The first time I laid eyes on this piece, it stopped me dead in my tracks.
Overthinking and overanalyzing are very familiar territory for me. My dad had a PhD in engineering, so it was baked into me. Overthinking was my way of making sure I was right. And if I was right, I couldn’t be criticized, judged or made wrong.
But something about this landed differently. The idea that someone else was putting themselves out there while I was still in my spin cycle hit home.
After working with clients for all these years, I’ve come to see that overthinking keeps all of us safe in some way. It’s a strategy we learned to protect ourselves from what happens when we get it wrong: being punished, criticized or made to feel less than. What it guards against can be different for each of us.
Surely you’ve seen it in your own life: someone presenting work that isn’t fully polished, or a mom taking a shortcut on something you’d make from scratch. You’ve looked and thought, “I’d never do it that way.” But they did it anyway.
100% kudos to them. They don’t have to over-perfect, overanalyze and overthink first. They’re out on the field playing the game rather than hanging with us overanalyzers, playing armchair quarterback.
There’s such a freedom in that.