Hello! If you’re new to this system, I would like to point you to this post to get an idea of what I’m talking about.
This is going to be my final update in my system for being bad at things. And unlike my personal scrum system, this one doesn’t have a cool step-by-step guide.
What I Wanted Out of This System
Honestly, when I started focusing on this system, I thought it would only take a few months. In my mind, I would reflect weekly on my fear of being seen doing things less-than-perfectly. After a time, it would come naturally to simply jump in when I wanted to participate in something.
You know, I could blame COVID-19. It’s hard to put yourself out there and try new things when everything is closed. And to be honest, the global pandemic did put a hitch in my giddy-up. I had started going to meetups and was planning on taking improv lessons, but that was not to be.
On the other hand, living in Berlin offers a ton of experiences for doing things poorly. Any time you have to speak a new language, the only way to get better is to get used to sounding like an idiot. I have training wheels though… Zack is better at speaking German than I am, so I can rely on him to tackle the hard conversations.
All this to say: learning the emotional resilience it takes to allow people to see your work when you’re not sure if it lives up to anybody’s standards isn’t something you can pick up quickly or easily.
What I Got Out of This “System”
A friend pointed out that the motivation behind building this system was my fear of judgement. And that’s totally true! If you only put the best parts of you and your work forward, you’re less likely to receive negative feedback. But I’ve been selling myself short by doing this – feedback is how we grow! And the best advice I’ve ever received is that we get to decide what we do with feedback. Just because somebody gives you advice or feedback doesn’t mean that you have to act on it.
So what did I get out of this work?
Awareness of my own gatekeeping
For one thing, an awareness that I gatekeep myself. This shows up when I feel like I need to finish a course on something before I try it. I did this when I was trying to work through a learn-to-draw class before taking up oil painting. Which is ridiculous. I’m not training for anything! I can paint if I want to paint! I’ll likely finish that drawing book at some point so that I can improve my painting, but there’s no reason not to paint now.
Now that I’ve examined my behavior, I’m more likely to recognize whether I’m gatekeeping myself. And if I am? I should just skip to the stuff I want to do.
Awareness of my own self-judgement
Another thing that I noticed was how much of the judgement I was avoiding was self-judgement. But here’s the crazy thing about it: I projected it on the people around me. For example, I have a lot of negative feelings about how messy my home is, and I beat myself up about it because, “Zack hates how messy our apartment is.”
But I’ve talked to him about it. He’s fine with our average level of cleanliness. And it’s not like it’s dirty or gross (most the time). I just have a lot of hobbies, which brings a lot of stuff. And I judge myself for the stuff. Zack doesn’t. And it’s not fair to claim that I’m stressed about cleaning for him, because the cleaning is for me.
So when I realize that I’m carrying a lot of stress for someone else, I’m trying to bring it up with that person. The hard thing is to believe them when they tell you how they feel… because I don’t know about you, but the self-judgement voice in my head is notorious for trying to convince me that they’re just trying to make me feel better. Liar.
But by clearing the air with the person, I can conclude that the judgement lives in my head and nowhere else. Then I can grapple with it (jury’s out on how to do that consistently – any tips?).
Summary
Looking back at the past few months, the point of trying to be bad at things is to NOT have a system. It’s much better to just go do the things I want to do rather than have a convoluted system to figure out if I should do something or not.
Perhaps this is a decidedly Katherine Thing (TM). But maybe not. Which is why I’m writing about it.
So since I don’t have a fancy tutorial for how to be bad at things, I’m going to share something that I promised many loved ones I would never share. And I was never going to share it because (1) all the advice I read said not to; and (2) it’s something I took on for this system.
So.
Below is a link to my 50,017-word NaNoWriMo project. I find myself wanting to share a bunch of caveats about it. But I’m not going to, because that would mean bending to my own self-judgement and trying to deflect judgement that I don’t even know exists. So here you go!
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