#140: When everything feels too high-stakes
When was the last time you made a completely frivolous, inconsequential decision? Some of you, I know, are going to have to think hard about your answer to that. Some of you are all about the drama, in the worst possible way. Missing that deadline means sabotaging your entire career. Forgetting that colleague's name means revealing yourself as a giant buffoon to everyone you care about connecting with. Making the wrong decision about which project to work on next means squandering what remains of your potential. You're so anxious about reaching your goals that you're burning through your energy and your peace of mind. You know you can't go on like this, but you're afraid to relax because that means giving up, failure, and oblivion.
It really doesn't have to be this way, my friend. Not everything matters. There's room in your life and in your career for playfulness, whimsy, and mistakes without consequences. Make yourself a calming cuppa and settle in for some straight talking from The Academic Imperfectionist.
Episode transcript:
Most stuff doesn’t matter.
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 in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi again, friends! How are you doing? That last episode was a whopper, wasn’t it? Have you recovered yet? My longest solo episode yet. Remember when my episodes were about 15 minutes long? Some of them were shorter than that. I guess you didn’t get so much of this waffley preamble back in those days. They used to take me less time to put together, too. A few hours of what was basically nice relaxation time in the evening, after I’d finished doing the stuff I’m employed to do. These days they’re the work of several evenings. I say ‘evenings’, but as a … whatever the polar opposite of a party animal is, I mean what most people would probably call late afternoon, or tea time. I like getting up early and finishing early, because it allows me to pretend that I’m an efficient, deadline-respecting sort of person, which unfortunately isn’t wholly true. I mean, I do respect deadlines, I suppose, but we have kind of an open relationship. I can’t always give them what they need from me. What does that even mean? No idea. Let’s just get on with it, shall we?
My topic for this episode is something really close to my heart. It’s something I struggle with a lot, and it’s something I see a lot in coaching clients too. Let me start off with an inspiring quotation from James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. He writes [quote]:
‘Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big.’
[End of quote] Uplifting stuff, right? For lots of people, at least. Clear is showing us how to become the person we wish we were - a person who might, from where we are now, seem impossibly distant and different - by making small, very achievable changes. On his view, you don’t need dramatic, magical powers to transform into your superhero self, like in the movies. You can do it gradually but just as reliably by doing stuff like making your bed in the morning and downloading a meditation app. Other stuff too, of course, but still small stuff. You can manage that, right? Easy! This time next year, you’ll be v2.0 and absolutely winning at life.
I do like Clear’s message of how very achievable positive change can be, and how big goals don’t always require big changes. His metaphor of every action casting a vote for the person you want to be is really evocative here. Even so, when I first read it, I found it really unsettling. It crystallised an anxiety I constantly struggle with, in which everything I do - especially the bad choices - takes on too much weight. Because, if every action we take is a vote for the type of person we wish to become, then it’s not just the good things we do that are shaping our future self. Our bad choices have their votes to cast, too. Every time we hit the snooze button, every time we skip a workout, every time we have a second slice of cake, every time we give less than 100% - we’re butterfly-effecting the person we will eventually become. When you start to look at it that way, every night is election night. You get into bed and lie awake counting the votes cast over the course of the day, wondering who’s winning. Will it be the superhero version of yourself, the version that’s enjoyed a groundswell of support from today’s 7am yoga session and that boring admin task you managed to do on time? Or is the nasty party edging ahead, thanks to a morning spent trying out every available font in your Word document instead of adding actual words, followed by an eleventh hour - perhaps literally - wine-fuelled ebay spending session? It’s a tense one. And unlike a real election night, the tension isn’t over in the morning. You don’t find out the result that fast. You find out - if at all - years later, when you reflect on how your life is going and decide that, on balance, you’re either pleased or disappointed with yourself.
I know that, for many of you, this experience is familiar, even if you haven’t ever given it the election night spin. With some people, it’s a sense that everything - even very mundane stuff like opening (or not opening) an email or briefly interacting with a neighbour - is weirdly high stakes. Every action gets overanalysed for what it means, for what it reveals about the sort of person you are and what you deserve and what lies in store for you in the future. You misinterpreted that email; that shows how unforgivably careless and slapdash and embarrassing you are. Your attention lapsed during that talk; you’re a daydreamer, you don’t have the focus to get the life you want. The talk ends and you can’t think of a single question to ask in the Q&A; there really is nothing between your ears, is there? It’s no wonder you’re constantly losing hours to pointless scrolling on your phone, you don’t have the smarts for much else. Look, there’s your colleague - perhaps even your junior colleague - asking a really insightful question! You’re getting left behind - you peaked years ago.
It’s as if you’re living your life on a stage, in audition mode, in front of a stern panel who are evaluating and critiquing your every move and tying them to your flaws. It’s especially difficult in cultures like academia, where - as I’ve talked about plenty of times before on this podcast, especially in episode #133: Academia is just a job! And episode #138: ‘So, what do you do?’ - we’re encouraged to think of success as being a matter not just of what you do, but of what sort of person you are. And that means there’s no switching off. There’s no backstage you. Everything you say, do, and think is revealing of what you are and whether you have what it takes. Even things like having the wrong hobbies or enjoying the wrong movies or laughing at the wrong jokes count.
If this sounds familiar, what can you do? Is it possible to dial down the drama? I’m so glad you asked, because yes it is. As a first step, here’s your usual, once-per-episode reminder to resist the binary thinking. It’s hard in this case because the whole thing is about the binary. It’s about catastrophising and you’re primed to notice the really ominous stuff, the stuff that confirms your worst fears about the sort of person you might be. There’s a little bell going off in your head every time you do something that confirms your laziness, your lack of discipline, your stupidity, your general unworthiness. And just as salient is the other extreme - the way you wish you were doing things but aren’t. You slept through your alarm this morning, but that idealised version of yourself leapt out of bed refreshed and ready to attack the day the moment it went off. It’s one or the other. Fail versus win. Bad versus good.
While those are the extremes you’re focusing on, though, as you try to steer your course away from one and towards the other, real life is happening in the space between them. Real life involves getting out of bed later than you planned but still earlier than you’d like. Real life involves drifting off and losing focus during the talk or the meeting, but still getting some of the gist, more or less. That’s not the headline news your inner critic is after, of course. She wants to yell ‘Yet more evidence of your inadequacy!’; she’s not interested in ‘Not perfect, but still an improvement on last time’. This gives us part of our answer to that question, ‘How do I dial down the drama?’ - and it’s: stop looking for it. You need to learn to remove the hair trigger from your self-criticism, or at least temper it with some nuance. Next time you’re inclined to yell ‘Yet more evidence of my inadequacy!’, engage some of that reflective, thoughtful, critical thinking that you’re 100% capable of, but curiously unwilling to apply to your own self-evaluation. Is getting up 45 minutes late really evidence of inadequacy? If someone else got up 45 minutes late, would you be confident concluding that they are inadequate? Are there any other, perhaps more measured and boring, explanations that you can think of? Tiredness? Not being a morning person? Understandable reluctance to start another day being yelled at by their inner critic? You’ve heard all this before from me, I know, and so I understand the eye rolls. It’s interesting, though, isn’t it? The eye rolling. Because resisting the binary thinking really should be welcome: it means acknowledging that you’re not as terrible as you tend to think you might be, and given that thinking that you’re terrible makes you stressed and miserable, you ought to be happy when someone tells you that there’s a way to avoid it. But it does involve a bit of mental discipline, and it can be hard work engaging that mental discipline when you’re dealing with such an emotive topic. There’s some satisfaction - a sense of fear-driven triumph, even - in pointing to the latest alleged proof of your failure and yelling, ‘See? I was right! I am an awful person!’ Self-destruction can sometimes feel almost joyous, and I suspect that’s because it can feel like a release to stop trying so hard to be rational and nuanced and instead give vent to our fears. You’re allowed to have those fears, but they don’t represent reality. Reality is found in the nuanced, non-clickbait headlines about yourself. You’re a boring, middle-of-the-road sort of person. In the best sort of way, mind. You have your weaknesses, but so does everyone. Your shortcomings are really nothing to write home about.
Now, if you can manage to steer yourself away from the binary thinking and the drama, something interesting happens. You’ve been so focused on those things that mean that you’re definitely a terrible person, so focused on making as much as possible as high-stakes as possible, that you’ve overlooked the fact that, actually, most stuff doesn’t matter that much. It actually doesn’t matter that much if you’re not a person who is inclined to spring out of bed, full of beans, while it’s still dark outside. Almost nobody is inclined to do that, by the way - that’s why alarm clocks are a thing. (Well, I guess alarm clocks probably aren’t a thing any more.) It doesn’t matter that much if you’re someone who drifts off during a talk or a meeting - again, that happens to most people. It doesn’t matter if you occasionally miss people’s emails or misinterpret what they’re saying to you or forget to do important things. Again, these are things that happen to most people. That’s not to say that things like this never have important consequences - they might, if you sleep through your own wedding or if you drift off while you’re giving evidence in your murder trial - but usually they’re not a big deal, and they certainly don’t entail anything in particular about what sort of person you are, whether you’re a good or a bad person, whether you’re destined for success in life, whether you’ll get that next job you apply for. If we return to Clear’s analogy about every action casting a vote for the person we wish to become - not all votes are equal. It’s not like a real election. Some votes are worth more than others. If choosing to hit the snooze button when there’s no urgency to get out of bed casts a vote on the wrong side, it’s a pretty weak vote. Maybe even completely inconsequential. If, on the other hand, you pick up some groceries for your neighbour, who’s just got out of hospital, you’re casting a much weightier vote on the right side. The lesson: not everything matters. Even the bad stuff.
Why would you think otherwise? Well, perhaps because you’re desperate for a sense of control over things that you can’t control very well, like whether you’ll get the job of your dreams in this dystopic job market or whether things will turn out ok or whether everyone in your life is secretly going to end up disappointed in you - or whatever sound your background anxiety makes. And so perhaps your habit of attaching inappropriately large significance to these things is an attempt to feel in control. Like wearing a pair of lucky socks, or throwing spilt salt over your shoulder. If you’re someone who gets up too late, who can’t sustain focus for more than a few minutes, and who regularly misses people’s emails, then when things don’t turn out as you’d like, these are things you can point to to explain the disappointing outcome, and that gives you something to latch on to to ensure things go better next time. Simple! I just need to become this laser-focused go-getting person and everything will be rosy! So, you have your sense of control, but at a cost - namely, magnifying the significance of completely pedestrian aspects of your life to the extent where the wrong decision can have disastrous consequences. And anyway, the sense of control you end up with is an illusion. Most things that you do don’t entail anything in particular about you, and some of the outcomes you most want aren’t as within your control as you’d like them to be.
If you can accept this, there is good news. Two pieces of good news, in fact - at least, two that I want to mention here. The first is this. The reason you started all this ‘make everything absurdly high stakes’ stuff in the first place is because of your belief that you need to become a better person, but when everything has dramatic consequences, it’s actually really difficult to make positive changes. There’s too much attached to it. Every decision you make becomes like those tense moments in movies when the goodie has 5 seconds to defuse the bomb. There’s no room here for a playful, curious approach, in which you try things out to see what happens. No room to give something a go, see if it works, and abandon it and move on if it’s not for you. But if you accept that not everything has to matter that much, you can explore without worrying about derailing your life. Instead of agonising about whether you should work on project A or project B and the potentially disastrous consequences of making the wrong decision, you can just pick one. Perhaps with the complete absence of drama that you’d attach to picking which pizza topping to order. Honestly, I’ve lost count of the clients I’ve coached who have come to realise that they can make room for playfulness and lightheartedness in the way they approach their goals - that nothing bad will happen if they do that, that a lot of that stress and weight they’ve been carrying is unnecessary, and that they can actually free themselves up to make better choices in the long run if they accept that they don’t have to get absolutely everything right all the time.
The second piece of good news is this. It’s tempting, when we set our minds to learning and growing and improving - and really, we don’t always need to be learning and growing and improving, sometimes it’s ok just to be, and if you want to hear more on that, check out episode #73: How to practise being instead of doing - but when we set our minds to all this growth stuff, it’s tempting to think that we need to reinvent ourselves completely. Restore factory settings, wipe all of the terrible choices we’ve made, and start over anew. But that’s yet another manifestation of that blinkered view I was talking about earlier, where all the bad stuff becomes salient and everything else fades into the background. The truth is, you’re basically fine as you are. Self-improvement, for you, is better conceived as making a few tweaks to fine-tune the good stuff that’s already there. It’s not about a personality transplant. I’m reminded here of some of the incredibly useful stuff that Professor Stephanie Dunson said back in episode #102, which was on how to level up your writing process. She talked there about working with people who vastly overestimate how much they need to change about their approach to writing. They think they need to replace their wholly bad approach with a brand new one. In fact, she explained, most people are about 90% fine. 90% of the way they write is working for them. If they want to improve, they need to look at the remaining 10%. Of course, since that 10% is what they struggle with, that’s all they see, and they think they’re all wrong. If you’re tempted to think that you’re all wrong or mostly wrong, that’s likely because you’re focusing only on the small portion of stuff that you could tweak.
The reason you’re overlooking the rest is partly because it’s working fine so you don’t notice it, and partly because you view it as your baseline. You view it as the ‘But everyone does that, that’s just normal, that’s just neutral!’ If you’re an academic, that’s things like the degree or degrees you currently have. It’s the achievements you’ve already made, the awards, the jobs, the grants, the general excellence. And, sure, that’s all just baseline if your reference group is curated to include those who you regard as around your level of achievement, and to exclude everyone else - and admit it, that’s exactly what you’re doing. Just keep in mind that the more you cherry-pick your reference group in this way, the more of your traits you dismiss as ‘just baseline’, the smaller the percentage of your traits are in need of improvement. If you’re focusing on the stuff that makes you look bad in contrast to this very impressive group of people, while ignoring that you qualify as a member of this impressive group of people in the first place, then you end up with a skewed view of yourself. We’re talking about marginal gains here, when it comes to decisions about how to improve. If you were a house, these decisions are more like choosing which shade of yellow to paint the spare room, and less like wondering whether to do a loft conversion or even knock the whole thing down and build a completely different house somewhere else. That’s not to say that those changes are not worth making - they may well be, if they don’t cost you too much time, energy, stress, and whatever else. But they’re certainly not changes that are going to make or break your moral worth.
That’s it from me this time, my friends. Take care, and speak soon.
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 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 leave 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 can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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