasks, we do kind of want to get into a flow state and for it all to come effortlessly - but, actually, when it comes to experiencing things going well for us, we get suspicious, and we resist.
It all sounds pretty pathological described like this, doesn’t it? It’s good to be vigilant and conscientious so that we do the things we care about well, but what I’ve described here - common as it is - is an unhelpful hyper-vigilance. It’s the motivational equivalent of a traumatised war veteran throwing herself to the ground when she hears a New Year’s Eve firework go off in the distance. You’re so afraid of doing things wrong - especially given that, thanks to your impostor syndrome, part of you can’t shake the belief that you’re completely incompetent and long overdue your comeuppance anyway - that you don’t trust any effort that doesn’t come with pain. But contrary to what you tell yourself, it’s not supposed to be painful. It’s supposed to be challenging, sure, but that’s not the same thing as painful. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that it’s not even supposed to be difficult. This is something that the late Hugh Mellor used to say to me when he was my supervisor at Cambridge. He used to say that writing a PhD should be challenging, but it shouldn’t be hard, because it’s only ever something you embark upon when you’re adequately qualified for it. There are likely to be hard moments along the way, of course - but the overarching project is something that’s well within your capabilities, assuming you’ve been accepted onto the program in the first place, and have jumped all the administrative hurdles along the way. That important project you’re trying to get done? It is completely possible, and completely desirable, to do it without pain. It’s completely fine to seek out and trust the flow experience while you’re working on it. On that note, let’s acknowledge that - according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist famous for his work on the flow state - flow isn’t something that happens unless the work is challenging. Being in a state of flow doesn’t mean that the work is too easy for you, despite what some of my coaching clients seem to think.
Right. So. Pain is bad. Carry on listening for more ground-breaking insights. What I’ve just said will help, I hope, with the cognitive, rational aspect of your discomfort with pain-free progress. But what about the emotional part of it? Enjoying working on your important projects, getting lost in them, is something that makes you anxious, and simply bombarding you with pain-is-bad logic isn’t going to do the trick here. So let’s take your anxiety here seriously. What’s behind it? Well, part of it might be, as I’ve said, a worry about whether you’re doing it right. Are you writing your thesis or article or book right? Are you doing your grant application right? Are you doing well in this job interview? With things like this, though, you need to accept some uncertainty and discomfort. You’re never going to know for sure whether you’re doing it right. There’s not a detailed guide that tells you exactly how you should write this thesis or that grant application and what you should say and do in your job interview. If there was, then someone would have already been there, done that, written the guide - and there’d be no need for you to walk the path they’ve carved out. You’re breaking new ground. That’s the point, and that’s why it’s important to you. No matter how right you do it, you’ll never know for sure whether you’re doing it right. You’ll never know whether you’re on track, because there is no track apart from the one you’re making. So, when you find yourself feeling anxious about that uncertainty, that feeling of groping in the dark - sit with it. Allow yourself to feel it, and tell yourself that this is how it’s supposed to feel. What you’re feeling is anxiety, yes - but what you’re feeling is also the experience of doing something that you care about and that challenges you. All of this is completely fine. Completely normal. Carry on. You’re doing great.
But another part of what you’re feeling might be what we could call undirected conscientiousness. ‘Have I followed the instructions?’ ‘Have I missed something?’ And unless you actually nail these worries down and get specific about exactly what you’re worried about, your anxiety is going to run riot. If you’re worried that you’re doing it wrong - well, what exactly do you think you might be doing wrong, and what can you do to make sure you’re not doing it wrong? Sometimes, like I just said, uncertainty is part of the deal, and there’s nothing you can do to make sure you’re doing it right - there is no ‘doing it right’. But sometimes there are things you can do. If you’re applying for a job, you can have the job spec to hand and make sure you address it in your application. You can get someone to look over your application for you when you’ve finished. If you’re writing an essay, you can make sure you’ve read the question (take note, my students). You can seek out advice and mentorship from more senior people. These are all things that could help, but you won’t find them unless you are specific about your worries in the first place. Don’t tolerate vague, unspecific anxiety from yourself - or at least, don’t allow it to hold you back. What are you worried about, and what can you possibly do that’s going to help you to worry less? Found something? Great, do that. Nothing you can possibly do? Fine, strap your anxiety into the passenger seat and carry on driving.
Something else that falls into the ‘strap it into the passenger seat and carry on driving’ category are some of the mixed feelings we have about focusing on a project we care about. If you’re a parent and also a PhD student, you’re likely to feel torn, because the time you spend working on your thesis is time you spend not interacting with your kids. Or, if some of the people you care about aren’t supportive of whatever it is you’re doing, you might feel that working towards your goals is taking you further away from those people, when what you really want is their closeness and support. I understand this. I’m a single parent. I’ve heard ‘You’re always working!’ more times than I can remember, and it still hurts. I’ve had my kids walk over to me holding a board game that they want to play with me, and I’ve had to say, ‘Later, my love - Mummy needs to finish something’. I’m not going to tell you to stop worrying about stuff like this. Being over-committed is part of life for many of us. But I am going to suggest that you don’t have to worry about it at the same time that you’re working on whatever it is you’re trying to work on. Here are a couple of suggestions for how to tackle it.
First - well, you know I’m a fan of keeping a notebook beside you while you work, so you can write down any niggling thoughts and anxieties to get them out of your head. Do that. Any guilty thoughts about what you should be doing instead - write them down, and make an appointment with yourself to think about them later. Not only does that help clear your head to focus on your project, but it also opens up the possibility of working out practical steps you might be able to take in order to resolve whatever conflict you’re feeling. A vague sense of ‘I should spend more time with my kids’ while you’re trying to write never helped anyone. But scheduling a time to take that worry seriously, and think about it in a focused way, with your full attention, can be helpful. You can, for example, come up with some concrete ideas for how you can make time to hang out with your kids and work on your project. Perhaps you could write for an hour and then play a game with your kids. Perhaps you could take a trip with them at the weekend. Perhaps you and they could ringfence some family time every day, in which they get to choose the activity.
Second, the sorts of guilt we’re talking about here implicitly paint your working towards your goals in a negative light: as time away from your kids, or as a source of tension between you and those you love, or whatever. Is there a way you can reframe it in a more positive light? This is something I’ve found really helpful myself. I’m stretched pretty thin as a single parent with a full time job, and I’m well aware that I simply don’t have the time or the energy to do the sorts of things I’d be able to do with my kids if I wasn’t single parenting of working full time. There’s a limit to how much I can do about that. But I am able to look at the positives. It’s true that there are times, frequent times, when I simply have to work instead of play with my kids, or when I’m too tired from working to be good company for them - but I’m also demonstrating to them that it’s possible to do it on my own, that I can work and parent at the same time and still survive, even if I’m not great at answering emails or keeping up with school parents’ evenings. I’m teaching them, I hope, that imperfection is ok. Perhaps that will empower them to be more confident and independent and forgiving of themselves as they grow up. I hope so. Why not have a go at this yourself? Write down a sentence to express any guilt that you feel about working towards your goals, and then try to reformulate it in a positive way.
As a final note, there’s a book I want to recommend to you here: Effortless by Greg McKeown. It’s all about how to find the easier way to do things. He’s also done lots of interviews about his work in this area - I’ll put a link to one of them in the episode notes.
Remember: be specific. Whatever you’re anxious about, force yourself to articulate it. And then take it seriously and tackle it head-on - but not at the same time as you’re trying to focus on something else. Are there solutions to whatever you’re worried about? Great: work out what they are and implement them. Are there positive ways to reframe your worry? Or is it just part of the uncertainty that you’re inevitably going to have to endure as you work towards the particular goals that you’re aiming at? Fine, get a taste for it, but don’t let it slow you down. You can do this.
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 https://www.patreon.com/AcademicImperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - https://www.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!