Are you tired of setting such a high standard for yourself? It’s time to show your inner perfectionist the door. Now is the time to lower your standards and sign up to the 1 day ‘Dare to be average’ challenge.
I know. A day doesn’t sound like very long. But if you’re high on the perfectionist spectrum, you’ll understand why it’s just a one day challenge (and not a 21 or 30 day challenge).
Most perfectionists are unlikely to take on a 30 day challenge. Why?
Their inner perfectionist is going to have a mini meltdown at the thought of 30 days:
What if I can’t do the Dare to be Average challenge perfectly? What if I fail?
The idea of being average for 30 days is just too scary and overwhelming.
But 1 day? That’s doable. Most perfectionists can handle this.
It may not be long enough to rewire your brain out of perfectionist patterns, but it’s an opportunity to dip your toe in the water and see what it feels like to lower your standards.
Here’s a breakdown:
The night before the challenge
Spend some time drawing out your inner perfectionist. What does she or he look like? Smell like? What are they wearing? What are their deepest fears? Their hopes and dreams? What do they carry around with them?
Then take a good hard look at the picture of your inner perfectionist. Tell them that you need a little break. Some time out. Then proceed to rip up your picture.
You’re done with him or her (for a day). They can come back after the challenge. But for the rest of the evening and the next day, you want them out of your life.
On challenge day
1. Log off social media and keep away from magazines
You see, it’s in our biology to trust what we see with our eyes. This makes spending time in the highly curated and perfect worlds of Instagram, Facebook and glossy magazines extremely dangerous.
We run the risk of comparing ourselves to these unrealistic photoshopped standards. Comparison is like fertiliser for perfectionism, so keep clear of these media streams. They’ll only make you feel ‘insta-bad’ and ‘insta-jealous’.
2. Set your expectations really low
Do away with long, overly ambitious to-do lists. Your to do list should comprise of three tasks. That’s all.
As you engage with each task, your job is to focus on the process (rather than outcome). If you don’t finish the tasks you set out to do, no stress! Congratulate yourself for making a good start on them.
3. Resist the urge to clean
Leave the dirty dishes in the sink. It’s not going to kill you to leave a few things lying around the place. Embrace your inner slob.
Our culture values cleanliness and organisation. Somehow if you have papers and dirty dishes lying around, you’re viewed as being defective. Not in this challenge though!
On the challenge, you’re going to reframe how you view your mess. Instead of seeing it as a sign that you’re not quite up to scratch, see it as a sign that you’re up to stuff. You’re living life!
4. Verbally reject perfectionist thinking
Every time your inner perfectionist creeps back in and you hear him or her muttering negative thoughts (“Your work is rubbish”), you need to verbally reject these thoughts as quickly as possible.
It could be as simple as saying, “Whatever!”. Or you could really let loose by saying:
That’s it! You’ve said enough! I don’t have time for this rubbish! Get out of here! Go sort the sock drawer!
5. Try something new
This is about stepping outside of your comfort zone and making yourself vulnerable to potentially making mistakes.
If and when you make a mistake, simply ask yourself the question, What can I learn from this?
See the mistake as an opportunity to grow, rather than a sign of failure.
6. Reflect on past achievements and how awesome you are
At some point in the day, take 5-10 minutes to reflect on your past achievements and good qualities. You’ve accomplished a lot, but chances are you don’t stop to reflect on what you’ve achieved … do you?
Take a few minutes to jot down all the good things you’ve done over the course of your life. Don’t worry about perfect handwriting. Scribble down all your achievements. The messier, the better!
How do you feel when you think your accomplishments? If you’re not satisfied, then your expectations are too high. It’s time to lower them. Get down low and go, go, go!
This ‘Dare to be Average’ challenge may sound strange but here’s the theory that underpins it:
Many people who aim for perfection in their lives end up not achieving much (or if they do, the process is super slow, inefficient and painful). Perfectionists spend their days in their heads, but fail to take action to fulfil on their dreams and goals.
But when you give yourself the freedom to be average, it’s easier to take that first step. It’s easier to be in action and have more fun doing what you need to do.
You might be wondering how you sign up to the ‘Dare to be Average’ Challenge and if there’s an app you can download. Do you get points for doing certain things on the challenge? No. There’s no sign up form, no app and no prizes for completing the challenge. You don’t get any points for trying something new. Why?
Because you’re doing this for you. Not for external rewards or praise. And the sooner you experience how intrinsically satisfying it can be to be fully engaged in a task and not worried about the final outcome, the closer you get to slaying your inner perfectionist.
Being average may feel scary, but it can also be liberating. Try it out and see how your day goes.
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Procrastination feels heavy.
But what if we could turn combating procrastination into a fun game?
Lately, when I catch myself avoiding a task, I’ll play a little game to see if I can get myself to move in the right direction.
I’ve discovered that it’s best to approach any task with a curious and playful mindset. If you take yourself too seriously, all the joy and fun can get stripped from the process.
Often, when I play this game, I surprise myself because the strategy works! I’ll be off and running with a task I procrastinated on for days.
But sometimes a strategy won’t work. That’s okay. When this happens, I usually take a little break before trying another approach.
I don’t claim to be a grandmaster at playing the game of combating procrastination. But these days, I can catch myself when procrastinating, notice the warning signs, and get moving in the right direction.
In this blog, I share how you can combat procrastination in a fun and playful way to fulfil your intentions and accomplish your goals.
Are you ready to play?
Let’s begin!
If you want to play this game of combating procrastination, you first need to understand what procrastination is and the rules of the game.
I recommend you play this game on your own so you’re not competing against anyone else. There’s no first or second place, no runners-up, and no one wins a trophy.
You can play with others, but it’s a collaborative game where you cheer each other on and gently coach each other into action.
It’s also a game that never ends because the work never ends. You are constantly learning and growing.
In her book ‘Procrastination: What it is, why it’s a problem and what you can do about it’ Dr Fuschia Sirois defines procrastination as:
“ . . . a common self regulation problem involving the unnecessary and voluntary delay in the start or completion of important intended tasks despite the recognition that this delay may have negative consequences.”
In other words, procrastination is:
Delaying a task + you know you are causing your Future Self pain and suffering.
There are some simple rules you need to understand to combat procrastination. Once you cement these rules in your brain, life becomes easier. Instead of experiencing constant resistance, you discover ease and flow.
Difficult work tends to bring up unpleasant emotions, such as boredom, stress, anxiety, fear, and frustration.
Most of us don’t like experiencing these feelings, so to repair our mood, we procrastinate. We avoid work and engage in easier, more fun tasks (e.g., scrolling through social media).
At the heart of combating procrastination is allowing yourself to sit with unpleasant feelings and push past them. Resist the urge to run to your devices. If you can do this, that’s 80% of the battle.
Pushing through the discomfort and making a start is a significant milestone worth celebrating.
Often, we wait for the perfect time to start a task. But it’s an illusion that there is a perfect time.
The perfect time is right now, amid the messiness and chaos of life.
“But I’m not feeling motivated!” I hear you say.
That’s okay. Make a start regardless of how you feel because here’s the part most people don’t understand:
Motivation follows action
In other words, you have to get moving for motivation to show up.
There are many great strategies and tools that can help you get started with a task, even when your motivation levels are low.
Once you have a selection of strategies and tools and you’ve practised using them a few times, you will feel more confident in your ability to combat procrastination.
Here are a few of my favourite strategies and tools for getting started with my work:
Fear is a significant driver of procrastination: fear that you won’t be able to do it, fear of failure, and fear of the unknown.
When you move your body, you decrease fear and anxiety. Movement can also help to calm and focus your mind and boost positive emotions.
This is why I start my day with a 20-30 minute run on my treadmill. It bathes my brain in feel-good chemicals, makes me feel stronger, and prepares me for the challenging work I’m about to face.
When a task feels big and overwhelming, it’s easy to procrastinate. But can you do 10 minutes on the task?
When I set a timer for 10 minutes, my brain thinks, “I can do 10 minutes. Easy!”
My brain then knows the task (and the unpleasant feelings) won’t last forever. The worst-case scenario is I experience 10 minutes of mild to moderate discomfort. When the timer goes off, I have a way out. I can do something else.
But what usually happens is after 10 minutes, I realise the task isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. The motivation has kicked in, and I’m on a roll.
When struggling to write my PhD, I attended a workshop led by an academic coach. She encouraged me to “Write crap” (her words, not mine).
This helped me to get over the perfection hump and make a start.
Most (if not all) great works started as rough drafts. The problem is we don’t see those rough early versions. We only see the polished final product. This messes with our minds and can lead to perfectionist tendencies kicking in.
Embrace the first messy draft. Celebrate it! You have to do it to get to the good stuff.
In the book ‘Everything in its Place’, Dan Charnas recommends the ‘Slow-but-don’t-stop’ technique for doing things you don’t want to do.
Here’s how it works:
If you’re feeling resistance towards a task, start doing it, but move very slowly. Breathe into the discomfort. Take your time.
Charnas writes that as you use this technique:
“You’ll still hate it [the task] but your task has become a moving meditation or like a game.”
For example, I used this strategy on the weekend to sort my laundry. The first step was to pick up the basket full of clothes and place it on my bed. Then, I picked up one item at a time and put them into piles (e.g., socks, activewear, and undies). I then selected a pile of items (socks) and dealt with one item at a time.
I’d usually rush to fold my clothes and feel slightly annoyed by the whole process (“Ugh, what a chore!”), but this time, it felt different. It felt like a meditation. I felt calm and grounded as I folded my socks.
The beauty of this technique is that the work will still get done, but as Charnas points out, you don’t give up control. You still have forward momentum.
As the Mexican proverb goes:
“An ant on the move does more than a dozing ox.”
Are there things in your workspace that distract you? Is there anything that reminds you of more fun stuff you could be doing (e.g., a video game console or your phone)?
Please get rid of those things or make them harder to access.
My phone is my biggest distraction. This is why I keep it away from my body in another room whenever I need to do focused work.
I’m currently experimenting with Mel Robbin’s 5-Second Rule. The 5-Second Rule is simple:
The moment you have the instinct to do a task before your brain can come up with an excuse not to do it, you count backwards ‘5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1!’ and you do it.
In her book ‘The 5 Second Rule’ Robbins explains the psychology underpinning the strategy. She writes:
“The counting distracts you from your excuses and focuses your mind on moving in a new direction. When you physically move instead of stopping to think, your physiology changes and your mind falls in line . . . the Rule is (in the language of habit research) a “starting ritual” that activates the prefrontal cortex, helping to change your behavior.”
The ultimate way to combat procrastination is to create a habit or a ritual. You need something that signals to your brain it’s time to engage in a particular behaviour.
With habits, you don’t have to stop and think, “What do I need to do now?”. Habits are automatic. Your brain knows exactly what it needs to do, and you do it.
For example, I have a habit of running on my treadmill before I launch into my day. My brain knows that after I put on my gym clothes and shoes, I turn on my treadmill and hit the speed button to start my warm-up.
I carry these behaviours out even when I’m not in the mood to run. That’s the power of habits.
Then, I suggest you cut yourself some slack.
Forgive yourself for procrastinating, pick a strategy, and get moving.
Most of us don’t do this, though.
We bag ourselves out in an attempt to motivate ourselves. The problem is this rarely works.
Dr Sirois says that intense self-criticism leads to negative thoughts, which lead to negative feelings. We end up feeling demotivated, which causes us to procrastinate even more!
You can stop the vicious cycle of procrastination by practising being kind to yourself.
If you follow these simple rules and be playful with experimenting with these strategies, you can get a better handle on procrastination.
Like anything in life, the key is practice. The more you practice allowing yourself to feel the unpleasant emotions instead of running from them, the better you’ll do. The more times you practice a strategy, the more natural it will feel and the sooner it will become a habit.
One foot in front of the other. You can do this.
The standards are ridiculously high.
All those perfect bodies, perfect meals, perfect smiles and perfectly decorated homes can make you feel lousy.
Could all these perfect images be messing with your brain?
Absolutely.
This why late last year I took the plunge and deleted all my social media accounts. All that social comparison (and the general toxic vibe) was getting me down. It may be getting you down, too.
You’ve probably seen the following optical illusion: The Muller-Lyer illusion
In this illusion lines of the same length appear to be different lengths. But they’re not. The lines are exactly the same length.
I love optical illusions because they show us how the human mind can play tricks on us. We are so sure we are right about something (“That line is longer!”) but it turns out, we’re wrong.
Social media presents us with a highly curated version of other people’s lives. You’re exposed to the very best bits. This distorts your perception of reality.
As Professor Dr Laurie Santos states:
“If you imagine people have a plot in their life of like things that are just kind of super boring, or bad, or to things that are awesome, people aren’t snap chatting this stuff [the super boring and bad stuff] unless it’s like really funny . . . they’re usually snap chatting this stuff [the awesome stuff], right?
So you’re not seeing the right distribution. But in your own life, you see the distribution. You look at other people’s Snapchats and you’re like, “Everybody else’s life is awesome and everybody else is like doing cool things that I’m not.”
It’s in our biology to trust what we see with your eyes. So we get easily fooled into believing the highlight reel on social media.
Behind the edited photos, we can’t see the other person’s struggles.
But unlike most of the people you follow on social media, you know yourself well. You know that your life is not all ponies, kittens and rainbows. Life is messy.
If I was to fill your social media feed with the thoughts and feelings of some of the students that I have worked with, here is what some status updates would say:
• “My teachers are talking too fast. I can’t keep up! #feelingstupid”
• “I find myself swinging from not eating at all to snacking excessively. What is wrong with me?”
• “I can’t sleep at night. I manage 1 to 2 hours max. I am sooooo tired.”
• “My maths teacher is a bully. She told me to start using the big brain that is inside my tiny head. My mental health is going down hill because of her.”
• “My ex-boyfriend is toxic. I have to see him everyday at school. Ugh. It’s awful.”
• “I can’t find part-time work. I need a job. No one wants to hire me. Why don’t they want me?”
• “I’m drowning in work. I don’t know how to study. I’m not sure I can do ATAR.”
• “Some boys were making jokes about my arms. They were saying I have hairy arms. So what did I do after school today? I shaved off all the hair on my arms.”
• “I keep failing OLNA. I can’t do maths. I think there must be something wrong with my brain. I need to get a diagnosis.”
• “On my first day of school I felt sick and I threw up before going to school. I felt so sick and anxious when I arrived at class. . . I really wanted to make a good first impression on my first day but I feel like I blew it.”
• “Now I’m in year 11 and things are more serious. I have to think about my future . . . it’s a bit scary because I have no idea what I want to do.”
When I talk to students, I can often see the worried look in their eyes. Their eyes say . . .
“What the hell is wrong with me?”
But here’s what I want to say to these students . . .
“There is nothing wrong with you. You’re perfectly fine. You’re doing just fine.”
The bottom line is this . . .
That doesn’t make you weird or defective. That just makes you human.
In the book Happy, Healthy Minds by the School of Life, the authors say the solution is simple:
I realise this sounds really harsh. But here’s what they mean by this . . .
We all do foolish things.
We all feel anxious and nervous from time to time.
We all bomb out on tests and assignments.
But that’s okay!
Remember, you are human.
Accepting you’re an idiot (just like everyone else) should give you some freedom to try new things. Next time things don’t quite turn out, you’re less likely to beat yourself up. You can practice a little self compassion.
The School of Life also says it’s important to remember this . . .
“ Every so often, things will go right: we make a friend, we get a part in the play, we learn a language . . . “
In short, life doesn’t have to be perfect to be good.
So embrace your quirks. Accept you’ll make mistakes. And please, go easy on yourself.
I recently overheard a year 12 student say to her friend:
“I can’t be bothered studying English … I can’t be bothered studying maths or biology … I’ll just sit here and do nothing.”
I suspect that this student was feeling overwhelmed by everything she had to do.
And we all know what this feels like. You have so much work to do, where do you even start? In those moments, it can feel easiest to simply do nothing and pretend that the work doesn’t exist.
But trust me, doing something is always better than doing nothing. All those little bits add up to something really solid.
The Do Something Principle works like this: when you’re feeling overwhelmed, you do something. Anything. It doesn’t matter what piece of work you choose to do. Just make a start.
• Clear away all other projects (out of sight is out of mind).
• Keep the task small and make it have a clear end point (e.g. “I will read this paragraph” or “I will create 10 flash cards”).
• Write down the task on a white-board or post-it note (this helps you to stay on track).
• Put a timer on for 5-10 minutes (whatever you feel you can handle).
• If your brain starts saying things like, “I don’t want to do this!” or “This is going to be painful!” simply ignore these thoughts.
• Pair the task with something enjoyable, such as drinking a smoothie or listening to some enjoyable music (preferably without lyrics).
• Focus on the process, not the finished product: In other words, don’t worry about completing the task in the allocated time.
And most importantly …
The reality is there is no ideal time to start your work. So just get started on one part, regardless of how you feel.
Yes, it will feel uncomfortable.
Yes, you’re work will probably be messy (at least to start with).
Yes, you’re brain will be screaming out for novelty and distraction.
But that’s okay. Just stick with the process.
Because eventually you will strike gold.
As artist Chris Anderson says:
“There have been times when I’ve just sat there doing something over and over in different ways, scrapping every idea in frustration until I finally made that one right pencil stroke, took one photo with the right angle, chose a slightly different shade of the same colour – until finally everything comes together absolutely perfectly.”
Good work takes time. If you want to do your best, you need to start the process early and give yourself enough time to properly engage with the work.
So what are you waiting for? Go do something. No matter how small the task may be, just make a start. Remember, all those little bits of something add up to something really solid.
How can you implement The Do Something Principle into your life? What work have you been avoiding that you can make a start on?
Dr Jane Genovese delivers interactive and engaging study skills sessions for Australian secondary schools. She has worked with thousands of secondary students, parents, teachers and lifelong learners over the past 15 years.
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