I used to think being prepared was a good quality to have. Someone’s kids would be unhappy and I would shake my head (inwardly only of course) and think… they didn’t prepare enough. ‘Cause, I confess, I was pretty good at being prepared with kids: snacks, drinks, entertainment, favourable time of day, amount of stimulation, after-activity plans.
I used to think this sort of planning was brilliant! But then, two people have made cases to the contrary: first, Ellen Hendriksen on the Ten Percent Happier podcast, who, 25 minutes into the episode talks about three aspects of social anxiety - perfectionism, attention as a spotlight, and safety behaviours. The safety behaviours “essentially what that is, is its any action that we take to try to “save ourselves”. It’s like a life preserver that actually holds us underwater. We think it’s going to save us, but really, it sinks us. So these are all the actions we take to compensate when we feel anxious. So we might over-explain, if we think we offended someone, we might write a nine paragraph explanatory e-mail saying what we really meant. We might over-prepare! If we’re feeling anxious about a presentation, we might rehearse it 25 times. We might be overly-friendly and put triple exclamation points at the end of sentences in our e-mails. (…) We might point out flaws.” (This last one is about using self-deprecation in order to elicit a reassuring response.)
She argues that safety behaviours “get the credit for the worst-case scenario not happening.” And scary as it might be, dropping these safety behaviours leads to a feeling of ease and freedom.
Second, George Saunders. At one point in A Swim In a Pond In The Rain, Saunders compares a writer who follows a pattern to someone who brings index cards on a date. “So, why the index cards on that date? In a word: underconfidence. We prepare those cards and bring them along and keep awkwardly consulting them when we should be looking deeply into our date’s eyes because we don’t believe that, devoid of a plan, we have enough to offer.
”Our whole artistic journey might be understood as the process of convincing ourselves that we do, in fact, have enough, figuring out what that is, then refining it.”
So yes, preparation is fine, but, with time, building confidence in yourself is better!