Chronic procrastination

Today as I was mulling over the issues I was examining yesterday, I did a little more research into black and white thinking and perfectionist thinking. Today I used phrases such as "I am dying over here" I was not really dying but exaggerating what I meant. What I meant was that I was a little tired and bored. As I learn to recognize my perfectionism, I read about a few behaviors that are a flag for this type of behavior.

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  Chronic procrastination and giving up easily ,

I do procrastinate and give up easily when a task becomes difficult or I feel I am failing at it. The piano lessons are a good example of how this behavior displayed itself in my childhood. As I thought about it – in adulthood – it is not that I give up easily, I do not try at all. I do not engage on activities that "other people do." For example, I want to learn how to sew – I have a friend who sews and she is quite talented at it. I used to think that if I started to learn how to sew, she would be angry that I wanted to learn. I felt that she would resent my wanting to learn as "an attempt to copy her" when I just wanted to make a cool skirt. I thought about that a lot and found out that I avoid activates that "other" people do and only seek out activates that I can do alone. Some of the thoughts I have are "I suck at this" and "why did I ever try to do this when I am so bad at it?" what never occurred to me is that EVERYONE sucks at an activity when they first start. (Unless we are talking about child prodigies or Beethoven who just "pop out" excelling I certain fields) The more I thought about it, the more I realized that "normal" people get excited when someone wants to share an interest with them. They get excited that they someone is interested in learning what they know and they can offer help and advice on how to tackle a difficult task or problem. They do not feel upset that someone is trying to "copy" them or take away from some imagined spotlight. I live in an imagined spotlight and this is a major breakthrough for me.



 How does that tie into "Black and white" thinking?

 Remember, one of the key points to this type of thinking is "either/or" statements. Either I am good at it or I am not. In addition, if someone else is better at it than I am, then I must suck. So why try? I have this inner need to be good at everything and work myself to death to get there. When I was in college, I spent almost 4 years on the President's list with a 4.0 GPA. I studied all the time. When I was knocked down to the Dean's list because I got a B+ in a class, I went into a rage and wanted to run over my professor in the parking lot for making me "less than perfect." At the time, it was a perfectly justifiable thought and one I wanted to carry out. I almost left college because of it – if I could not be perfect, why should I stay? All of these thoughts were perfectly normal to me and I never thought for a second they were not. That is, until now.

More recently, this behavior exhibits itself at my job. I have a co-worker that is extremely good at one of our job duties. I am not as good at it as she is. I am very thankful that she is very good at this job function because it means more work can be done faster. I used to try to outdo her and get better numbers than her to "prove" I was better. However, no matter how hard I tried, I just could not do it. My brain did not function like that and that is one of her talents; my talents lie elsewhere. Now I can accept I cannot complete as many as she can and that is ok. I do not have to overwork everyday in an attempt to catch an invisible number that does not matter in the end. Who is really counting anyway? If I can overcome that thought – maybe I can overcome the rest of these. This is an example of "realistic thinking."