I've been asked to talk about my fear of failure for a new self-discipline book I'm reading. Today I need to recall three past experiences that I perceive as failures, mistakes or just dumb behaviour:
#1 - my main recent failure is in these exams. I know that when the exam results come out on Thursday I won't have done very well. I haven't done very well because I work full-time, and it is a valid reason. However I also didn't try as hard as I should. I didn't have the motivation and the self-discipline to work because there were always more important or fun things to do (Escapism and Delayism). End of story. I also end up fighting against my perfectionism when I do get down to study. I don't understand why but I feel like it needs to be perfect. (Cynicism?)
#2 - One of my early failures/embarrassments/humiliations was the whole experience of boys during my early teenage years. Twice I was asked out by boys (to be the girlfriend in name only, as you are at that age) only for it to be a joke. A year later, I asked out a guy who I really liked, Finlay, only for him to turn me down. I think it fuelled an already existing fear of not being liked or being good enough. I know that, although outwardly confident, I have low self-esteem. I think that this low self-esteem comes, unintentionally, from my mother. I have never made my own decisions or done things to please myself because she has always been the stamp of approval on me and my life.
#3 - A further failure is actually regret that I don't get involved in things, and I feel that I missed out on a lot in school because of this. I didn't get involved in the school play, I didn't play in the school orchestra etc. etc. etc. because I was scared of people laughing at me. I hid it as anti-establishmentism but it was fear of being judged as not good enough. And there were plenty of people better at things than me. So I don't think I bothered because I wouldn't be the best. (Negativism & Defeatism)
Although I didn't expect it, it turns out everything listed in the "Self-Discipline Poisons" section applies to me. Additionally, I realise that I need to work on my self-esteem a lot more. This has been very enlightening...
Saturday 15 August 2009
Friday 14 August 2009
Import from Spark People 5/8/2009
Well, I have had a far better day than I thought I was going to have. Just goes to show what a bit of navel gazing can do for you.
Today's objectives have all been attained. I didn't put off buying the anniversary gifts and card for my parents and I wrapped them early, not leaving them until before bed. I studied for an hour and I just looked up the dates of the January exams. I'll just jot down how many weeks and days until the beginning of January and then I'll go to bed. All in all, I am exceptionally proud of myself and am currently indulging myself on Spotify with a few of my favourite songs.
It's been a good day.
Today's objectives have all been attained. I didn't put off buying the anniversary gifts and card for my parents and I wrapped them early, not leaving them until before bed. I studied for an hour and I just looked up the dates of the January exams. I'll just jot down how many weeks and days until the beginning of January and then I'll go to bed. All in all, I am exceptionally proud of myself and am currently indulging myself on Spotify with a few of my favourite songs.
It's been a good day.
Import from Spark People 4/8/2009
I’ve felt better since I had my monumental vent the other night but I still feel antsy. It's probably the way I should be feeling, given that I am waiting on so much to happen: college, medical school, the house. How can I fix it though? I know if I were more proactive that I would feel better, so I'm going to try and write down what I can do to ease my anxiety.
College: I still believe I can achieve the end goal of 2 A*s next summer; I believe that I have the potential to pull that out of the bag. What stands between me and glory is the shedload of work I have inflicted on myself by not working hard enough last year. And believe me, I'm scared of that work. I'm scared that I won't be able to learn it all in order to get my grades...read into that the deep but entirely reasonable fear of failure. It chases me but doesn't hit me around the head hard enough to make me work. Plus I work stupidly. My stupid perfectionism demands it of me. I end up knowing the first few pages of a book amazingly well...and the rest gets rushed through in the last few days before the exam. I have to get over that. Perfectionists set themselves up for failure, after all.
Plan: I have to start: tomorrow. Work out how long I have between now and the January exams but also just pick up the damn books and start writing, start getting through those bloody past papers, start learning what I should already know.
Medical school: I have two months before the medical school applications are in. Again, my procrastination stems from fear: the fear of making such an enormous decision, the fear of having to deal with my mother's inevitable disapproval, the fear that the money will run out and that I won't be able to go and that I'll look stupid to everyone...
Plan: I need to get all the prospectuses ordered, get to all the open days I can, sit the UKCAT, get my personal statement written, get my references sorted and speak nicely to Nick. Also I need to get college work sorted because if I fail again, I won't be going in the first place.
The house: urgh...my main worry is all my finances at the moment, so I need to get the account sorted. I also need to organise the current mortgage paperwork and send off the life insurance forms. I don't think there's much else I can do after that, until we start actually moving and then I'll need to research the bills etc.
****************************************
In the spirit of this post, I thought I would share something. I figured something out about myself the other day: I am passive and now that I know that about myself, I hate it. You see, I will wait until the very last moment before I get things done. I always left my homework until the night before school, I never do my filing until the box is overflowing, I never stock up at work until I really, really have to. I also recently realised that I am not consistent. I have never worked at something consistently all my life. My studies are a great example. Combine it with the perfectionism and you have trouble: I have to do everything perfectly in one sitting to consider myself a success. Recipe for failure or what? Maybe it's because my memory is terrible: I can't remember what I did the last time I studied so how can I be sure that I didn’t miss something. In that sense, I don't trust myself. I need to pay more attention to everything, but how do you do that?
Whose fault is the above? It's mine, sure. But I'd like to pose a question: at what point is my brain not my brain? You know what I mean: you make your to-do list in the morning. Good intentions make you think that you'll finish the list BUT when it comes to doing it, your brain talks you out of it. "You'll do it later, come and watch TV," it says. Surely, if I am as well-intentioned as I think I am my brain won't put up a fight with me? Then why does it? Why am I fighting with myself? I wish I had the frickin' answer, that's a cert.
So with all my ramblings etc. out of the way for the night and a good list of personal objectives scribbled down in the new BFF, El Moleskine, I am off to bed. Tomorrow will not yield fun because I will be working (sort of) but tomorrow afternoon I might get an inch closer to who I want to be.
College: I still believe I can achieve the end goal of 2 A*s next summer; I believe that I have the potential to pull that out of the bag. What stands between me and glory is the shedload of work I have inflicted on myself by not working hard enough last year. And believe me, I'm scared of that work. I'm scared that I won't be able to learn it all in order to get my grades...read into that the deep but entirely reasonable fear of failure. It chases me but doesn't hit me around the head hard enough to make me work. Plus I work stupidly. My stupid perfectionism demands it of me. I end up knowing the first few pages of a book amazingly well...and the rest gets rushed through in the last few days before the exam. I have to get over that. Perfectionists set themselves up for failure, after all.
Plan: I have to start: tomorrow. Work out how long I have between now and the January exams but also just pick up the damn books and start writing, start getting through those bloody past papers, start learning what I should already know.
Medical school: I have two months before the medical school applications are in. Again, my procrastination stems from fear: the fear of making such an enormous decision, the fear of having to deal with my mother's inevitable disapproval, the fear that the money will run out and that I won't be able to go and that I'll look stupid to everyone...
Plan: I need to get all the prospectuses ordered, get to all the open days I can, sit the UKCAT, get my personal statement written, get my references sorted and speak nicely to Nick. Also I need to get college work sorted because if I fail again, I won't be going in the first place.
The house: urgh...my main worry is all my finances at the moment, so I need to get the account sorted. I also need to organise the current mortgage paperwork and send off the life insurance forms. I don't think there's much else I can do after that, until we start actually moving and then I'll need to research the bills etc.
****************************************
In the spirit of this post, I thought I would share something. I figured something out about myself the other day: I am passive and now that I know that about myself, I hate it. You see, I will wait until the very last moment before I get things done. I always left my homework until the night before school, I never do my filing until the box is overflowing, I never stock up at work until I really, really have to. I also recently realised that I am not consistent. I have never worked at something consistently all my life. My studies are a great example. Combine it with the perfectionism and you have trouble: I have to do everything perfectly in one sitting to consider myself a success. Recipe for failure or what? Maybe it's because my memory is terrible: I can't remember what I did the last time I studied so how can I be sure that I didn’t miss something. In that sense, I don't trust myself. I need to pay more attention to everything, but how do you do that?
Whose fault is the above? It's mine, sure. But I'd like to pose a question: at what point is my brain not my brain? You know what I mean: you make your to-do list in the morning. Good intentions make you think that you'll finish the list BUT when it comes to doing it, your brain talks you out of it. "You'll do it later, come and watch TV," it says. Surely, if I am as well-intentioned as I think I am my brain won't put up a fight with me? Then why does it? Why am I fighting with myself? I wish I had the frickin' answer, that's a cert.
So with all my ramblings etc. out of the way for the night and a good list of personal objectives scribbled down in the new BFF, El Moleskine, I am off to bed. Tomorrow will not yield fun because I will be working (sort of) but tomorrow afternoon I might get an inch closer to who I want to be.
Import from Spark People 2/8/2009
I can't even find the word that describes how I feel at this moment. I suppose if I were to narrow it down it would be between grief, guilt, frustration, fear and unhappiness. I'm at a crossroads in my life, everything is vying for my attention and I don't know if I can cope.
I hate my job (or more the people at my job) and I don't want to go there tomorrow night. The fact that it is a night shift doesn't help and that is ironic given that I had to fight long and hard for equal consideration on nights, and I upset a lot of people in the process. The job situation isn't a new thing but it doesn't help. I suppose I should be grateful that because it's nursing, I only have to be there for three days a week. However, when I am at home, I can't stop thinking about the place. I am paranoid, to a certain extent, but if I were to share the story with you, I think you'd understand.
I just wish I could get my act into gear on my days off. I am tired of being lazy and unmotivated. I should have got up on Friday morning and attempted the first session of the Couch to 5K program, but I didn't. The long and the short of it is that I'd spent the early hours of the morning on the iPhone watching YouTube videos and that I didn't feel like getting up at 5am to go running. However, when I woke up (at 11am) I felt so angry at myself. I wanted to do the C25K, I wanted to make a start and to feel that for once I was doing something worthy. Plus I didn't feel like the day was mine. I don't know, I like to feel unrestricted on my days off. On Fridays, the Mothership finishes work early and we club together to finish the housework. Later, the boyfriend comes over. These set events make me feel like my life is not my own. I don't feel like I can do my own thing around people, especially my boyfriend. God bless him, he is a clingy fella, loving cuddles and always wanting me massage his head etc. I feel like I couldn't go upstairs and perhaps start filing my paperwork or just doing something for me, not around him. He'd be there, and I hate doing personal things in front of him. It doesn't matter than we're engaged and about to move into our own place, I like to have a bit of privacy. We usually spend the night sat on the couch, watching whatever my mother dictates we should watch. It's a sorry state of affairs and it is about to change in some ways but I'm not overly enthusiastic about the impending change.
I am about 6 weeks off moving into my own house and I have all the emotional upheaval of that. Stuart is so keen, I am less than keen and my mother is half on the fence in that she wants to see me settled but as she puts it, "will miss every hair on my head". That makes me so upset, I'm almost filling up now as I write this. I know that it is a natural progression for me and Stuart and that 23 is a good time to leave home. However, this is my home. Bottom line, I don't want to be separated from my mother. I don't know whether we're closer than the average mother and daughter or whether my job makes me more appreciative of my parents. I just know that I could stay here forever, paying my rent, doing the chores...I don't know why I like it here so much. Perhaps it'll just be that with the pressures of modern living I won't see her as much. I think that is my fear. I hope that I'll pick up the phone often, pop over with ingredients for a meal and still spend a good portion of my time there. However, with the boyfriend as well, I don't think it'll happen as much as I'd like. He will be my priority and I don't know if I can deal with that.
The other big thing stressing me out is college/medical school applications. The deadline for med school apps is fast approaching. My results, out next week, will show me up as a flagrant failure and in spite of that, I still need to study hard for 2 As, get into a decent school and raise enough money to support myself through five years of education, all while working full-time and running a house. It's not like medicine isn't what I want to do. Suggest a career other than medicine to me and I can't see it. I can't see myself doing anything else. I want it, I really do but I just don't know if my track history will get me there. And that is my constant worry: that I won't get it, that I'll have to delay for yet another year and that I'll end up stuck in that sorry excuse for a job forever and a day.
On top of all this, I am sick and tired of my own body. I want to be a skinny, athletic type with a great resting heart rate and amazing lung capacity and I really want to be working on it now. I know that in the midst of all of the above, weight loss and exercise should be the last things on my mind but I still think that I should be able to do it. I want to feel better about myself, probably because my lack of personal successes could at least be reflected in outward success if and when I fail.
Right about here I would normally talk about moving forward but I just can't. I can't see myself getting out of bed in the morning and tackling anything: ordering prospectuses, organising my finances or looking at my college books. I am in a rut, hemmed in by my track record and by other people. If I succeed tomorrow, I will fail the next day. I always have, and I probably always will.
I hate my job (or more the people at my job) and I don't want to go there tomorrow night. The fact that it is a night shift doesn't help and that is ironic given that I had to fight long and hard for equal consideration on nights, and I upset a lot of people in the process. The job situation isn't a new thing but it doesn't help. I suppose I should be grateful that because it's nursing, I only have to be there for three days a week. However, when I am at home, I can't stop thinking about the place. I am paranoid, to a certain extent, but if I were to share the story with you, I think you'd understand.
I just wish I could get my act into gear on my days off. I am tired of being lazy and unmotivated. I should have got up on Friday morning and attempted the first session of the Couch to 5K program, but I didn't. The long and the short of it is that I'd spent the early hours of the morning on the iPhone watching YouTube videos and that I didn't feel like getting up at 5am to go running. However, when I woke up (at 11am) I felt so angry at myself. I wanted to do the C25K, I wanted to make a start and to feel that for once I was doing something worthy. Plus I didn't feel like the day was mine. I don't know, I like to feel unrestricted on my days off. On Fridays, the Mothership finishes work early and we club together to finish the housework. Later, the boyfriend comes over. These set events make me feel like my life is not my own. I don't feel like I can do my own thing around people, especially my boyfriend. God bless him, he is a clingy fella, loving cuddles and always wanting me massage his head etc. I feel like I couldn't go upstairs and perhaps start filing my paperwork or just doing something for me, not around him. He'd be there, and I hate doing personal things in front of him. It doesn't matter than we're engaged and about to move into our own place, I like to have a bit of privacy. We usually spend the night sat on the couch, watching whatever my mother dictates we should watch. It's a sorry state of affairs and it is about to change in some ways but I'm not overly enthusiastic about the impending change.
I am about 6 weeks off moving into my own house and I have all the emotional upheaval of that. Stuart is so keen, I am less than keen and my mother is half on the fence in that she wants to see me settled but as she puts it, "will miss every hair on my head". That makes me so upset, I'm almost filling up now as I write this. I know that it is a natural progression for me and Stuart and that 23 is a good time to leave home. However, this is my home. Bottom line, I don't want to be separated from my mother. I don't know whether we're closer than the average mother and daughter or whether my job makes me more appreciative of my parents. I just know that I could stay here forever, paying my rent, doing the chores...I don't know why I like it here so much. Perhaps it'll just be that with the pressures of modern living I won't see her as much. I think that is my fear. I hope that I'll pick up the phone often, pop over with ingredients for a meal and still spend a good portion of my time there. However, with the boyfriend as well, I don't think it'll happen as much as I'd like. He will be my priority and I don't know if I can deal with that.
The other big thing stressing me out is college/medical school applications. The deadline for med school apps is fast approaching. My results, out next week, will show me up as a flagrant failure and in spite of that, I still need to study hard for 2 As, get into a decent school and raise enough money to support myself through five years of education, all while working full-time and running a house. It's not like medicine isn't what I want to do. Suggest a career other than medicine to me and I can't see it. I can't see myself doing anything else. I want it, I really do but I just don't know if my track history will get me there. And that is my constant worry: that I won't get it, that I'll have to delay for yet another year and that I'll end up stuck in that sorry excuse for a job forever and a day.
On top of all this, I am sick and tired of my own body. I want to be a skinny, athletic type with a great resting heart rate and amazing lung capacity and I really want to be working on it now. I know that in the midst of all of the above, weight loss and exercise should be the last things on my mind but I still think that I should be able to do it. I want to feel better about myself, probably because my lack of personal successes could at least be reflected in outward success if and when I fail.
Right about here I would normally talk about moving forward but I just can't. I can't see myself getting out of bed in the morning and tackling anything: ordering prospectuses, organising my finances or looking at my college books. I am in a rut, hemmed in by my track record and by other people. If I succeed tomorrow, I will fail the next day. I always have, and I probably always will.
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