Hope you are recovering well from the penis removal!
I have a question about how to deal with procrastination caused by fear of things not turning out how correctly.
Because I always get told 'to stop being a perfectionist' but that doesn't Help. If you have any tools or techniques that would be. Greatly appreciated
Yes! I have some stuff that works for this! The first thing is a skill called ācognitive defusion,ā a technique used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help people observe thoughts without immediately passing judgement on them.
It helps to start by switching to noticing-focused language. Instead of settling on the automatic thought of āI did this wrongā or āI canāt do this rn, I donāt have the timeā try and notice the thought as a thing or an object. āI notice I think I did this wrongā is different than just āI did this wrong.ā āI notice I feel incapable of doing this right nowā is different than āI canāt do this right now.ā It gives you a bit more internal distance with which you can observe the thought. That distance can help you reflect on the thought from a different perspective, as well. You can then ask yourself something like āwhat else do I think?ā or āAm I feeling anything else right now?ā Maybe you notice that youāre also thinking about how scared you are to schedule a cleaning with the dentist, or you notice you feel sad about something that happened earlier in the day. Maybe if you call the dentist you notice your emotional bandwidth changes and you can suddenly feel more capable of doing [thing] than you did before, or by letting yourself feel sad for a few minutes you feel more capable than you did a minute or two ago. A
You can also turn the thought/feeling into more explicit words. You may not think the words āI canāt do this,ā but if you notice a feeling of resistance you might translate it into those words. From there, you can try changing the voice of the thought. I like changing it to a voice I canāt take super seriously, like Goofy. If I think āLizard, you canāt do this Hu-HYUCKā and my first of reaction is to go āhehehe thatās sillyā then itās not necessarily a *true* thought, itās just a thought - like so many others. If I change the voice of the thought to Ben Shapiroās voice and hear āOk, well letās hypothetically say that youāre the worst at this and everyoneās gonna laugh at you for even tryingā in that wheedly PokĆ©mon voice he pretends is real and my first reaction is to say āWell FUCK you, Ben, you stupid bitchā then itās not a correct thought, just a thought.
Remember that your brain is a thought-generating machine in much the same way that your intestines are a poop-generating machine. Your brain extracts important information from sensations and experiences, combines it with knowledge and personal beliefs, and can turn something into a nutritious package of information that feeds you or into the waste product that you eventually expel. In other words - not every thought is created equal, just like every turd is not created equal. Your brain will generate thoughts regardless of the nutritional content they are fed, but some thoughts will be spicy and runny and make you feel gross and others will be solid and dense and make you feel pleased with yourself, and both can be the result of extracted necessities being fed to you.
Some other things that can help are playing thought over like theyāre a movie - noticing perfectionist of thoughts or feelings and projecting them onto an imaginary screen in your brain can help you recognize them as simply thoughts and not arbiters of reality. Not all thoughts are created equal just like not all films are created equal. Some thoughts are incredible masterpieces, and some thoughts may end up being made fun of by Danny Gonzalez or Drew Gooden and thatās fine. They all serve a purpose.
Some other things to keep in mind are things like the rule of āclose enough.ā To date I am the only one of my siblings to ever successfully kill an elk - something that means a lot to cowboy families because āputtinā meat on the tableā is a valuable thing to be able to do. I also like to point out that, compared to my siblings, I am not the best shot. In fact, I am probably the worst shot of any of my brothers. But I never fail to make a kill shot on an elk - and I have a good reason for that: After a Hunterās Safety Course class on ethical hunting I remember shakily telling my dad that I didnāt want to hunt anymore. We had gone over how to make the perfect shot to an elkās heart and I realized that elk are HUGE and their hearts are comparably small and I didnāt have an x-ray scope to reveal the exact location of a heart, so Iād have to guess where it was. I told my dad I couldnāt be a hunter anymore because I was scared of causing unnecessary pain, and to his credit he seemed surprised. I explained what I just said - that I couldnāt live with the idea of hurting an animal and not killing it cleanly. He thought for a moment, then drew a crude elk on a piece of blank paper for me. He drew where the class instructors had drawn the elkās heart, right behind the front shoulder and approximately in the middle of the torso, and then asked me:
āLizard, what happens if you shoot too low?ā
And I said āWell, then that elkās gonna run off and die in unimaginable pain hours or days later.ā My dad listened, then shook his head, and drew a. IG circle around the elkās heart, and said āan elkās lungs are about the size of a garbage bag. If you shoot too low, you hit the lungs, and the elk dies in about 60 seconds or less. Thatās not bad, especially when compared to slower deaths like starvation, old age, sickness, or even predation. Now, what happens if you shoot too high?ā And I was like āOh, well then THATāS when it runs off and dies hours if not days later in unimaginable pain,ā and again he shakes his head and taps the diagram and says āNope! Remember, garbage bag lungs. If you shoot too high, but youāre still aiming for the heart, youāll either hit the lungs, the ascending aorta, or the spinal cord. Either way, itās dead in under 60 seconds. So what if youāre aiming for the heart and you shoot too far back?ā and again I say my line - āit dies in unimaginable pain hours if not days later?ā and again he says āNo! Elk have livers the size of watermelons and those livers will receive all the blood in that elkās body over the course of about a minute, meaning the elk will die in 60 seconds or so. Personally, I canāt think of a better way to go than after living a life in nature, surrounded by peaceful greenery, and dying in less than a minute. It sounds idyllic. When I get old I want you to take me into the Alaskan forests and shoot me in the head, and I feel like thatās a fair way for an elk to go too. Weāre gonna call this the rule of close enough, and itās gonna make your hunting trips SO much easier.ā
And tbh he was right. The rule of close enough doesnāt mean just saying āfuck it who cares?ā It means that if youāre doing your best to do it perfect and you fail, youāll still be so close that it wonāt make much of a difference to others, and thatās important to know.
They say that perfection is the enemy of good, and tbh I believe that to be true. Not because perfection is bad, but because it takes so much out of you that it renders an otherwise doable and maybe even enjoyable task unbearable, exhausting, and overly strenuous. You donāt have to spend hours pouring over elk anatomy to get āclose enough,ā you just have to do your best and let the rest go where it may. D
This is where the last trick to overcoming perfectionism comes into play, and if youāre like me youāre gonna HATE this part: self-compassion and acceptance.
In my job the thing I hate the most is knowing that in ten years Iām gonna be an even better therapist. I wanna be the best therapist I can be NOW - I donāt want to have to wonder how much sooner my patients could have healed if they came in ten years later, I wanna know what I can do for them now! I donāt want to have to accept that the only way to be a therapist with ten years experience is to do therapy for ten years, but I have to. I donāt wanna have to accept that the way to write a ten-years-of-experience surgery letter is to write 20 āfour-years-of-experienceā letters right now because it feels so unfair and so unjust, but I have to continually engage in the agonizing work of self-compassion and acceptance to recognize that I canāt do better than my best, even if my best is gonna be better in 5 years. It means that I canāt do better than good if the alternative is doing 1/10th of what I actually needed to do. It means trying and failing in a million small ways and being kind to myself because a blade is sharpened with friction and a skill is honed with repetition and at a certain point volume of repetition and frequency of internal friction matters more than perfection.
Self-compassion is SO hard when you wanted to do better, but itās SO necessary because without it you end up not being able to practice enough to do better. So be kind to yourself. Be gayer. Read more Terry Pratchett. And let Goofy narrate your thoughts more, because it really makes thinking a lot more fun.
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