Why your ‘all-or-nothing’ attitude always end in nothing?

I am sure you have done it at some point in your life: whether you decided you would chase after a new career by applying to every university out there or signing up for every recruitment agency. It could be that you decided you would exercise and go to the gym every day for a week, buy all the new clothes then don’t go for months. Or it could be the diet that you decided to follow and you buy all the ingredients to cook, sign up for Weight Watchers and then after someone brings donuts into work, you decide to give it all up!

This ‘all-or-nothing’ attitude, or perfectionism will always end badly as it is not sustainable. We cannot do anything perfectly all the time and there are always times when life gets in the way or you are thrown a curve ball. The courage really comes from moving past that and keeping going. Resilience and consistency are key.

Perfectionism is just another form of procrastination – putting off what you actually want for fear of not doing it well enough and it is all linked to a fear of failure. So often the ‘all’ part of it lasts for only a few days and the ‘nothing’ part of it is you in your old ways for the majority of the time. This is why the ‘all-or-nothing’ model is so dangerous and cunning. You fool yourself into thinking you are doing what you want to do, becoming who you want to become and are moving forward, when, in reality, you have made no progress and are back dealing with your negative behaviours (which can be detrimental) for the biggest part of each week.

The worst thing about it is that the ‘nothing’ part of this is usually when you are in ‘aah well, I have ruined it now, I will just go all out to ruin’. So you eat worse than usual, do less than usual and are lazier than usual. Instead of applying for one job, going to the gym once or eating well for a few days, you do NOTHING, or worse, you go the other way and sabotage the dream you have.

Fear of failure can hold us back significantly from achieving our dreams because we ultimately think at our core that we are not good enough, we do not deserve the success, we will look stupid when we fail, so if it cannot be perfect, we will not do it at all. Logically, this is such a senseless thought process. It is like saying that we are not allowed to learn to do anything. We have to go from zero to perfect in whatever we are trying and that is not how life works. We learn to draw, to write, to speak languages, to cook, to walk, to be a good person – so why would we not learn how to improve our fitness, get a better job, make more money or lose weight?

5 Tips to help avoid the ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality

1. Set yourself realistic goals that are not in absolutes – so instead of saying you will exercise every single day, tell yourself you will do 2 or 3 days a week
2. Celebrate the successes you have – so if you apply for 2 jobs instead of 10, that is progress and it could be all you need
3. Keep a tracker of days you were feeling good/ bad or were on plan/ off plan – this will give you a visual that even if you have a bad day, there have been so many successful days and that does not mean you need to continue down the road of self-sabotage
4. Speak kindly to yourself and accept you will have bad days– be compassionate in your self-talk and do not use one bad day as an excuse to beat yourself up, rile yourself with guilt or feel like a total failure – we all have days when we are not at our best
5. There is no failure, only feedback – so learn from each time you fall down. Did you set your sights too high? Was it unrealistic? Was there a reason you did not have a good day? Do you have triggers? Is there something deeper stopping you from wanting to change?

So, in conclusion, the ‘all-or-nothing’ approach NEVER works. It is unrealistic, unsustainable and always ends up with you doing worse than if you had not started because the thing you are trying to avoid, you end up doing more of. Look for somewhere in between. Seek out consistency and dig deep for the resilience to get back up and try again when you have a day that does not align with your plans. But even to do a little, is a step in the right direction and is so much better than doing nothing.