Settling for ‘good enough’ as an antidote to perfectionism

I work with a lot of musicians, so it goes without saying that I work with a lot of people who would describe themselves as perfectionists. Now, I’m not knocking standards in this post – of course we should strive to be the best we can be at what we do. But I am going to attack the particular stream of perfectionism that causes some of us to delay finishing things, or to delay even starting, for fear that we might create something that falls short of impossibly high standards.

Perfectionism as procrastination

For some of us, perfectionism becomes a means of not starting something we’ve said we intend to do. Many writers will tell you about the curse of the empty screen and the tyranny of the blinking cursor. Artists will talk about the fear of the empty paper or canvas. I can vividly remember, as a teenager, being faced with a blank piece of very nice and very expensive art paper in my high school Art class, and being frankly terrified to mark it because I felt in my bones that any mark I made would be terrible.

This fear of being terrible is a key component in the dark side of perfectionism – we want to be perfect, but are inwardly convinced that we are doomed to fail. So we don’t even begin. Note that it is our belief that holds us back, not any actual clear evidence.

Perfectionism as fixed mindset

But how did we end up this way? Toddlers will fall over many times while learning to walk, but we don’t see them not bothering to get up and try again. What happens to change the way we think so dramatically that we begin to fear even the prospect of making mistakes?

This has been a subject of study for a number of psychologists, including Aaron Beck, Carol Dweck, and Angela Duckworth. Beck’s contribution was the foundational insight that the same objective event can be perceived in different ways, depending on the interpretation – the self-talk – of the person involved.[1] In other words, two children can make a mistake on a maths quiz, but one might have a very different interpretation of that mistake to the other. The first might see the error as proof they are ‘no good’ at maths. The second might see the mistake as a cue to try harder in order to succeed next time. Dweck demonstrated in one of her early studies that telling a group of children to ‘try harder next time’ when in a group solving maths problems was far more successful than simply praising them – the praise group were more likely to give up on harder problems, whereas the ‘try harder’ group did exactly that![2]

Whether we are aware of it or not, our self-talk around whether it is okay to make mistakes, or whether we need to be right (perfect) all the time is a belief that is rooted in the examples given to us by parents, school teachers, music teachers, sports coaches, and pretty much any other adult we were around as kids. Children soak up knowledge, but they also soak up beliefs and attitudes. Some of them will be good and useful, and some will be rather more unhelpful.

Alexander’s take on perfectionism

FM Alexander was clear, in his chapter called Incorrect Conception, that a student’s fixed ideas were the cause of most of the student’s difficulties. All those little ideas and beliefs that each one of us has picked up over the years and added into our own little private universe of what is Right and True – these are the things that trip us up.

it is probable that all his former teachers will have instilled into him from his earliest days the idea that when something is wrong, he must do something to try and get it right. Beyond this, he will have been told that, if he is conscientious, he will always try to be right, not wrong, so that this desire to “be right” will have become an obsession in which, as in so many other matters, his conscience must be satisfied.[3]

If our overriding belief is that it is bad to make mistakes, then we’ll do whatever it takes to avoid them. And if we can clothe our fear with the seeming virtue of perfectionism, so much the better. But whether our perfectionism stems from fear of mistakes or a genuine desire to be perfect, what good does it serve us? It stops us from finishing projects, from trying new things. I know of a French exchange student who barely spoke to his English host family, for fear of getting his English wrong. He effectively threw away a tremendous learning experience through fear! Do we really want to make that mistake?

Listen to the new means; make mistakes

The only way out of the perfectionism trap is to start being prepared to make mistakes. It’s a decision, and as a recovering perfectionist myself, I can testify that it isn’t easy. But it’s the way of progress. Allow things to be ‘good enough’ occasionally. And if you’re having lessons in a skill, whether music or sport or something creative, make the experience of listening to what your teacher is telling you and trying it out, no matter how silly you may feel. You may be on the road to great things.[4]

[1] Duckworth, A., Grit, London, Vermilion, 2016, p.175f.
[2] ibid., p.179.
[3] Alexander, F.M., Concstructive Conscious Control of the Individual, Irdeat 1997, p.295.
[4] ibid., p.298.

5 Easy Ways to Tank Your New Year’s Resolutions

optinoptout

Psst! Want to give yourself a failsafe way of getting out of keeping those resolutions you signed up for on new Year’s Eve? Follow these five easy steps.

1. Don’t analyse the conditions present. Of course you don’t need an idea of exactly where you’re starting from. And you certainly don’t need to know what’s around that will help or hinder you. *

2. Make your goals as vague and non-specific as possible. “To be a better person” or “to move freely at all times” is a totally acceptable and achievable goal to have. **

3. Don’t give yourself an end-point or time limit. I mean, you wouldn’t want to give yourself a suitable timeframe for analysing whether you’d made any progress. Then you might realise that you were going about things the wrong way. or, more interestingly, you might see that your goal was too ambitious, or just wasn’t right for you, and then you’d have to go to the trouble of thinking out a new one. How tedious.***

4. Don’t bother thinking about how to reward yourself when you’re finished. Rewards are for kids.

5. Don’t bother thinking about the nuts and bolts of how you’re going to achieve your goals. Who needs steps and planning anyway? If they’re meant to be, then they should just magically manifest themselves without you having to do any work at all. Shouldn’t they? ****

 

If you follow these steps faithfully, you will successfully avoid even coming close to achieving your resolutions again this year, and you can carry on muddling along through life in the same old ways as before.

Cool.

 

* FM Alexander, Use of the Self in the Irdeat edition, p. 423.
** These are genuine goals that students have come up with in my classes. Sad but true.
*** in Evolution of a Technique FM may not give specific time frames that he used for evaluating what he was doing, but it is pretty clear from the text that he did. See p.423.
**** See Use of the Self , p. 423 .

Image by Stuart Miles from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Tennis lessons – why being rubbish at something is all-important

tennis

When I decided to take my Youngster out to buy him something as a reward for a really good school report, I didn’t expect him to choose a tennis racquet. But he did.

And then I didn’t expect his enthusiasm for it to last beyond a couple of days.

But it did.

So a trip to a charity shop later, we have two racquets, and have been out to our local park every day to hit a tennis ball around. Every day. For at least an hour.

I was terrible at tennis at school – couldn’t even get the ball and racquet to connect – so was a bit apprehensive about playing, especially when the Youngster demonstrated that he was able to hit the ball very effectively from the off.

But the outcome of nearly two weeks of going to the park has led me to a surprising discovery. Tennis is fun, even if you’re terrible at it. Why is this a surprise? Well, it all comes down to rules.

 

Rules, rules, rules

The rules we make about an activity materially affect the way we will approach it, and will determine how much fun we have. Like a lot of people, as a young person I took on board the view that being good at an activity was all-important, and that if I couldn’t be good at it immediately, I should give it up.* FM Alexander comments that students will have had this attitude instilled into them by teachers from their earliest days, and that

He will have been told that, if he is conscientious, he will always try to be right, not wrong, so that this desire to “be right” will have become an obsession in which, as in so many other matters, his conscience must be satisfied.**

I gave up a lot of stuff, and didn’t even try a whole load of things, because of this belief that I needed to be perfect immediately. But no one can expect to be immediately proficient at something new. This is too high a standard for success. More importantly, it is just a belief, or a rule, about what is correct and allowable. And beliefs and rules are changeable.

 

I am still a terrible tennis player. Put bluntly, I stink. But I’m still having fun, and that’s what counts.

What activity would you try if you would just allow yourself to be joyfully, gleefully bad at it?

 

* Incidentally, all teachers need to remember this point. Your students’ sense of self belief is a delicate thing. Criticise too much at an early stage at your peril.

** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.295.

Image by Suat Eman,  freedigitalphotos.net

 

Interlude: change your rules, change your world. A true story.

I’m postponing the last of the 5 steps to everyday happiness for one week, because I have a really important true story to tell. It’s an important story because it shows so clearly how the rules we make for ourselves can completely change the way we act.

Cello

My son is going to play his cello in a concert at school this week. Because he learns outside of the school environment, one of the school music teachers wanted to hear him play so that they could place him at an appropriate point in the programme. So last Friday my son took his cello in to school.

The cello was placed in a safe spot in an office, but I placed his music bag on his coat peg. Clearly he didn’t notice me do it, because later, when the music teacher came to collect him, he didn’t pick up his music. He just went to the office, got his cello, and went off to play.

After setting up, he realised that he didn’t have his music with him.

So what did he do?

What would you do if you realised you didn’t have your music, and you were auditioning for a concert? Would you panic? Would it affect your performance?

 

What my son didn’t do.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t worry.

 

What my son did.

Telling me the story later, my son said that he thought, “Oh well, I’ll just have to play my pieces from memory.”

So he did. Really well, according to the teacher.

My son doesn’t know that playing for strangers is meant to be scary. He doesn’t know that playing pieces from memory is meant to be hard. So he did both things unquestioningly and without a jot of worry. In fact, when I suggested to him later that some grown-ups might find that situation hard, he laughed at me.

It’s a question of rules. My son hasn’t learned or internalized any rules that say that playing for other people, or playing from memory, is anything to be afraid of. This means that he hasn’t put up any barriers from playing as well as he can.

So why should we?

 

Change your rules, change your world

FM Alexander said that “a changed point of view is the royal road to reformation.”* If you change the rules and assumptions that you operate under, then you effectively change the way you view and interact with the world.

Piano teacher and blogger Elissa Milne gave a great example of this in her most recent post. By encouraging her student to stop reading the note names he had placed over every note in his music, and instead to think about the music in terms of shapes, she was able to change his playing from fumbling to near effortless in minutes.

If a piano student can experience that sort of improvement from a change of rule, what sort of improvement do you think you could achieve?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.44.
Image by J Frasse, FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Don’t copy me!

On the weekend I taught a day workshop (about Alexander Technique) at the Bristol Folk House, a lovely venue in central Bristol. Amongst my students for this workshop I had a husband and wife lady of the couple said that they have a six-year-old daughter, and that they had been trying to explain to her what they were doing that Saturday. They had told their daughter that when people are young they move around really beautifully, but that as they get older, for one reason or another, sometimes they don’t move so well or so easily as they used to. And Mum and Dad wanted to investigate whether they could move a bit more like their daughter.

I think this is an eloquent description of something that a lot of people feel to be true. Children seem to move so easily and beautifully, with an artless grace that we adults can only wonder at. How do they do it? And what happens to them – and us – between early childhood and adulthood to cause us to lose it?

What happens to us – part 1

One of the other participants in my Saturday workshop was a lady who had a standing lesson. When I worked with her to counteract the habitual way she pushed her hips forward while standing, she exclaimed that I was stopping her from standing up straight. She then gave an impression of  her school mistress telling her to ‘Stand up straight!’

My student had been out of school for a couple or three decades, yet that teacher’s admonition stayed with her. Words are powerful things. If we are told to do something as a child, and told it strongly enough, it is entirely possible that we will keep doing that thing long after the person who told us to has gone away or lost interest! This is even more likely if we received praise for following their instructions.

What things do you still do, just because a teacher/coach/parent told you? And if you have contact with children, are you careful about what rules you choose to pass on?

 

What happens to us – part 2

My son, when he was younger, absolutely loved a book by author Helen Oxenbury. It’s about a little boy called Tom and his toy monkey Pippo. My son’s favourite little story from the book began like this:

imitation2

This is the second major thing that happens to us. We find someone we love, and we want to be like them. So we do what Tom does in the story – we copy the person we love. And we most often choose to copy the eccentricities of the person we love. We copy their walk, or the way they hold their head. Tom begins copying his father’s walk as an act of love.

 

Losing it – or not…

The thing is, we’re all really tempted by the idea that a childlike freedom and gracefulness is just that – childlike, and therefore a thing of the past. We feel nostalgic and a bit envious, and assume that like belief in Father Christmas, our freedom of movement, once gone, is lost forever.

This is a big trick.

If we believe this, we are cutting ourselves off from the truth. We never lost it.

We never lost it.

We listened to our teachers, and tried faithfully to do what they told us (‘Sit up straight!’). We copied those we loved, and did it studiously and well. We lived our lives, and made decisions about what was possible and what was not, and lived accordingly.

All of these acts are decisions. And decisions can be changed.

We have lost nothing. Our natural grace and elegance of movement is still there and waiting for us to rediscover it. And this requires nothing more nor less than a change in our point of view – what Alexander describes as “the royal road to reformation.” Like all roads, sometimes it may get a bit rocky, or may take a few twists or turns. But choose to stick with it.

This is what Alexander says to encourage us:

The brain becomes used to thinking in a certain way, it works in a groove … but when once it is lifted out of the groove, it is astonishing how easily it may be directed. At first it will have a tendency to return to the old manner of working … but the groove soon fills, and although thereafter we may be able to use the old path if we choose, we are no longer bound by it.*

Moving freely and easily is available to us. The path is waiting…

*FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat complete edition of the 4 books, p.67.

Put the patient down!

Last Friday, I travelled to Southampton to give a talk about Alexander Technique to the women of the NHS Southampton and Salisbury Breast Imaging Unit (part of SUHT).

These women are amazing. They carry out all the mammograms that form the main part of the screening programme against breast cancer in their part of the world. Sometimes they work from their comfortable and welcoming base in Princess Anne Hospital in Southampton. More often, they have to drive a large van up to an hour to a town or village in their catchment area. They park up, then spend the day carrying out the scans using the equipment on the van. For every patient who comes through their door, they have to greet the patient, (usually) calm them down, help to position the patient in the imaging equipment, take four images, label everything carefully, then help the patient out the door. They do all of this in seven minutes. Yes, seven minutes per patient.

Some of the patients are small and birdlike, and have – how can I put it? – assets that befit their small and birdlike frames. Other patients are considerably larger, and have assets that are rather heftier. And the mammographers have to heft these assets into the imaging equipment, and help to hold them there so that the images are clear and the patient doesn’t have to come back for a rescan. They do this ‘hefting’ (can’t think of a better word for it!) by extending their thumb and creating a V-shape with their hands, then ‘sweeping’ the assets into the machine (‘sweeping’ is their term for it). And they do this for every patient. Every seven minutes. Every day.

These lovely mammographers are starting to suffer from shoulder and back pain, and RSI-like symptoms in their hands and thumbs. They invited me down to Southampton to give them some tips and advice on how they can work to improve their working conditions and thereby alleviate some of the pain.

So what did I do? Well, one of the things that I did was to look at their hands, and then tell this story…

One of my least favourite household jobs is filling the washing machine had in Australia). One day I was bent over double, shovelling clothes through the door. One of my son’s socks had escaped, and was a few steps away. Without straightening, I walked over to get it, walked back, then put it in the machine. Then I noticed my husband’s hankie, halfway across the kitchen floor. Again, without bothering to straighten, I went to get it. The machine was full. Without bothering to stand up, I got the detergent ball, put it in the door, then turned on the machine.

Then I noticed the cat water bowl was empty. Without bothering to stand up, I picked up the bowl, filled it, put it back. I went on with other bits of cleaning. After a few minutes, my back started to feel tired. I realised that I still hadn’t bothered to stop bending over. I was walking around the house like Groucho Marx! I hadn’t yet stopped filling the washing machine!

My mammographer students were no different. Even though they had stopped scanning for the day, even though there were no patients anywhere nearby, their hands were still ready to heft and sweep. When I pointed this out to them, most of them looked down at their hands, and allowed their thumbs to go limp. They sighed in relief! They admitted to me that, now that they thought about it, they realised that they always kept their hand ‘ready to sweep’ – from first thing in the morning, to last thing at night.

They had forgotten to put the patient down.

My simple suggestion was this. What would happen if the mammographers put the patient down – not just at the end of the day, but between patients?

And what about you? Is your right hand always ready to click the mouse button? Are your shoulders permanently prepared to lift that bag/child/rucksack?

What would happen if you ‘put the patient down’?