Proofs and goals
Spent much of the afternoon and evening proofreading and generally tinkering with my forthcoming collection. It's something which the editor has been waiting for for some months. It's been hard to find the time to give enough concentrated effort to such a task, and to be honest, I have been procrastinating too. For various reasons, but I did feel when I last looked through the manuscript - about a month ago, on a hot busy day in a Kingston Starbucks - that the collection didn't quite work as a whole. But then, it's so easy I find for one's confidence to disintegrate completely with a project like this. That hot afternoon nothing seemed to make much sense and major revisions seemed to be in order. Either that or sticking my metaphorical head in the metaphorical sand, ostrich-wise, for as long as possible.
Anyway this afternoon things seemed a little clearer, after I'd got away from the young kittens who were keen on offering numerous editing suggestions of their own, straight to keyboard too. There's a good cafe on Stroud Green Road which offers large cappuccinos and wi fi access too. I made a good start there and by the end of the evening had made a good few cuts and fine tuning suggestions, and sent an email off to the editor, word document attached. Not thinking any further than that tonight. So something of progress. Possibly no coincidence that I have my work appraisal tomorrow and one of the goals (aka 'golden targets' among us colleagues) is to have submitted a complete manuscript by the end of the year. Well that one's done ok.
This whole idea of goals. In one way I think it’s very good. Especially if they’re great big goals, the sort of ambitious goals that to have achieved them would indicate a real mark of success – either to self or others, or both. The difficulty with such goals is that they seem so big that one can shy away from them, putting them off indefinitely until one is ‘ready’ – which of course, with the less confident among us, may never happen. One waits and waits until that magical future moment when one has reached confidence and a sense of mastery. A mandate for procrastination.
I was like this for years, I must confess. Big goals seemed out of reach so I concentrated on little jobs or routines that needed to be done and didn’t always do them so well either. So now here’s my odd secret – one evening I ended up purchasing Monsieur Paul McKenna’s enticingly entitled ‘Instant Confidence: The Power To Go For Anything you Want!’ and reading it on the train to an evening class in Thetford. McKenna, for all his dubious skills as a hypnotist and his questionable acquiring of web-based PhDs, is a good clear communicator and has created a blend of cognitive behavioural self-therapy and neuro-linguistic programming. His books are clear and enthusiastically written. Taken with a bit of seasoning, they are helpful, even (perhaps even especially) for the skeptical academic. Here’s McKenna on the power of big goals:
"Your goals have to be big enough to get you out of bed – to make you feel motivated even before you push the switch. Just being ‘a little more efficient at work’ or ‘losing 5 lbs’ is rarely a big enough target to aim at. You need BIG goals – goals that will ignite your passion and get you off your arse and into action. Then all the things you do in your daily life become easier."
So there. But the initial trouble remains – one can end up procrastinating because one doesn’t feel good enough. So a corrective is necessary, and as McKenna insists : ‘truly successful people take action before they feel ready!’. He advocates daily action towards the goals – whether or not you feel prepared or in the right mood. It’s obvious stuff but I do find it helpful. I know there are alternative philosophies/ thought patterns advocated to get stuff done, including a zen-like appreciation of process, the daily, moment-to-moment doing or not doing of things, which offsets the possible neuroticism of ignoring the present by hankering after the future. I guess a mix of both – attention to process and goal – is the most desirable, adjusting the balance according to both task and personal foibles. I like the big goals though – as long as one doesn’t end up taking them too seriously. It’s helped me get a lot of things done, including the uneasy process of book proofs.
Here’s a poem from way back when. Not part of the proofs…
i. angel swimming through water
water flows over my body as gold
streaks through my veins my eyes
fluoresce like crystals with the cold
I feel I am braced for any occasion
though too large for fish to recognise me
they are disturbed by my passage
they sing tone poems as they whisk away
a few return to mouth their puzzlement
breast stroke is not so different from flying
- to glide and push over invisible buoyancy -
a singlemindedness flushing the soul
the luxurious exhaustion of a goal
Anyway this afternoon things seemed a little clearer, after I'd got away from the young kittens who were keen on offering numerous editing suggestions of their own, straight to keyboard too. There's a good cafe on Stroud Green Road which offers large cappuccinos and wi fi access too. I made a good start there and by the end of the evening had made a good few cuts and fine tuning suggestions, and sent an email off to the editor, word document attached. Not thinking any further than that tonight. So something of progress. Possibly no coincidence that I have my work appraisal tomorrow and one of the goals (aka 'golden targets' among us colleagues) is to have submitted a complete manuscript by the end of the year. Well that one's done ok.
This whole idea of goals. In one way I think it’s very good. Especially if they’re great big goals, the sort of ambitious goals that to have achieved them would indicate a real mark of success – either to self or others, or both. The difficulty with such goals is that they seem so big that one can shy away from them, putting them off indefinitely until one is ‘ready’ – which of course, with the less confident among us, may never happen. One waits and waits until that magical future moment when one has reached confidence and a sense of mastery. A mandate for procrastination.
I was like this for years, I must confess. Big goals seemed out of reach so I concentrated on little jobs or routines that needed to be done and didn’t always do them so well either. So now here’s my odd secret – one evening I ended up purchasing Monsieur Paul McKenna’s enticingly entitled ‘Instant Confidence: The Power To Go For Anything you Want!’ and reading it on the train to an evening class in Thetford. McKenna, for all his dubious skills as a hypnotist and his questionable acquiring of web-based PhDs, is a good clear communicator and has created a blend of cognitive behavioural self-therapy and neuro-linguistic programming. His books are clear and enthusiastically written. Taken with a bit of seasoning, they are helpful, even (perhaps even especially) for the skeptical academic. Here’s McKenna on the power of big goals:
"Your goals have to be big enough to get you out of bed – to make you feel motivated even before you push the switch. Just being ‘a little more efficient at work’ or ‘losing 5 lbs’ is rarely a big enough target to aim at. You need BIG goals – goals that will ignite your passion and get you off your arse and into action. Then all the things you do in your daily life become easier."
So there. But the initial trouble remains – one can end up procrastinating because one doesn’t feel good enough. So a corrective is necessary, and as McKenna insists : ‘truly successful people take action before they feel ready!’. He advocates daily action towards the goals – whether or not you feel prepared or in the right mood. It’s obvious stuff but I do find it helpful. I know there are alternative philosophies/ thought patterns advocated to get stuff done, including a zen-like appreciation of process, the daily, moment-to-moment doing or not doing of things, which offsets the possible neuroticism of ignoring the present by hankering after the future. I guess a mix of both – attention to process and goal – is the most desirable, adjusting the balance according to both task and personal foibles. I like the big goals though – as long as one doesn’t end up taking them too seriously. It’s helped me get a lot of things done, including the uneasy process of book proofs.
Here’s a poem from way back when. Not part of the proofs…
i. angel swimming through water
water flows over my body as gold
streaks through my veins my eyes
fluoresce like crystals with the cold
I feel I am braced for any occasion
though too large for fish to recognise me
they are disturbed by my passage
they sing tone poems as they whisk away
a few return to mouth their puzzlement
breast stroke is not so different from flying
- to glide and push over invisible buoyancy -
a singlemindedness flushing the soul
the luxurious exhaustion of a goal
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