Impostor syndrome, kaizen, and getting stuff done

I have impostor syndrome. Not all the time, but usually when I plan to do something new or exciting it creeps up on me. Then the fear kicks in and I spend a couple of days with my head stuck re-reading a large series of books. Then I beat myself up about the self fulfilling prophecy I’ve managed to enact. It’s boring to do this over and over again, and more tiring than actually doing the thing you should have done.

I still get things done eventually and I thought it would, quite selfishly, help me to document how I get past this and maybe help some other folks if I wrote down what I do. Then I can take my own advice more often. Win win, tea and tiffin on the lawn and croquet later. If I had a lawn, a croquet set, and some tiffin.

The best advice I’ve ever had was in an email exchange with a colleague of mine who shared the idea that you should try and do one small thing every day that gets you closer to your goals. The tricky thing after that is to identify the small thing, and of course have some goals.

This is where we come to kaizen. If you read the link there it gets all complicated and starts talking about lean manufacturing, but I read the excellent book The Spirit of Kaizen which was written by the psychologist Robert Maurer. He shows how using small changes stops your fears pushing back at you and lets you move forward without needing to re-read the 4,000 page Peter F Hamilton series over a week.

So the first thing is to make a list of things you want to get done. Just write it down.

Then take one of the elements on the list and break it down.

For each item ask yourself can I do this today? If it pushes back it’s too big. So break it down again, and again, until there’s the small thing shining back at you.

Do it.

After a while you will find you’re just getting on with it, you have got yourself in a place where the flow is flowing and things are getting done.

Maurer’s book explains how to use small changes everywhere, including in changing organisations or your own perceptions of problems and obstacles.

The other thing you need to do, if you’re a workaholic, is to sometimes go and re-read that 4,000 page series and turn the worry machine off for a while. So none of this is fixed, sometimes the thing preventing you from getting things done is your own mental exhaustion. You need to listen to that too.

Goals, that’s a topic for another day.