What was happening at P&G?
What was really going on during this spiral?
The issue was I was telling myself it was all about me.
I was taking my performance, results, and feedback and projecting it back onto the movie screen of my mind with big, ugly phrases like “I suck at my job” and “I’m failing my bosses” and “I’m losing the company money.”
Remember the high-achiever study?
I was blaming myself for everything. I was telling myself it was all about me.
The problem is that when we make such self-harming projections, we believe them.
Our minds are so sharp they can shatter us.
To show how dangerous this is, let’s look at a 2013 study called “Too Fat to Fit Through the Door” by Anouk Keizer and a team of researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
The researchers watched women with anorexia and women without anorexia walk through doorways while asking them to do a simple task that mentally distracted them from paying attention to their bodies.
What happened?
Anorexics turned their shoulders and squeezed sideways through the doorways much more than the group without anorexia did. Even though they had plenty of room to walk right through, they thought they were too fat to fit.
Am I saying you have anorexia? Am I saying you have an eating disorder? Am I saying you have a mental illness? No, no, no, none of that. So what am I saying, then?
Your image of yourself may be projecting outward in your actions in potentially nonsensical ways.
Especially if you’re hard on yourself like I am.
What doorways are you trying to squeeze yourself through right now where… you know what?
You really fit just fine. You probably aren’t the problem.
And what about our modern environment?
Does it help prevent us from separating ourselves from the challenges we face? Does it make us believe it’s all our fault?
Yes, yes, definitely yes.
We live in a world where the screws are on tight. There’s a capitalistic shrink wrap making sure everything is fitter, happier, and more productive. So sometimes the stress on all of us builds too high.
See, nobody at P&G ever said to me, “This is gonna take a while, Neil” or “It’s normal to feel like you don’t know anything for six months” or “Let’s get a few flops out of your system so you can learn how to do it.”
No, nobody was that lax. They couldn’t afford to be! Our world no longer has space to be lax. We no longer have space to be patient with you, to slowly train you, to let you make little failures and learn from them. We’re running our races so fast that we need to pass the baton to a supertrained all-star on Day 1 every time!
Now, that doesn’t mean my bosses at P&G were cruel. They absolutely weren’t. My point is that they had lofty expectations and needed me to help. Fast! The screws were tight on them, too.
No wonder it’s such a hard lesson to learn as we’re falling that we’re okay, we’re okay, we’re okay. And maybe it’s just not about us. It’s not about us. It’s not about us. Why is it hard to learn? Because nobody else is telling us that! Not the messages online, not the world we live in, not our bosses at work. So we think it’s always all about us. When we fail we dig the point of a knife into our stomach and give it a twist.
What are we doing to ourselves?
Well, a study published in Psychological Bulletin in 2016 declared that “Perfectionism Is Increasing over Time.” In the study, researchers Thomas Curran of the University of Bath and Andrew P. Hill of York St John University claim that “recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.”
We want to be perfect so badly.
Which makes our flops hurt even more.