Driven by All-or-Nothing Thinking?

This summer, my husband Chris and I managed to do something rather impressive.

We crashed our bicycles into each other.

Not into a car. Not into a tree. Not even into another cyclist.

Into each other.

Two reasonably intelligent adults, riding side by side through a quiet condo neighborhood near our house. How hard could this be?

Apparently, harder than we thought.

Chris was riding on my left, and we were approaching a T-intersection, where we needed to turn either left or right.  

Chris turned right.  I turned left.

He stayed upright. I did not.

I landed knee-first on a metal sewer grate, leaving me with a pretty nasty cut and a deep bruise. Three months later, my knee still reminds me of our little adventure.

Chris felt absolutely terrible. He was convinced it was his fault because his bike had turned into mine.

But once we got me back on my feet and figured out what had happened, I realized that we’d both made some pretty significant assumptions.

Earlier in the ride, I'd told Chris that I didn't want to go too far that day. So he quite reasonably assumed we'd turn right, which would take us toward home.

I, however, had a different assumption.

We'd been exploring the neighborhood, and there were still a couple of streets to the left we hadn't ridden down.

So, in my mind, OF COURSE, we were turning left.

Of course we had to ride every street. That's what we do!

Except... who said we had to?

Apparently, my thinking patterns were driving me. Literally.

When "Some" Doesn't Seem Like an Option

Now that I’ve seen my faulty thinking in flesh and blood, I can’t stop noticing it. 

I hadn’t realized how much the “rule of all” was guiding my life.

I eat all the food on my plate, even when I’m full.  I overstuff presentations with far more information than anyone needs. I comparison-shop all the options, and I read all the reviews.

If I'm going to do something, I want to do ALL of it.

I often say that I’m a recovering perfectionist.  But apparently, I’ve traded perfectionism for something else:  completionism. 

I don't necessarily need everything to be perfect. But I do have a hard time leaving things unfinished.

And sometimes that tendency serves me well. I'm thorough. I'm persistent. I follow through.

But sometimes it also gets in my way. 

Sometimes it’s exhausting for me.  And frustrating for others.

And here's what I've only recently begun to recognize: When I assume I have to do ALL of something, sometimes I end up doing NONE of it.

When ALL Leads to NOTHING

Here's a rather ridiculous example.

The plastic chair mat under my desk has been falling apart for months. It's cracked, full of holes, and makes it difficult to roll my chair around.

I've known I need a new one. In fact, I already have a replacement saved in my Amazon wish list.

So why haven't I ordered it?

Because I also want a new desk chair.

And somehow, without ever consciously deciding this, I've been operating under the assumption that I need to buy the chair and the mat at the same time. 

Even though I’m not even buying them from the same place!

There is absolutely no reason why one purchase depends on the other.

In fact, while reflecting on this bicycle accident, something suddenly occurred to me:

Wait a minute. I can buy the chair mat without buying a chair!

Seriously, this is a new realization.  

And now I'm wondering how many other things I've been postponing because I think I have to do the whole thing, when I could simply do part of it.

Maybe this sounds familiar.

There's the project we keep putting off because we don't have enough time to finish it. The friend we keep meaning to call but don't because we think we need an hour to catch up properly — even though a quick check-in would mean something. Or the simple decision we complicate because we feel like we need to explore every possible option first.

Sometimes our all-or-nothing thinking pushes us to do more than we need to.

And sometimes it keeps us from doing anything at all.

Either way, we may not even realize that we've given ourselves only two options.

What If There's Another Option?

I'm not suggesting there's anything wrong with wanting to finish what we start. That instinct can be a real strength.

But I'm realizing that sometimes my all-or-nothing thinking creates rules I don't even recognize as rules.

And it's hard to consider other options when I haven’t even realized I have any.

So lately, I've been trying to pay a little more attention to the things I assume I have to do — or the things I'm waiting to do until I can do them "properly."

And asking myself a simple question:

Besides doing all of it or none of it, what other options do I have?

I'm still working on this one. Clearly.

But I'm beginning to wonder how many possibilities I've overlooked simply because I never thought to look for them.

Including, apparently, the possibility of turning right.

And buying a chair mat.

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