Perfectionism

I think our culture of trying to "blame" someone is the culprit of why perfectionism is so rampant. Our culture has also become a culture of specialists, "the niche," the authorities. Generalists are out of style right now...(but I can look for evidence that's changing.) What do you think?

Anyone can blow off perfectionism by declaring, "I don't care!" (I've certainly had to surrender and semblance of perfect for extended periods of time!!)  But how to deal with it when you DO care about quality and you know you have time to make things better?

I've discovered that own desire for quality is an emotion of pride - without fear. It's the fear of the result not being good enough in some way that's the problem.

What does it for me is thinking about what's important for me personally. But I've learned some ways to decide where to draw the line on how much work on perfection is too much in various ways.

• I try not to use the deadlines of the project to "get myself moving" so I don't have to run faster or more efficiently from having procrastinated. I'm deadline-driven, but I'm getting better and parsing out how much time I've really got left.

•  I pay attention to how I'm doing what I"m doing, as I'm doing it. (This helps quality to happen by itself, so I make less mistakes by omission.)

• For me, using a thinking skill helps. For instance, spelling out the factors (by making a list of plus, minuses and "interesting") helps me prioritize what is more important and helps me stick to not wasting my time on what is merely urgent but not important.

• Sometimes there's a key site of applied effort which I've learned to search for ahead of time - where if I concentrate my efforts there, it acts like a kingpin of influence that has a ripple effect on the whole.

• If I can, I practice it before the "big show." But sometimes the first time is my best effort. Whether I chose the practice or the "wing it" approach depends on if it's a "hard-wired skill" or a "integrated concert" of many integrated skills and factors.

•  Maybe I get a chance to decide how much time I really have to improve on quality and I might be able to use the strategy of spreading that time I have to improve quality over the whole project.

• Finally, I put the desire for perfectionism on cue, and then give the cue when it's more appropriate. In certain situations where I have decided it's appropriate, I just give myself permission to do something with the highest quality and take however much time I feel that the objective needs. Purely because I enjoy being absorbed in making something happen exactly the way I imagine or know it could be. I invest the practice, the dedication, and embrace the effect of long-term, gradual gain. What's the harm in that if I'm not hanging someone else up?

Anyway, just some of how I deal with perfectionism. What activates a desire for perfection for you? How have you managed to make peace with a desire for quality when you know you're going to be falling short?

For Your Own Good

As a lifestyle choice, I find the strategy of slowing down to be a productive strategy. I've gotten so much benefit from taking a bit more time to do whatever I'm about to do that I fully endorse going slower. Mainly allows me to consider the way I'm about to do it.

Except at my current pace, it seems that I'm slowed to the point of irritating productive, functional people. I've been accused of being passive-aggressively slow, which is not what I intend. A former friend of mine declared I've slowed to the point of becoming a "Walking Stop Sign."

I do feel a bit self-righteous when I'm driving exactly six miles over the speed limit and in Hawaii I will still hold up a line of cars behind me who want to go fifteen miles over the speed limit. I can feel the anger of those who are tail-gating me. Then we pass a cop car and they all fall back, obviously thankful that me driving slower just prevented them from getting a ticket for wanting to speed fifteen miles over the speed limit as they usually would be doing.

I used to feel self-righteous about changing the level that my culture doesn't want to touch each other too - almost to the point of "forcing" or "training" people to allow me to touch them and to invite being touched.

There were many other actions I did that violated people's cultural expectations about autonomy, independence, personal space and respect that I inadvertently challenge by my very nature of not being affected as others are by social constraints.  I've had to learn so much about body language to be able to deal with feeling rejected, isolated and misunderstood. For instance, being near-sighted and not comfortable with glasses or contacts, I tended to stand too close to people when talking, encouraging them to back away from me or flee during a conversation.

When I finally gave in and accepted that it was OK that people in my culture did not want to be touched, I think others lost out on the value I could offer them about the importance of being touched.

Most people didn't seem to want what I had to offer them in that manner anyway. It was only in the expression of friendships that people would tell me later that they had misunderstood my overtures of wanting to be their friend; once they understood being affectionate was how I treated my friends they were happy to count themselves a member of my club.

But I had to be almost manipulative in a teacherly sort of way to "train" people to allow me to touch them. At first I'd touch people only when leaving them - on the upper arm. I'd do it when we were parting to communicate that their touching me back was completely voluntary and not required. It seemed to help if people with whom I'd like to invite closer to being friends with me would see how I treated my friends. I did this by touching those who were already my friends in their presence. Then they could say, "See, this is how she treats people she knows so I need to expect her to do that with me."

I got to experience being on the other end of how I irritated people by pushing their comfort zones recently. I have a friend who doesn't have much experience in social mores. As an unfortunate result, others do not want to be around her because she makes them feel uncomfortable with social blunders. But they can't quite put their finger on what she does that makes them want to exclude her if asked. One of the things she does is to stare at people. She does it because she likes them and is interested in what they're doing, but staring is also how she pays attention to what they're saying. Having her do that to you can really becomes irritating in a strange way. It begins to make you wonder if she's staring at you for her own agenda while she is making own judgments about your actions that she is sure to catchyou doing because she is watching so intently.

I make people uncomfortable because I'm so observant, even if I don't stare. Once people realize you have turned your attention to them, it's a bit unnerving to them how much you can successfully notice that they do not realize they are revealing to you.

There's a strange ripple effect in mentioning things that aren't often discussed too. In my past the mother of my stepson gave me this little talk about how the people closest to children are the ones who are most likely to be sexually molesting them. She got it from the news, so I could have merely cast the mention of the subject off as a media fad. But as time went by, I couldn't help but take what she had said personally. Her paranoia about what was not happening resulted in her six year old son no longer getting to enjoy being read to while sitting in my lap, or hanging out with the family and friends on the couch draped over each other in a puppy-pile. It was as if his mother was, in a roundabout way, trying to accuse me personally of molesting her son by cautioning him not to trust the grown-ups he knew about an issue which he had no clue what it meant at the time. Her actions really made me angry, because she cautioned her son in such a general way without giving him the real information about what was objectionable about it. But it also made me realize how an accusation like she made can so easily become the same as a foregone conclusion.

So I decided to let sleeping dogs lie and stop trying to get people to touch each other more often, along with not touching her son. It was a sad day to have to give up some of the true affectionate pleasures of taking care of her kid. It made me want to leave the situation and stop offering what I'd been doing for the family, but I imagined at the time that what she was saying was a reasonable request that had to be respected at some point anyway in her son's upbringing.

I think my decision at that time was a mistake, in retrospect. I should have negotiated that time in her son's life to do without parental affection to be when he was older, when he could have understood sexuality and how it could be twisted.

All these points seem related to me because how they are "for your own good."

At what point does an opinion or belief in a value (such as the value of being appropriately affectionate) become a coercion or a sales technique or proselytizing?

In A Fight

In brain science and in hand-to-hand combat, the person who has the ability to calm themselves while under the threat of fighting has the upper hand. A person who can calm themselves can use an incidental strategic advantage collected by their slower upper brain as well as their faster reactions of their reptile survival brain. 

A friend of mine was once in a bad situation where a group of thugs were threatening to roll him and rob him. He looked around, figured it would be easier to defend himself if he were in a small space where one person at a time was going to come at him. So he backed in between two parked cars against a dead end wall and proceeded to wait. The thugs taunted each other to go in after him; but eventually one of them said, "Look at him - he's too calm. He's got a gun. Let's go."

Defending oneself in real fight is a whole different matter too, but again - calm observation and questioning one's own assumptions can pay off...

At 24 years old, I was once walking uphill on a one-way switchback to the little Mesa to a party in a remote place in Bolinas near the beach at night. As I walked, I began to suspect that someone was behind me, matching my footsteps. Was it in order to sneak up on me for some nefarious purpose? I shuffled my feet. The person behind me matched my footsteps again. The houses I was passing had occupants who were on vacation, or gone to bed and locked their doors... So I decided my advantage was that he did not know that I suspected what might be going on.

At fifteen paces, I turned around, still walking backwards and started blabbing to him in an over-friendly way in the dark silence. "Oh, hi! Were you at the beach like I just was? I didn't notice you there. Did you get that shirt at the freebox? I love the Freebox... I'm going to a party; are you going there too? "

He stopped, somewhat shocked...not answering me. Which indicated to me that he might have the nefarious intentions I imagined. Now I knew how he was dressed. But there we were...walking along, twenty feet apart. So I kept blabbing to him and decided to choose my battle ground to conduct a little test. I wanted to control where I was going to allow him to get closer to me to see what he might do when we came to a steep switchback.

When I reached my chosen spot, at that point I said, "Oh shit! Forgot something at the beach, gotta go back..." Sure enough, he ran the last ten feet uphill across the street towards me and pushed me down. But because I was smart to think ahead, I was on the ground parallel to the outside edge of the road; next to me was a steep drop off. I had a significant advantage of familiarity with the terrain.

While I was on the ground as he was coming close to me, I realized that my legs were a whole lot longer than his arms. I remember thinking, "Some part of me must have been planning this." As he loomed over me, still saying nothing, I crouched in a fetal position, saying, "Oh, you're going to help me up." He still said nothing. As he bent over me, all I had to do was extend my legs and plant them in his crotch to toss him over the steep edge of the road. I got up and ran. When I breathlessly arrived at the party, I explained what had happened. The guys in the part all went out looking for this attacker. But there was enough time to for him to disappear.

Later in the daytime, I went back to the scene of the crime. I saw that what I had done to evade the attack was an even better plan than I imagined. Where he'd landed off the side of the road, there were many poison oak bushes...

Sploosh!

Fifteen years ago my then-significant other named Pearl and I had loaded the back of the pickup truck camper for an extended trip to Baja California. We were located along Highway One an hour north of San Francisco along a tightly winding road. After situating everything we could possibly need in a primitive desert environment such as Baja by the means of car-camping in the back of the pickup truck, we set out at a leisurely pace for a ten hour drive to San Diego to my brother's house.

It wasn't slow enough. Or perhaps we hadn't tied in the water container well enough. Or perhaps we were too excited about who else we were about to visit on the way there. At any rate, as the driver I swung a little wide on one of the turns and over-corrected a little too fast...and the 5 gallon water container dumped it's contents on our bed.

My significant other pointed to a steep driveway to pull off the road. With the nose of the car pointing up, most of the water went out the back of the tailgate so didn't spend more than thirty seconds soaking the back of the truck. We got out of the car and re-tied the water container after mostly emptying it.

Back in the car and driving down the road, we admonished ourselves for filling up the water dispenser before we left, and not tying it down properly so it fell over.

"Hey," I looked at my significant other and said, "SPLOOSH!" and I started laughing.
"Sploosh? What is Sploosh?" he ranted. "How can it be so funny that our bed and stuff in the back is soaked!"
"Sploosh!" I explained. "We're driving for the next ten hours in the desert with the windows open, blowing hot air on our bed for hours."

Later, we found ourselves halfway down Baja to "Bahia de Los Angeles" on the Sea of Cortez side of Baja. I had become more than a little worried because somehow, despite having a really cool calculator-calendar, Pearl had mis-calculated the amount of gas required to get home. (He had an excuse, which was he had just quit smoking and wasn't in his right mind.) We talked about calling my brother for a rescue when we got closer to the Tiajuana border, or leave our truck and getting just ourselves back to San Diego and going back for the truck...or something. In the meantime we figured it wasn't any different if we continued our camping trip; only the change of heading home the most direct route.

A little closer to the border, I was cleaning out the car near Bahia Conception to repack after camping for our last week, intending to get the dust out of the car. Hidden under the driver's seat footwell mats by the previous owner, I found three stained old travelers checks that totaled three hundred dollars.

"Hey, check this out! As I brandished the checks. "Apparently, a fateful redemption."

"Oh yeah," Pearl quipped. "Sploosh!"

Scapegoats

Blame is an interesting activity that is worthy of study. When there is something wrong, it's very curious why people first have the urge to go looking for someone else who can be the reason for their problems.

Have to admit, this same thought of being a victim often happens when I must look for something that I have misplaced. What really happened was that I found a "secure" spot for it in a remotely "safe" location. In an attempt to foil possible theft, I hid the item from myself! Nobody stole it from me. But this is what I begin to fear as I frantically look for it.

No wonder people look for scapegoats. Someone to blame is so convenient to have around.

Sophie Lhoste Are polite relationships draining your energy?

Read: http://bit.ly/co9kuH

Reading this article leaves me to wonder how those energy vampires feel about people who label them.

Beyond the judgmental conclusions of name-calling, what do loving people constructively do about this situation? Couldn't people who complain and label just learn more gracefully and tactfully to ask for what they need or want as a questionable point continues to happen routinely? Why do we need to resort to name-calling to demonize others for allowing some room to adjust to each others evolving needs?

I'm asking these questions because I really want answers. A mark of true friendship is to be able to hear other points of view without imagining it is an attack. I don't intend to deliver my opinions veiled as questions. I want to let the spin cycle come to a close before we open the oven to see if the souffle fell. Divorce seems to be a rite of passage, rather than a last resort. People are too quick to come to a conclusion that writes off others. They could look for new ideas about how to deal with a new situation that is unfamiliar.

Let's think for a moment from the point of view of these people you want to blame for taking your energy. 
What would they say they are doing to deal with how you are acting?
The first platitude that makes sense is "live and let live." 
Can it be OK to say: "if you can't say something constructive, don't say anything"...?  
What about the tolerance and compassion of, "OK, whatever floats your boat"! 
Isn't it supportive to indicate," I'm gonna leave it up to you to call me when your available again."

Is it a requirement that those closest to us should ALWAYS read our minds so they can provide exactly the support we need in the moments they determine that we must have it? 

Isn't that a bit self-involved to expect from the mere humans who happen to have already been loving us?

Why should every moment, every support, every activity be so much drama that we must come to a resolved conclusion about What It Is and arbitrarily determined we should cut off the relationships that we have decided must be "draining us"?

It's the empty spaces that get left up to us to provide content.  Leave some dead air for a change and have it all be OK. Assume love. Those people who used to love you might want you to be happy, but are they could be innocently clueless about what you want them to do because you're not being all that articulate. Get a little more proactive and indicate what is appropriate and constructive.  Just...take a nap or go for a walk; play with the pet or the kids. Nobody is sucking you dry, just stop expecting there is a trade or tacit agreement of exchange as you give.

Thinking While Angry

I have taught myself to creatively problem solve while angry. It was a very strange skill to learn, not a skill which I'd recommend to others. Better to not to get to this level in your ability to have to manage anger in the first place!

Twenty years ago, I had a relationship going with a person who was quite skilled in being manipulative. When I entered into the relationship, I observed that he also possessed ethics on when and where to apply his considerable skills in argumentation and debate. Ten years into the relationship, he eventually used his superior memory recall and debate skills to fight with me - something which I did not anticipate would ever happen. I had to firmly establish my boundaries and keep them in place as he decided that all things we had established and agreed upon previously were renegotiable. It was a trying time, but I managed it.

He came to expect me to do so. Had I not groomed the ability to creatively problem solve possible options of what to do next in spite of being angry, our relationship would have ended immediately. As it became clear later that staying in the relationship had become a toss-up whether it was good or bad for me personally, I was relieved when the relationship fell apart for practical reasons. I'm sure that the demands for training the skill to be able to problem solve while angry mitigated unpleasant reactions and effects; but perhaps it also prolonged the inevitable conflicts that later ended the relationship.

A more common situation where this skill would be useful to model would be during the parenting of teens - who again, would come to believe that everything should be renegotiated.

There were some prerequisite skills to make this ability possible. These were the ability to stop, pause or interrupt one's own habitual reaction. This can be best practiced when one is not in the throes of an intense emotion. It requires quite a bit of practice concerning the ability to surrender one's goal. There is a short window of time, (a quarter-second,) available to veto an action. You are already preparing to act as soon as you think of doing so, long before you realize you "want" to do something. It's quite telling when people around you believe you have first gotten angry - usually this is quite a bit further back before you realize it yourself.

Because of this lack of awareness, it's very difficult to veto a reaction that has already begun. This skill implies sophisticated exploration of expectations. Also useful during the learning process are pointedly specific observations of how a specific person's anger routinely works.

I learned this skill through the study of Alexander Technique. I'm not sure there is any other forum to learn such a thing, but I imagine anger management class would have these elements. Most commonly, this skill is usually described negatively as "poor impulse control." As far as I know, there is not any place suggested where "good impulse control" is taught - other than very early in life by parental guidance.

There is recently a field of study that seems to teach this skill specifically, but it's tailored toward adults. It's in the negotiation field, ( "Appreciative Inquiry,") the field of mediation or arbitration. Also, at www.newconversations.net there are free e-books on communication tools that seem quite useful. Some interesting books on this are classics in negotiation by Ury and Fisher. It's a series that started with "Getting to Yes." "Getting Past No, dealing with difficult people" More recently Fisher wrote a book with a guy named Shapiro dealing with how to manage emotions during negotiation called "Beyond Reason, using emotions as you negotiate."

Most of these contain stories and philosophy, but some of them provide practice suggestions. It's those offerings of practice that are most effective.

In an ongoing relationship, it is a good thing to make the general agreement that only one person in an argument is allowed to be "out of control." Obviously, it's best for the longevity of the relationship if safe expression of anger can happen as this role is rotated. It has been documented that women in particular suffer quite a bit in their health more than men if they do not speak up and make their "not very nice" concerns known.

I did hear about a study where four year olds were told that if they waited to eat something yummy, they could have twice as much of it when the grownups returned. Or they could eat the smaller portion that was in front of them now. The study afterwards followed the kids as they grew up who managed to wait compared to those who did not. It was found the ability to wait possibly resulted in a significant difference in general achievement.

My own mother was also a great model for how to deal with anger. She and my sister used to fight when I was a kid. By the time I became a teen, she had learned a few things about anger. She told me that people do not bother to get angry if they are not concerned about the relationship. She also modeled "cleaner" ways to fight. She never brought up "the kitchen sink" i.e: unrelated issues. She never tried to wound intentionally, retaliate or say things she might regret later. She would never accused me of being stupid and managed to resist telling me to do what she did not want me to do. But she would yell when she was upset, "I thought you're smart enough to think ahead about how your actions affect others."  Her words were quite carefully selected. This instead of the classic name-calling angry routine of: "You thoughtless, selfish, cruel complainer. Why should what you want come first?"

She also made it quite clear to me that people who are out of control while angry say things they don't mean. She said this is mostly because people get scared - fear is a big component of anger. She gave me ways to calm myself down when I got angry and left me the time and place to do so. Then she modeled the ability to talk out the concerns that made us want to get angry with each other, once we were calmed down enough to figure out what we really thought and wanted.

So it was this fortunate, firm foundation, along with learning Alexander Technique, that led me to be able to manage to learn later to creatively problem solve and actually think while angry. I believe it's a rare thing. It should be more common.

Being Authentic

    There's a cost to being generous and to then draw personal boundaries.

    Certainly being "honest, real, and ethical" as defined by yourself is a good thing to do. However, if you care about others, you still must deal with how others feel about how you're acting. How do you want to affect others and the situation while communicating effectively?

    It's wise to choose your battles deliberately. Sometimes it's better to tell a white lie and go through some meaningless social niceties than it is to announce your contrariness just out of the starting gate. Asking for permission is more complicated than asking for forgiveness.

    I know I'm an unusual person with unusual values; it's not important to me any more to broadcast that quality to the world. Now I let others figure that out about me on their own. I've learned a little friendly reserve helps others not be intimidated by my lack of social constraints. I decided that I do not enjoy people being afraid of me because of my social "daring." Whereas, I used to broadcast these qualities about myself as my own sense of self.

 

    Tricky to imagine this person in the picture is the one I'm describing, isn't it?

    I have always been surprised how others seem to assign the lowest motive to actions they don't understand. To respond to this, it's best to explain motives and go from there. But this strategy always made me feel the paradox of advertising what's not really there. If it was there, would I need to advertise it?

    Opting out without revealing why is a better strategy. My rule of thumb for making these decisions has been, "keep you eyes on the prize." The virtual question is: "What do I want to create here, and are my means congruent with my goals?"

    Someone who is "ethical" and treats people well is actually is in the act of protecting the other person, while leaving themselves vulnerable. In a perfect world, the other person is being ethical to watch your back, but that's not always the case. So that's why wonderful people lose out, and find themselves paying prices they didn't expect to have volunteered for making the sacrifice. That's one of the costs of "being real." In an intimate relationship, you protect the other person with your ethics, while leaving yourself open. If it works out well, their actions and attitudes protect you. 

    If not, at some point, later in your life you'll get embittered for having put out too much without getting enough back. It's happening to people I know who were real "Givers." They just get jaded and burnt out and withdrawn. It happened to me.  

Just wanted to warn you, in case you're a "Giver." 

Helping a Disabled Person

Today I helped the person who handles my mail while I'm away in Hawaii to set up a blog. She's going to talk about having to handle California's budget cuts as a partially disabled person.

Tammy's blog is: here

Tammy has been awarded In Home Support Services hours. She has had the help of someone who gets paid for one day every week to drive her to her doctor appointments, carry things up and down her stairs and help her pick up groceries, as well as do some of the cleaning that would make her back worse. She's a disabled person who lives in Novato, CA.

Tammy can't drive because of the nature of her medication. She used to ride the bus everywhere. She would often walk from Fairfax to San Rafael with pleasure. Awhile ago, she fell on some ice on her deck and developed a slipped disc. Everything changed. Since then, she's needed a little bit more of additional help. Her doctor was nice enough to fill out a sixty page report to help her get IHSS hours.

Now California is cutting IHSS for those disabled people with less than thirty hours a week. I'm hoping that Tammy's blog will make it more clear to people what it is she is facing.

She decided to start writing this blog because of the lame and clueless suggestions that people were giving her. She found herself getting angry at her friends when they began to repeat what the newscasters on TV had said that she should get along without this IHSS help because she "wasn't REALLY disabled." She found herself screaming at people, "Well, who is going to help me? Because I can't live by myself!"

She realizes that being upset about this issue is going to drive away the few friends she had who might help her. She wanted some place to refer people to who thought they had suggestions so their suggestions would be more constructive.

Tammy jokes with her black humor: "By eliminating services, California is helping disabled people to hurry up and die." After knowing a little more about her situation, it's sadly starting to sound true.