Auto-Exigence or Self-Demanding

Transcript

I’d like to talk about auto-exigence or being self demanding.

So I kind of borrowed this word from Spanish. In Spanish they call it “auto-exigente or auto-exigencia”. We take that into English the cognates exist. Exigent exists in English and is not so common.

Self demanding, auto exigent. I like the term because it’s a lot broader than the term perfectionist.

You don’t necessarily need something to be perfect to be auto-exigent, to demand so much of yourself.

Sometimes you just want things to be better or you want to achieve so much right now.

Like if someone starts out with meditation and they start out with five minutes, then they wanna increase. Be at that level where they can meditate for an hour in a row right away or the second day they do it.

Now there are some terms in English…like people say Don’t be so hard on yourself so auto-exigent.

This is a problem that a lot of people have, I’ve had some experience with it. I’ve been auto-exigent my whole life and I think I’ve gotten over it for the most part.

The big part of it was just recognizing it.

That’s part of the reason why I think it’s so important to have this word in English. How can you recognize something you don’t even have a word for? It’s hard to point out to someone that they’re being that way if you have to use a whole phrase.

Someone told me I was autoexigent and I was very resistant to that idea. I had this idea like alright if I’m auto exigent, why aren’t I a super success?

This is so funny because this is kind of a meta thing because the reason I would say something like that was because I was being auto-exigent.

The reason that I expect exigence to lead to success is because I’m being demanding of myself

The reason I cant notice my own successes, in many ways I am successful. I’ve brought up many talent, mastered a lot of things.

I have talents in music and public speaking and so many other things, videography.

In that moment of resistance I would ignore all of those success.

Why aren’t I more? Why aren’t I better?

So this is what happens, auto-exigence will even prevent us from seeing the fact that we are being demanding of ourselves.

What can you do to overcome this?

How can you be easy on yourself?

Well one thing is just noticing it and being aware of the fact that you are being auto-exigent.

I recommended to a friend of mine that she start keeping a diary. Just write daily for 5-10 minutes and saying what was going on for the moments when she was being hard on herself, when she caught herself and tried to look at it from a different perspective and resolve that.

Another important thing to address is why is it important to let go of all that? In a sense we do gain things from being hard on ourselves and have these high standards.

But what I’ve learned in my experience, I’m actually more productive when I’m not demanding of myself. When I’m willing to let things slide.

This is a lot like what’s described in Keith Johnstone… Impro. I recommend this book, it’s not just about theater or improvisation. This is about improvisation in a broader sense about creativity, in the sense that life is an improvisation.

What he says is in life you have to be free to make mistakes. That’s what improvisation is all about.

If you’re not free to make mistakes or you expect too much of yourself, like say what happens sometimes, people will be improvising in verse or in rhyme and somebody will come up with something and bam, it hits and the audience laughs.

It gets that big emotional reaction and comes around in a circle and comes back to that actor and now he’s feeling that pressure to be as good as he just was or even better.

That’s not how creativity, improvisation and life work.

If you put so much pressure on yourself to be excellent, you can’t be free to experiment.

Creativity and that magic that makes improvisation so wonderful comes out of that space of being free to mess up and make complete balls of the situation.

That’s where the magic comes from.

One other thing you can do to address the feeling of being self demanding is having the first draft mentality.

I like to think about the authors L. Ron Hubbard and Philip K. Dick.

They were both science fiction authors and I think they had this in common, I don’t think they ever wrote a second draft.

Reading Philip K. Dick you can tell it’s not exactly polished. Sketch out this idea and let it fly, send it out to the world.

You know this book was filled with short stories and there it is. No time to waste getting everything perfect, is how his work appears to me.

I really like that.

Of course there is this story of the two pottery classes. One class tries to get everything perfect, their best pot. The other pot tries to pump out as many as they can. Second class does 40-50 pots per student and ends up with the best pots.

If you just try to focus on one thing and get it perfect you don’t exactly have the fundamentals.

I don’t actually know how that works, I guess it’s just that you pick up more things by doing things by scratch rather than sitting on one thing and trying to polish it up.

I like to have a first draft mentality, like with a lot of these episodes I recorded for this podcast and I don’t know if you can tell I just do one take.

Maybe I didn’t say exactly everything I wanted to but I said it and those ideas are out there and that’s good enough, move on.

It’s ironic though because this is one I’ve stopped a few times and took a few takes to get it right.

That’s basically it.

Being aware of your auto-exigence or admitting to yourself that you are auto-exigent. Sometimes that’s the harder part.

Be willing to make mistakes. This also ties into Albert Ellis, one of the founders of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the 14 self defeating rules. One of them was I can’t make a mistake, everyone has to like me, or everything I do must be a success.

If we can let go of these self defeating rules through our action by having this first draft mentality, at least get something on the page even if you don’t do it right, do it.

Doing something almost always better than doing nothing.

And when you do something you start to find that soon enough you do something awesome.

As Jake from Adventuretime says “Sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something.”

Thanks for listening, thanks for putting that effort in to put yourself at risk, maybe make a little fool of yourself in order to be creative and introduce some joy and happiness and defined consciousness into this world.

Thank you, have a great day and I’ll talk to you soon.