I am starting my writing earlier today, it’s a beautiful autumnal Sunday morning and I am sitting at my desk looking out over the Surrey countryside.
I am contemplating the day ahead, I have been up a while doing the usual weekend chores, like the trip to Aldi, to do the weekly shopping. I always find trips to the supermarket an interesting insight into human behaviour and I like to see what others eat.
Aldi, perhaps more than other supermarkets, brings together quiet a varied mix of people, unlike say Waitrose or Asda. Most supermarkets have a typical customer, but Aldi brings people from all walks of life and it always feels to me like shopping abroad. No surprise given that it’s German.
The other thing that fascinates me at Aldi is where do they find checkout staff that can scan your shopping at the speed of light?
I’ve got a bit of writers block this morning, I am not actually sure what that means. But it sounds good and don’t all the real pro-writers suffer from that?
Most days I knock this 750 words out in about 20 minutes flat, although, I do often then need to spend 10 minutes tidying it up on Word Press, if it’s a ‘sharer’, which often it isn’t.
Today is dragging a bit, really because I am over-thinking the writing and as I decided I would use today as blog post, it is now putting pressure on me to make it a good read.
Normally, I just write as the thoughts come and then worry about how it reads afterwards. That is interesting, as I think we get more that just writer’s block in life.
When we over-think, we get a blockage on everything that is going on. We are all guilty of this at times and it can, without you realising it, become a habit that has over time a big impact.
Now I am not suggesting, that we blindly go with every thought that comes into our head and immediately say or do it, without a pause for some thought.
However, it is that pause, that is what matters. It is good to just momentarily engage the human/frontal part of our brains for a moment, to just weigh up a thought, before acting. This is obviously not on ever tiny little thing, but on the slightly more important stuff, than say ‘should I have another tea?’.
However, what can creep in, if you are not careful, is that you start to over-analyse every tiny part of your life large or small. The longer that you think about stuff, the more the ‘chimp’ part of the brain, the limbic brain, has time to dig up past experiences on something and then has more evidence for the case of not doing something.
Now, sometimes it is good to listen to experiences and not do the same stupid, sometimes painful, mistakes again and again.
However, this process also stops us from giving new things a try, as what happens is, that the limbic brain will find evidence of a previous bad outcome and tell you that this will always be the outcome.
Just because you had a bad experience with something, doesn’t mean that you will always have the same experience, every time you do a certain thing. Also, as you over-think, even if you do decide to try a certain thing, because you have over-thought, you go into it already expecting it to go wrong.
The over-thinking habit will not only slow you down, it will lead you to doing whatever you do decided to do, with less than positive thoughts and that will, more often than not, end with poor results.
So how can you overcome this block in life?
Well, for me I have started to overcome it by changing the habit slowly and surely. It is about having a mindset of starting something immediately. Most ideas that we come up with, pop up often like lightbulb moments, but they often have been bubbling away in the background for a while and that’s because they are good ideas.
If you say to yourself, OK let’s just do that and I am going to do it, as best that I can. That is really important, because often we put unrealistic expectations on ourselves. Then often our measure of success for a particular thing is set far too high and when we don’t reach it, we feel we’ve failed. Yet more perfect ammo for the next thought process on doing something or not.
If you set small expectations initially, just get started straight away. Then increase the expectations as the results come. Then if something is only a partial success, it is still a success and you were doing your best to achieve it.
This will help to massively build your confidence in doing stuff and that will kill the over-thinking habit dead.
Actually the 750 words only took 23 minutes and when I started, because too much thinking, I believed today was going to be hard. When I stopped the thinking and just started, it flowed easily.
Enjoy your week and stop talking and thinking. Stop setting ridiculously high expectations and just start doing. Even if it is only one small thing.
Philip Dodson 