Second Guessing

I learned to do this at home, and the habit stuck. When I start running a decision through my head a second time, then a third, then a fourth, nothing actually gets finished. I know a woman who refuses to work this way. She moves through a day like a machine and accomplishes what three regular people would. Bless her for it.

Trying to predict what other people will do is a related trap. I'll step aside before anyone has even asked me to, and then we end up colliding anyway because I guessed wrong about where they were headed. Reading ahead like this is something you pick up. The goal underneath it is to feel safe. Safety sits near the bottom of what any of us need. Think about how it used to work: women stayed in the house, and their survival ran through their husbands. An unhappy husband meant an unhappy household. He could walk out and leave them with nothing. That isn't so far from the street, really.

If you simply ask someone what they think, you can't actually forecast their answer. Some confrontations never happen at all, because the whole thing has already played out as a private argument between me, myself, and I. I rehearse what the other person might say, how they could take it, and what their reaction would do to me, and the real conversation never arrives.

That pattern wears self-esteem down. You stop trusting your own read on things. You fixate on every mistake and skip right past the choices that worked out fine. A lot of it traces back to a childhood where criticism came too often and praise came rarely.