photo courtesy of Flickr's Creative Commons and thunderchild5
--post by Jennifer Irsfeld James
Some households have a junk drawer in the kitchen. At my house, nearly every drawer is a catchall for delayed decisions: the semi-important, potentially historic, almost useful, or broken-but-possibly-repairable.
I yearn to purge the excess, but often feel too overwhelmed to take action. At the root, I fear making a mistake—an imperfect decision.
But the slog of clutter is getting to be a real problem. Yesterday I couldn't find the extra digital TV converter box coupon I had promised a friend. I knew I had it tucked away in a safe place, somewhere. . .
That dilemma brought me to a new book Be Happy Without Being Perfect: How to Break Free from the Perfection Deception, by Alice D. Domar, Ph.D., and Alice Lesch Kelly. Reading about how perfectionism smothers and stifles, both in the words of Domar, a practicing
psychologist, and more than fifty of her patients interviewed in the book, is helping free me from perfectionist paralysis.
My favorite chapter, "Stop Agonizing Over Decisions," offers several tools I've been testing:
- Visualize living with a decision. (How will I feel in a year or even a decade about letting go of a particular piece of children's artwork?)
- Use a decision-making tree to discover hidden fears. (If I give away an antique porcelain box my grandmother gave me, she might find out and be disappointed or angry.)
- Challenge distorted, black-and-white thinking, such as "should" statements. (When I think "It's rude of me not to keep all gifts I receive," I can tell myself "Gifts are given to me to use as I choose, so it's perfectly acceptable for me to donate or share gifts that I cannot use.")
So how's it working? This time, I found the missing coupon after an hour of de-cluttering! But even if I hadn't, I'd still celebrate a bulging bag of recycled stuff and a donation box piled high. Many small decisions decisively made.
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