-Perfection
-Pressure
-Pinsecurity
OK, so maybe that last one wasn’t really a “P”-word.
Anyway, I was talking to my roommate Elizabeth late last night about relationships with people and dating, and in true Dr. Phil fashion, she gave me some helpful insight. She pointed out that there are three big issues that cause major stress when you are dealing with another person in a relationship of some sort (personal, professional, dating, friends): the need for perfection, outside pressures that skew expectations, and insecurities that make you worry unnecessarily.
Which then led me to realize that I tend to make things seem like catastrophes when they really aren’t. For instance, I had a phone interview the other week for College Summit, and Karla asked me how it went. And I said that I felt it was pretty bad, that I didn’t articulate everything that I wanted to say, and that there were so many things I could have done to make it better. I didn’t stop to think that the interview, overall, went very well. I instead focused on the small negatives, and blew them out of proportion, thereby kind of separating/shielding myself from the situation and not really getting anything out of it.
My need for everything to be perfect driven by external pressures (as well as internal) and coupled with personal insecurities, makes me over analyze situations to useless degrees.
Interesting pattern. And I don’t just do it with interviews…