|
Disclaimer: This post is made solely for my own benefit. The reason I’m posting it here is that this puts a requirement on me to be thorough as I formulate my thoughts as someone else might actually read it. Because this is the reason for putting this on paper - to be alone with my thoughts for a while, and to make them as clear as possible to myself.
So I’ve been having this tiny feeling of stress or anxiety for quite some time - about two years. It started when I was about to launch a startup with some colleagues , branching off the company I worked at then. This was very exciting, and I realized that I could actually do something really cool with my life. It feels like nervousness before an exam or, excitement in anticipation of something good. It can be both negative and positive depending on my mood, but it’s never a calm feeling, and that’s my problem right now. I just can’t calm down, and this has transitioned to a feeling of insecurity.
Now I’m not used to thinking of myself as insecure. I’ve always been very good at whatever I do. At school, physical exercise and sports, my job as a software engineer, music, computer games etc. I’ve never worked very hard to achieve any of this (my own opinion - some people I know disagree), I just live my life, do what I want and it always turns out very good.
So to try to tackle this, I went to a therapist (or “life coach” as she’d like to call it for my problem). In one of the sessions she asked me: “What does your wife and friends appreciate with you? Not based on anything you do, just about how you are.” I just couldn’t answer, and this was quite shocking to me. The first thing she identified about me which is what this post will be about is that I have great confidence, but low self-esteem. The difference was unknown to me. Confidence is the belief that you are good at things. It is very performance based. Self-esteem on the other hand, a soft value, hard to measure. It is the belief that you have an inherent value as a person.
It turns out, that if your confidence and your self-esteem aren’t well balanced, you try to compensate - in my case by trying hard to perform well. I’ve always enjoyed winning a lot, more than I dislike losing - or being bad at something. For example, playing Starcraft 1v1 was something I enjoyed a lot, partly because I find the game very interesting and partly because I absolutely love winning. However, I stopped playing 1v1 because every game was tightly coupled with a lot of stress. And yes I know, SC is a stressful game, but this was a stress solely about the outcome of the match. I wanted to feel the feeling of winning so badly, and avoid the anger and disappointment at myself that always came with losing. “You should have done this and that, you can do much better than this?”. A loss was a failure. My theory here is that losing made my compensation for low self-esteem fail, which naturally made me feel bad.
I shared this with my best friend who has played Starcraft way more than me at a much higher level. I’ve always thought of him as very hard on himself to perform well, but it turns out I was the one being hard on myself. He had the ability to feel good about losing, because “he tried”. This felt very good for me to learn, as trying was never enough for me. Apparently this is very typical for my form of compensation. I have set a vision of myself and my life which is impossible to achieve, because it involves a perfect score on everything. When I say it like this, it may sound obvious that no one can be perfect all the time and that I should have realized this, but my problem was (and to an extent still is) that I can’t tell when I’m expecting something unreasonable from myself.
The second problem with my need of great success is that smaller victories or pleasures, like playing with my cat for a few minutes, strumming some chords on the guitar or having a nice dinner with my wife become dull, and I forget them. Unless I won a great victory at Starcraft or Dota or whatever, I could hardly remember what I have done the previous day.
So how do I balance my confidence and my self-esteem? It’s mostly about expectations of myself. I must identify when they are unreasonable, and lower them. Try to capture the thoughts behind my feeling of failure, bring them up and reason with them. “Yeah so you lost this game. So what? You’re still good at it, and after all you’re not playing it to win, you’re playing it because it’s a nice game.” Naturally this is not something I can change overnight, and I will likely be working on this for months - if not years - to come.
To tackle the second problem, I’ve started doing mindfulness. This is basically meditation, and the point with it is to make your life stop for a few minutes while you notice everything that’s going on right now, in your mind and body. The first time I tried this was very interesting. I couldn’t fucking stand it. Every bone in my body told me to turn it off immediately and go do something else than wasting time. This got me thinking. Regardless of whether I thought mindfulness could help me or not, there is nothing that I shouldn’t be able to endure for just a few minutes without going mad with stress. This alone told me that this is something I really have to practice on. I mean, staring on the microwave for a minute is something I just can’t do. A few weeks later, I’ve managed to go from 3 to 5 up to 15 minutes of meditation and I am definitely getting better at it.
So to summarize:
* Realize what I’m doing when I’m setting these expectations on myself and how I’m being unreasonable. * Trying is always good enough. Accept myself. * Accepting myself and lowering expectations will cause my self-esteem to rise. * Increased self-esteem will lower the need for compensation - it will become a benevolent circle. * Take the time to slow down. Very little time is needed to make a difference.
Wish me luck.
As I’m about to post this, the anxiety comes back. I want people to like what I’ve written. Dude, it doesn’t matter, remember why you wrote that disclaimer. You did this for yourself. You’ve spent a good hour on it, and put a lot of thought behind it. Well fucking done bro.
|
But what made you a perfectionist in the first place? What is the reason your self-worth is tied to your ability?
Without exploring the root causes, can you really understand and master yourself? Maybe expecting an ability to change your nature is also expecting something unreasonable from yourself.
Do you believe it is possible to change, and if it is, why do you want to? Perfectionists are profoundly unhappy, but they also have a unique perspective in this life.
|
I empathise a lot, as I can relate to a lot of what you are saying. I wish you the best of luck in understanding yourself.
|
On February 09 2016 02:09 FreeZer wrote: Well fucking done bro.
Indeed. You are awesome. And not because I like what you wrote. But because you are. Awesome. Now go and enjoy life.
|
This is actually so legit. I've never thought of self-esteem and confidence as different things before.
|
On February 09 2016 04:49 aboxcar wrote: But what made you a perfectionist in the first place? What is the reason your self-worth is tied to your ability?
Without exploring the root causes, can you really understand and master yourself? Maybe expecting an ability to change your nature is also expecting something unreasonable from yourself.
Do you believe it is possible to change, and if it is, why do you want to? Perfectionists are profoundly unhappy, but they also have a unique perspective in this life.
Thanks for the comments! I have no definite answer to what made me this way and while I think it might be interesting to know I don't think that it's necessary. I have identified a way of destructive thinking that is a very likely candidate and I don't think I have to look deeper right now.
And yeah, I definately think it's possible to change. After all, I changed for the worse didn't I? I want to change because I don't believe my perfectionism benefits me in any way - it only gives me stress and anxiety. I could lower my expectations of myself a great deal without actually affecting my performance, since I can't reach them anyway right now.
I empathise a lot, as I can relate to a lot of what you are saying. I wish you the best of luck in understanding yourself.
Indeed. You are awesome. And not because I like what you wrote. But because you are. Awesome. Now go and enjoy life.
Wow thanks. This actually made me very happy. I didn't think simple comments from random dudes on the Internet could do that. =)
This is actually so legit. I've never thought of self-esteem and confidence as different things before.
Me neither! It's actually quite interesting. And important to know. It turns out that knowing how stuff like this works is the first step, because then you can pinpoint your problem and you become aware of your feelings and the thoughts that cause them.
|
Some people might consider going straight to the heart of the problem the best method, but for mental things the approach is often dependent on the individual and their circumstances.
I, too, had a similar experience recently. After a week-long job, I sat down for a post-job evaluation with my superior, and he asked me what I thought I had done well. And I couldn't think of a single thing, even though I had tried my best every step of the way in a week-long situation I had had absolutely no prior experience with. All I could remember was the things I thought I had failed at every single day. For a whole week. But being the nice guy that he was, my superior took the time to slowly talk things through with me and point out how I had contributed in both tangible and intangible ways. And that was despite the fact that he would probably never see me again, because he was effectively retiring.
Which brings me to my next point. Don't miss chances to to be kind to others and remind them that we value them and that they are doing good work. I know that this is mixing recognition of achievements and intrinsic value together, but I believe that the two are so closely linked that when you cannot genuinely say anything about someone else's intrinsic value as a human being because of the relative shallowness of your relationship with them, reminding them of their achievements is equally valuable. And when it comes to the people we meet often and know well, there are usually more opportunities to say a little more to them, to remind them that we love and value them.
When people are their own harshest critic, it helps them a lot to hear from those around them, who can see what they are doing from a different perspective. If you can only recall what you did wrongly, it helps so much to have someone there for you who will take the time to tell you what they saw you do right. And you can be that someone for those around you too.
I wish you all the best.
|
I'm seeing a lot of myself in this. Thanks for sharing, you gave me some things to think about!
|
I also found this helpful, I have had similar issues for years.
|
Thank you for writing this as it got me thinking about this issue. I am a perfectionist - I want everything to be perfect or very good. The problem with this is that I am not able to cope with fails, mistakes or imperfections (mostly my own). I feel it is getting worse as I am getting older. Basically every fail or mistake I make makes me feel really bad and sad. It takes much longer time to reconcile than needed. The result is me being very indecisive and scared of bad outcome, because I don't want to have the shitty feeling that I failed or made a mistake. I keep telling myself that mistake/fail = experience and it is actually good and that nothing can't be perfect, but I can't convince myself to feel that way.
|
|
|
|