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It’s happened to all of us. We’re on the brink of a new project we’ve been yearning to tackle for years, and now we need to take the next, critical step. But we don’t. Why?
It’s not that we lack abilities or relevant background. In other areas of our lives, we’re able to orchestrate the seemingly endless stream of details, making our way around obstacles that inevitably arise, and finishing the work to the applause of friends and colleagues. But when the project really matters to us, we are frozen.
The challenge we face as human beings is that we are not perfect, and we never will be. And yet, some of our roles and duties pull for perfection. When we have children, we feel a natural love and obligation to be the best parents possible. At the same time, we need to juggle our other critical roles, being a reliable and conscientious employer or employee, all the while contributing to our community. We’re destined to fall short.
Good enough is enough
This inability to be perfect led the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1953 to coin the term “good enough mother” to reinforce the fact that children don’t need parents—either mothers or fathers—who care perfectly. As Laura Smith notes in her article “Good enough is enough” in the April 2019 issue of Therapy Today, Winnicott “believed that perfection is impossible: no mother can realistically anticipate and provide what her child wants or needs every moment of every day. And if she could, this would surely create a child so fragile that the smallest let-down would be intolerable. By failing to meet every single need, by sometimes getting it wrong, good-enough mothers enable their children to develop a sense of self-reliance and autonomy that will help them withstand the many disappointments and failures that they will inevitably encounter in life.” Children can do fine if they have parents who simply care enough.
We can apply the intention of caring just enough to make progress in high priority projects in all areas of our lives. By letting go of perfection, we can develop more effective strategies to accomplish our goals.
Step 1: Identify what you need to do next
Any big project can be overwhelming, simply by virtue of it being … well … big. But often, the scope of the project ahead is not the intimidating part. It’s the individual steps we need to take that hang us up.
We have one or two items that constantly gnaw at us, waking us up in the mornings with a sense of fear and dread, as we know that these are the things we should start working on, right now.
The bad news is that we are left with a feeling of failure, because we avoid doing these things.
The good news is that this constant self-nagging gives us guidance on what to do next.
Step 2: Start on something
Often we know more than we give ourselves credit for. When faced with a gargantuan feat, we think we need a comprehensive plan to move ahead. But more often than not, we just need to start somewhere.
We tend to think we need the perfect starting point. We need to know how each step fits into the larger whole. We need to prioritize, so we’re proceeding in the most efficient and productive way possible.
In reality, we just need to take a next step.
When we even contemplate doing so, however, we feel a surge of negative emotions welling up from within. Typically, that’s enough to stop us, as we shift our attention to something less threatening, more doable. It’s called avoidance.
But there’s another path forward. We can use this sense of intense emotion as a cue that we are on the brink of taking an important action. Rather than doing everything in our power to run away from that feeling, instead, we can intentionally move into it.
More often than we’d imagine, we will discover that the dreaded task isn’t nearly as dreadful as we had imagined. Once we start in, we might even be surprised to find out that the very thing we had been avoiding is actually kind of interesting, possibly even fun. But even if it remains uninspiring, it’s probably not as bad as we had anticipated. And in any event, we’ve now eliminated the possibility of feeling bad for avoiding what knew all along we had to do.
Step 3: Learn to let go
As I sat down to write this blog post, I had intended for it be much more comprehensive. I’d expected to identify seven or nine or eleven steps, and to explicate all these antidotes to procrastination with a clarity the topic had never seen before. But it took longer than I’d hoped to write what I already have, and a glance at my watch now tells me my next appointment is starting soon. And after that, I need to go to the dry cleaners, then stop by the grocery store on my way home from work. And … and ….
There are, indeed, seven or nine or eleven steps we all can take when we care too much. And in the coming weeks, I’ll explore some of them in other blog posts. For now, though, my goal is much less ambitious, and yet paradoxically, much more effective. I will not care too much about coming up with the perfect list, but I will care just enough to take a first step. Perfection will have to wait.
Copyright © 2019 Douglas Vakoch
References
Smith, L. (2019). Good enough is enough. Therapy Today, 30(3).
Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena—a study of the first not-me possession. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89-97.
