The Academic Imperfectionist

If you're an academic with ADHD, you're probably battle-hardened from years spent struggling to do things that come easily to your colleagues: focus, resist distractions, tame exciting but messy ideas into nice coherent research papers. But no matter how good you've got at finding ways to get the work done, you're still at a disadvantage. The rules for How To Get Things Done were written for people who don't have ADHD. Living by those rules is harder for you than for other people, and it leaves you with a demoralising sense of being second-rate. My friend, it doesn't need to be like this. You can rewrite the rules to allow you to play to your strengths instead of managing your weaknesses. Your card-carrying academic ADHD imperfectionist buddy is here to set you on the right tracks.

Do you often have thoughts like, 'I just need to finish X, then I can relax'? Except that when you finish X, you still can't relax, because along comes another obligation - and before you know it, you're face-to-face with burnout. If that's you, you're not alone, and you're not incompetent. You're simply approaching your work in a way that has served you well ever since you were a kid: finish your homework now, play later. That approach is not serving you any more, but it's hard to move on because it's part of your identity. Who even are you, if not the kid who gets their homework done?! There's a way through this muddle, my friend. Join The Academic Imperfectionist for a mindset reset.

We all have that one person, don't we, whose success makes us painfully aware of our own shortcomings? A person who serves as a reminder of all the great things we could have been, but aren't. Hearing news of their latest achievement is liable to ruin our entire day, as we rush headlong into reflecting on how flawed and disappointing we are. But what if it's not that simple? What if the reason that person is doing so well is not because they're better than you, but because the two of you have different values, and therefore different priorities? In this episode, I'm going to reframe your depressing comparisons and show you how you can use them to tune in to what you care most about. Turn that frown upside down, my friend, and settle in for some uplifting truth bombs.
You can find my Core Values exercise here, and the Wheel of Life here.

Yeah, okay, clickbaity title, but I really do want to share with you a helpful way of reframing perfectionism that I've been thinking about recently. Perfectionism happens when our lack of confidence in our ability to succeed meets our lack of knowledge about what success requires. Overcoming it requires filling in the gaps in our knowledge and finding constructive ways to respond to our lack of confidence. How do we do this? Well, by thinking about what we do when we're hungry, and also by thinking about getting wedged in an unground tunnel. Hear me out.

Do you ever worry that you're not serious enough for academia? That you're constantly playing whack-a-mole with hiding your many frivolous and unimpressive traits as you try to convince everyone that you deserve your place at the table? That you're a big old fake because you need to curate yourself so much in order to seem like you belong? If so, you're not alone - and it's not because you're flawed. It's because you're yet to uncover academia's dirty little secret: that it's just a job. If you can get your head around that, life will be much less stressful.
References
Goffman, Erving. 1956: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (University of Edinburgh Social Sciences Research Centre).
Guignon, Charles. 2004: On Being Authentic (London: Routledge). (Bernard Williams quotation on page viii.)
Hawley, Katherine. 2019: 'What is impostor syndrome?', Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 93/1: 203–226.
Kelsky, Karen. 2021: 'Academia is a cult', TEDx Talks.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1770: The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lester Crocker (ed.) (New York: Pocket Books, 1957).
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943: Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992).