Let me know if you’ve experienced this: you are super excited to try something new. You’ve seen the Instagram posts, you’ve browsed the Etsy shops, you’ve salivated over the supplies at your local craft store and you’re finally ready to dive in head first. You know you can make this project just how you would want it to be. You get your supplies, you watch a tutorial, you sit down at your craft bench on a quiet Sunday morning, you turn on the show you’re watching or the latest episode from a podcast you’re following and… you begin.
You take the first stitch or cut with excitement while you envision the perfect final product. As you continue, you you can see this new obsession start to take shape. You work for an hour or two (or even a day or two) and then it begins. You come up to a step in the process that doesn’t seem to make sense. You thought you knew everything about this project thanks you at least 4 tutorials that you saw online. But this… no one talked about this. No one showed how do to do this one little thing.
You can think of a couple of different ways to work thru and get past this step so you can get back on the path to crafting heaven. You take a break. You get a snack. You watch a couple more tutorials. Still, no one addresses this one step.
You know you should commit to completing the step with one of the methods you thought of. You know that it’s not that big of a deal and you can just try again, right? But the supplies, the materials, they are so precious! They are beautiful and perfect and unspoiled by mistakes and still full of hope and promise of carefully created crafts in the future.
You grow worried that if you choose the wrong path, you’ll ruin the project. You’ll waste all those hours immersed in this new hobby. You’ll have to start over and… worse, what if the other method is not the right one either. What if you’ll never solve this problem? What if you can’t ever find the answer?
Suddenly, you’ve lost all interest in this project. You walk away because you know you have other tasks waiting for you. You feel disappointment creep into your heart because you know, deep down, that if you could just find THE right path, you will be able to complete the project in no time. You recall the other times when this has happened before and you wonder why you keep doing this to yourself.
Before you know it, the project you were so in love with has fallen to the way-side along with a half-dozen or so others. You go back to the tried and true projects you have that you know you can complete and resign yourself to scrolling pinterest and instagram again.
If any of this sounds familiar, just know, you’re not alone. I have fallen into this pattern so many times in the past. I have started projects with gusto only to get hung up on a little technicality. I spent years trying to figure out why this happens. Why do I get so paralyzed by making such an insignificant decision? Well, one day I was listening to a podcast about an unrelated topic (weight loss, I think) and they were discussing why people quit on diets or why they perceive that they fail on them and one of the reasons provided was that they are a perfectionist. They struggle with connecting that failure is actually a tool for learning. Their viewpoint of the world is that if they can’t do it perfectly, they give up and they feel that they are failing or have failed. They don’t equate the “try” with learning what to or not to do. They see the “I don’t know what to do or which method to try” as not being able to be perfect in their attempt. And this turns into “well, if I can’t do it perfectly, then why even bother?”
This resonated with me so much! This is why I’ve started so many projects: crafts, home repairs, process improvements at work, you name it, and gotten to a tricky step or a step when I struggled with making a decision that would affect the overall outcome and ended up walking away from it. I didn’t know how to proceed, therefore I must be inadequate to complete this task, therefore I am not able to do this task perfectly, therefore why am I doing this task at all?
It has been such an eye-opening experience since I first heard that podcast a few years ago. I have observed this behavior in so many parts of my daily life. I always suspected that I was a perfectionist but I never felt that was a bad thing. I had always presumed that being a perfectionist meant that I did everything exactly how it was meant to be done. This was a very handy talent to have at my job. I was able to step into a new role and learn my tasks very quickly and so it never crossed my mind that it would hold me back in other areas of my life.
While I still struggle with these tendencies, I have been actively working to overcome them over the last few years. I have made greater progress in finishing projects than I ever had before. I am almost fierce about finishing a project now before starting another one, even if it takes me months (and believe me, sometimes they do take months!).
Have you ever experienced these habits? Does it take you longer to finish something because you agonize over the “right” way of doing it?
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