Don't stamp your foot!
Try this instead.
I’m on the brink of completing six months in a wonderful book club this week, and ahead of our last call there’s a little homework to do, including a feedback form to fill out.
This fills me with terror.
I don’t know why, but questionnaires of this kind - with questions about what I was thinking before it started, what my expectations were, and what has happened since - feel impossible to tackle. I can’t explain it (and I’m certainly not proud of it) but they tend to turn me into a petulant wimp. As if there’s a way to get it wrong or right.
By the way, did I mention that the main gist of the book was overcoming perfectionism? The irony is not lost on me.
Fortunately, I’ve also been playing with and contemplating the idea of momentum this week. Especially when it comes to creative activities, but it’s also useful when applied to many other things.
Creating movement with a light, playful approach, rather than completing the task itself, has been the focus. The experiment: if you do something just for the sake of having started it, then you get to concentrate only on creating the movement part of it, which allows you to come at it from a bit of a run up. It’s sort of like trying to push a car out of a deep snow drift, you’ve got to keep rocking it back and forth a bit, until you finally get enough movement to push it over the rut and on its way.
Getting at something from a complete standstill takes a lot more effort than when you’re already moving. And there’s a lot more opportunity for the mental gremlins (unhelpful thoughts) to get in and start messing with you if you’re stuck thinking about doing something. They convince you it’s impossible, too difficult or that now is not the best time. To show you and tell you about things that need to happen first. To remind you that the fridge desperately needs to be cleaned out and organised before you could possibly concentrate properly, or something equally inane, yet quite convincing in your weakened state.
After I’d finished being cross about it, I decided I’d use this thought-process to take a running jump at my book-club-homework-dilemma. I sat down to my daily writing with the intention of using the time to create some momentum for the task. I started by acknowledging my feelings about it (fear, shame, and amusement at self for the first two) and let my inner petulant child know that I was simply going to start writing some words to see if I could get going, and if there might be an idea or something I could edit from it. Treating it very lightly, like a game, and with no demand that something useful had to come out of it. I then copied down the most daunting question into my document, just as I would for any creative writing prompt, and let myself continue to write.
(There’s almost a superstitious quality to this process, as if by pausing too much I’ll break the magic.)
No matter how much I needed to slow down in order to keep a continual pace, I concentrated only on the movement, on putting more words down. And bit by bit the words and ideas came. Imperfect and messy, but there they were. It felt more like a discovery than a mental thought exercise, and at the end of less than ten minutes, I not only had something I could work with, I also had the answers to questions which ten minutes before I thought were unanswerable.
All because of my trusty word of the week - momentum.
When the object is to write something good, valuable or worthwhile, it's going to feel a lot different than when the object is to put some words down to get going. (The second is much easier to begin.) Once you’ve begun, your only work is to keep moving. The results can be quite surprising, and it’s a lot nicer than sitting paralysed in front of your blank screen as the attacking and limiting thoughts start to show up. The threatened ego is such a brute sometimes.
Other ways I’ve applied this idea for myself so far this week:
sketching - instead of looking specifically for subjects for my sketchbook, I’ve created a few simple warm up exercises. I get to play with these and if I want to move onto something else I can
writing this post - get the main ideas down with plenty of space to pick up threads and edit later.
voiceover audition - moving from reading a script to working on it, to recording the audition. No need to read it and mull it over first to analyse how to best approach it, just start somewhere. No one is going to force me to send my first attempts if I don’t want to.
admin tasks. With the focus on “doing a bit” instead of having to complete xy & z.
cooking - instead of staring at the cupboards and fridge for ages, trying to decide what to make - taking a few simple ingredients and starting on one bit, then building out a meal from there.
You get the idea.
Now it’s your turn.
x
Love this Emma! And so glad to have been a tiny part of this discovery :-)