Browsing the archives for the avoidance tag.
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Have to Do Something and Don’t Want to? Here Are 4 Steps to Get on Track

Strategies and goals

Recently a friend posted in an online discussion forum that she had revisions to do on a book she was writing, but didn’t feel able to do them. This is an accomplished writer, but she found that she just really doesn’t want to tackle rewriting this particular chapter.

I have some suggestions for her, because of course writing motivation is a subject in which I have a passionate interest and on which I’ve done a lot of research. Here was my response, much of which applies as well to other kinds of tasks as it does to writing.

First, may I suggest my free PDF eBook, “The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation“? There’s a motivation troubleshooting section in back that could get you some good answers within minutes

About the specific question, I wouldn’t suggest walking away and waiting for your subconscious to sort the problem out. That definitely works some of the time, but there’s a needless delay involved, your subconscious may very well be preoccupied with other things, and there’s a chance that you’ll let it linger and dread of the work will grow until the project dies for want of just a little industry. Better to face the problem head-on, get used to facing such things in that way, and get the sense of satisfaction that comes from making progress through dedication and effort.

I share the thought that it’s possible you sense something wrong with the story, in that I have been derailed in my own writing sometimes when that was the case. However, it’s also possible that you’re facing fears of what will happen to the story when it’s finished and is finally ready for you to try to sell it or get representation. A lot of us seem to get thoughts like “Is it any good? What if it’s really junk and I’ve spent all that time on it? Can I even do any better? Maybe I’m just a lousy writer. Maybe my success so far is a fluke.”

Alternatively, you might just be associating some bad feelings with the task, e.g., “Man, this is going to be a pain,” or “I don’t even know if I can fix this,” or “I hate revising!” or “Why didn’t I write it well the first time?”

Regardless of the reason, here’s what I would recommend.

1. Sit down now or at your nearest opportunity and commit to making some kind of progress on the work. You don’t have to finish it. You don’t even have to start on it. Instead …

2. Write about your situation. You can write about what you want to change, what you’re feeling about the work, both, or something else related.

3. If you’re not already carried into the work by step 2, next brainstorm as many ways as possible to change it, include ridiculous and stupid ideas, ideas that might require more work elsewhere in the book, cutting things, adding new elements, etc. (See “Writing Differently: Picking Up the Scary Tools“)

Step 2 or 3 is very likely to get you into a mood to want to work on the revision. From out here, the revision looks like nothing more than a pain in the ass. From up close, working on ideas that excite you, it may well start looking like an exciting opportunity. Alternatively, you may discover to your dismay that you think the whole project is horribly flawed, in which case it might be time for feedback, or else to just finish it, send it out, and perhaps discover that you were wrong and it’s terrific.

If Steps 1-3 don’t get you there, then I would recommend

4. Sit down, make a list of the things you need to do, figure out what the first one is, and just start doing it. Don’t worry about if you don’t feel like it, aren’t sure you can do a good job, have other things you need to do, etc. Focus on the task, ask yourself whether it’s physically possible to accomplish it, and if so, do it. Then do the next one. This isn’t forcing yourself: it’s resignation.

Picture by kxp130

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So This Sucks. What’s That Shiny Thing? On Schema Avoidance

Habits

I’m big on using writing as a tool for mindfulness and self-understanding: I do a lot of sitting down to write out what my thoughts and experiences have been on certain problem topics (whatever I’m working on in my life at that point in time) and using tools I’ve acquired, like idea repair and identifying mental schemas to figure out what’s going right, what’s going wrong, and what I can do to improve things. Yesterday, in the middle of this process, I suddenly became distracted.

And now for something completely different …
I was writing about a situation that had been frustrating me and had gotten to the point of saying “OK, I don’t know what’s going on there, but it sure is frustrating.” Sometimes I stop at that point if I don’t have any further insights. In this case, I hadn’t really thought the thing through very well, so I didn’t know whether or not I had further insights. Before I could figure that out, I found myself thinking about some entertaining distractions on the Internet, a new little project I could start, and wanting to check my e-mail. Since I was fortunately already trying to pay attention to my thoughts, I pulled myself up short. What was going on with me? I was doing meaningful self-examination, and then suddenly I want to go see what’s on YouTube? Was I trying to distract myself from something?

Having that thought, I was immediately inclined to drop the subject. It was as though I had walked up to a door and found a sign on it saying “Go away! We don’t want any!” Since this was happening (metaphorically) in my own brain, that seemed like a red flag to me–and also, I just like being contrary. So I opened the door and looked around. When I did, I came face to face with the overcommitment problem I’d been mulling over recently and one of the hidden ways it has been affecting me.

Schema avoidance
So what had happened was that the thinking I was doing led me to make a connection between some of my behaviors and overcommitment, but as soon as I got close to that connection, I automatically started distracting myself. There’s a name for this phenomenon. In schema therapy, it’s a “schema coping style” called “schema avoidance.”

Avoidance takes any number of forms: it can be television, surfing the Web, extreme sports, reading, going out with friends, eating, drug abuse, drinking, or anything else that can keep a person’s attention well enough to block some other thought or feeling. It can even be something constructive, like doing the dishes or working out.

Unfortunately, coping styles (like avoidance) don’t tell us much about what the underlying problem is. The fact that I was avoiding something only told me that there was something wrong, not what kind of thing it was.

It’s worth thinking how much this has to do with procrastination. In our culture, we tend to think of work as being something we would naturally want to avoid, but there’s nothing inherently painful about work, and often other problems–like fear of failure, perfectionism, or negativity–cause us to want to distract ourselves from working.

Opening the door marked “do not enter”
So learning about ourselves when we notice we’re being avoidant means facing the avoidance and consciously choosing to stay on task, to keep thinking or talking or feeling or investigating whatever it was that set us off. If I go to open my mail and suddenly have the idea that it would be fun to go out ice skating or that it’s time to watch a new DVD, then there’s a good chance that there’s something about the mail that triggers one of my mental schemas. If at that point I want to grow as a person and get past my current life obstacles, then the thing for me to do is to go to the mail, open it, and be observant of and gentle with myself as I face whatever it is I don’t want to face.

Being observant is necessary if I’m going to understand myself better in order to change things. Being gentle is necessary because we’ve developed these schemas and coping styles for a reason: somewhere earlier in life, something along these lines was painful enough to force a schema to develop around it. If we want to unravel mental schemas that keep us from living a good life, we need to care for whatever part of us the schema is there to protect.

Got courage?
I understand this talk of being gentle with ourselves may be offputting to some readers, so I’d like to characterize it in another way: facing those things that disturb us even though doing so makes us uncomfortable and vulnerable requires focus, self-knowledge, and above all, courage. So if the thought of facing everything that makes you feel uncomfortable or bad in the world gives you a sudden urge to see what’s on TV, I don’t blame you–but I also wish you good luck pushing the avoidance aside and courageously moving forward.

Photo by rishibando

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Sustain Your Motivation By Tracking Your Progress Daily

Strategies and goals

writing_coordinates

In this article, I talk about Decision Logging, a practice of writing down each decision, action, condition, or major thought about a goal that’s important to you as it happens to become much more aware of your mental process. Elsewhere, I describe the importance of feedback loops in self-motivation. Following up on Wednesday’s article on how tracking behavior helps weight loss, it’s worth our time to look at a more intense feedback strategy that keeps our goals front and center in our minds, but doesn’t require the high amount of time and attention that decision logging takes: tracking progress daily.

How to Track Behavior for Feedback
For weight loss, daily tracking comes in a particular form: writing down information throughout the day like foods eaten with their nutritional stats, exercise done, and weight. For other kinds of goals, often reviewing once a day in the evening, or twice a day in the morning and evening, provides a similar benefit. Tracking isn’t the same thing as feedback, but it is a key component. Without reliable, consistent information about our behavior–whether that comes from jotting down notes in the moment, reflecting back over the past week, or from some other process–there’s no opportunity for feedback. Once we have that information, we can proceed to the next step in our feedback loop, which is making judgements about our behavior: what worked well, and what didn’t? From there, we can make plans for the future: more of this, less of that, try this new thing, and watch out for this other pitfall. We start with raw information and work our way through to an action plan tailored exactly to our current circumstances and progress.

The once-a-day approach only needs to take a few minutes. With it, you answer a few questions:

  • What did I do today that moved me toward or away from my goal?
  • What do I think about those choices?
  • What would I like to do the same or differently tomorrow?
  • What am I learning from this?

The twice-a-day approach is similar, but with it the morning session has more to do with planning for the current day, and the evening session has more to do with reflecting on the day that has passed.

Tracking and reflecting on progress each day doesn’t need to take more than five minutes, and it’s very effective in keeping a goal alive and moving forward. It’s also instrumental in forming a habit of reflecting on progress, and getting to that level of awareness creates an enormous advantage in pursuing goals in the future.

The Top Obstacle to Tracking
One of the biggest dangers in tracking progress is not tracking whenever there’s something bad to write down. If I’m trying to teach myself French and don’t study at all during the day, I might be tempted not to track on a day when all I can say is “Didn’t do any studying today. Could have studied during lunch and/or instead of watching reruns of House.” When we think about it, though, it’s not really all that traumatic to write down the equivalent of “I didn’t do as well as I hoped today, but I’ll try to do better tomorrow.” If I don’t write that kind of thing down, I’m likely to forget how I got off track, which makes me pretty vulnerable to that problem in future. And tracking the lack of progress keeps up my habit of tracking, which makes it more likely I’ll both think about and possibly even do some French studying the next day. Finally, tracking is a victory in itself: even if I haven’t learned any French, I’ve done my tracking, which means I did put at least a little effort into my goal. This can be a badly-needed morale boost when the more workaday steps toward a goal aren’t going so well.

Not all goals lend themselves easily to being tracked in writing, but with a little creativity, it’s possible to find something meaningful to write down daily about almost any goal. Doing this accomplishes one of the most important steps in self-motivation, which is keeping the goal in mind every day, and it goes a long way toward helping us understand our own behavior better–and therefore understanding better how to change it.

Photo by Bruno Gola

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