ANC220 - TSM Reflection
Roughly halfway through the trimester, my lecturers and I met to discuss my performance in regards to the project production process. Beforehand, I had completed a sheet giving my point of view on the topics that we were to be discussing. Naturally, I gave very negative and self-deprecating opinions on all of my qualities, making myself out to be in a far worse position than I actually was at the time. The lecturers called me out on this, explaining that I had been doing a far better job than I had assumed, and that the criticisms I applied to myself were unjust and biased. Now that the trimester has progressed further and the project has developed, I have been drawing closer and closer to the negative opinions that I created in the meeting earlier. My work ethic decayed further and further to the point of stagnating entirely, until the point where I was overcome by guilt and desperation as the deadline drew nearer and was forced to actually work on the project. I still cannot converse with the class itself and find severe difficulty in asking for help, but I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t have a choice but to speak to the lecturer’s to get assistance. If I hadn’t, chances are the project would have completely stagnated and never been finished. One of the big things the lecturers mentioned during the meetings was that I needed to stop being so hard on myself, and have more confidence in the quality of my work. My combination of perfectionism, anxiety and self-loathing always results in me hating my own creations to the point where I don’t even want to work on them, because they’ll never live up to my astronomical expectations for myself. Through the help and advice of the lecturers, I managed to put that all aside for this project, and while I know my project could be miles better than it ended up being and I don’t really like how badly I made it look, I am content with how it finally turned out, and I’m confident that it exists as a ‘good enough’ product. While for the longest time, I had been ashamed of the fact that I can only work well when the pressure of a looming deadline is so close that it forces me to complete a project, the lecturers assured me that that’s a normal work ethic, and is extremely common. While it’s definitely not an ideal setup, they said that its not something to be ashamed of if it ends up getting the work done in the end. And as such, by falling into this work pattern once again, I managed to scramble together a completed project. Overall, the TSM meeting really helped put my own internal processes and failings into perspective, making me realise that most of my difficulties in production came from within, with most of them being completely fabricated in my mind and not actually a problem. The lecturers did a great job of arranging my chaotic thought processes and negative self-worth into a non-biased review of my performance thus far into the trimester, and it really helped my adjust my behaviour and outlook for the remainder of the term.