Nested all-or-nothings
Remember when you grew a little bit every day? That doesn’t have to stop. (Image by congerdesign)
I received hundreds of comments on a recent video in which I used the clearing of a brush pile to demonstrate how a person might make incremental progress toward a goal.
Such a high volume of engagement yields fascinating patterns. One common response goes something like this: “Oh, I could never do a project over multiple days. When I do something, I have to get it all the way done.”
Commenters cite stress, anxiety, guilt, perfectionism, or mental illness as the reason for their refusal to allow unfinished business. A number of people have labeled anything less than a commitment to take care of the project immediately, all in one go, as “lazy.”
And then there are the people who say that they would like to take advantage of an incremental approach to accomplishing a goal but that it would never work because, for instance, the dishes pile up faster than they can be cleaned.
The idea behind my video is that we don’t need to approach everything we set out to do with an all-or-nothing, black-and-white mindset. Each cigarette you don’t smoke makes you healthier. Each piece of paper you file or discard means one less piece of paper left to deal with. Each minute you spend at the piano helps you to get better at the piano.
Ironically, viewers are approaching my premise with an all-or-nothing mindset:
If this strategy can’t be used to solve every problem, it’s invalid.
If an idea makes me uncomfortable to think about, it’s not worth trying.
If I don’t do the whole project today, I’m lazy and irresponsible.
These nested layers of all-or-nothing prevent us from taking action. This mindset is exactly the mechanism that leads us to procrastinate on tasks and get stuck on projects. It’s the very thing that makes us give up in frustration when learning a skill.
The belief that it’s unacceptable to break a project down into tiny, doable parts is the very thing that is stalling out the project. Change the belief, change the result.
Now, it’s not easy to change beliefs. But the nature of what I’m suggesting — start your exercise program with one minute of exercise instead of thirty, floss one tooth tonight instead of none, delay picking up your phone by three seconds the next time you want to reach for it — is that we begin with something easy and doable. Over time, these easy and doable actions can build into accomplishments we can be truly proud of. The belief follows the action.
Why wouldn’t someone do this? Why wouldn’t they do something small and easy, just to see what would happen? Based on my experience in the classroom, I think it’s because ease and self-acceptance are threatening concepts to someone who has been raised to believe, whether consciously or unconsciously, that shame and fear are an inevitable part of the process of learning and growth.
To acknowledge that things can be easy would mean rethinking a lifetime of being driven by a sense of inadequacy. It would require the person to behave in a way that they’ve been conditioned to see as lazy and irresponsible. It’s hard to let go of.
Of course, the whole point is that we don’t have to change all of the behaviors at once and trigger the shame and fear. We can make tiny, almost imperceptible changes in one area. The transformation can be so gradual that it is only noticed in retrospect.
Nothing needs to be all-or-nothing. We don’t have to adopt a philosophy wholesale and apply it to everything in our lives all at once. We get to ease into things — and that’s not lazy. It’s gentle and generous.
