I have a blind spot. Do you?
I catastrophize.
Imagine the worst possible outcome: the worst reaction from a client, the worst feedback from a reader, or the worst review from a customer. Imagine failure not just as a setback but as a liability to reputation or personal welfare.
It can paralyze.
It can freeze momentum into regression.
I wanted to write on this site a little more about the lies we tell ourselves, the stories we make up in our own heads, and the demons that haunt our efforts to hold us back.
We all have them.
One of mine is overthinking the worst of it. Those notions swirl around in my brain, often keeping me up in the middle of the night or causing me to sit and stare at the screen during those precious moments I could be writing. It snowballs into narratives that play out as conversations in my own head where I debate and explain and justify—none of it with any value to the work.
The feedback loop would be much worse if I didn’t have strategies to cope with it: my personal counter-attack is math. Some little corner of my brain is a bookie for the odds and reminds the catastrophizing majority that the probabilities for the worst outcome are in my favour for a good result. (That bookie, though, he takes long naps and only really wakes up when things are spiralling.)
All that is to say: we each of us have blind spots, and acknowledging them might just be the first step in overcoming them.
Terms FROm this POSt
- blind spot
- Staring down our own faults, personality quirks that oft steer us into unwanted or unintended directions, is the first step in understanding ourselves better and then either fixing our perspective or embracing our natures.
- overthinking
- No one ever accused me of under thinking much, but more than sometimes (especially when I get to writing) I follow the rabbit down the hole and dig into a topic way more than necessary. But, hey, if we don’t ponder the little ideas, we’ll just spend more time worrying about the big stuff we can’t control, right? Right?
- value
- I use this word a lot on this site but I’m not always referring to cash money. There are many ways to find value in something: emotional, nostalgia, spiritual, environmental, social, and countless other personally meaningful ways. I do find the assumption that everything always comes down to coins in the pocket, but that might just be being disappointed with spending fifty years watching the capitalism struggle to deliver on anything meaningfully human.
