Grow With Soul: Episode 145 - Have You Overcorrected?
Today I have a topic for you that has been coming up for me over and over again in conversations with friends, with people I work with, and in my own head: overcorrection. We know what it means to overcorrect in a car, but we do it in our decision-making too. We experience something as so painful, so frustrating, so unbearably uncomfortable, that we turn the wheel a full 180 in our efforts to get away from it. And sometimes that works. But often it leads us somewhere we don’t actually want to go.
What I talk about in this episode:
What overcorrecting means
How overcorrecting has shown up in my own life
How to recognise when you’re overcorrecting
Correcting the overcorrect
Episode 139 - In the Beginning - The Evolution of my Work Series Pt. 1
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Read the episode transcript:
Today I have a topic for you that has been coming up for me over and over again in conversations with friends, with people I work with, and in my own head. It’s been a bit of a theme of the last few months, and today I’m excited to go in deep about it with you. That topic is overcorrection.
A few weeks ago I was driving on the motorway on the outside lane, and a car in the middle veered toward the line next to the car ahead of me. In response, the car in front of me steered violently towards the central reservation, and then freaking out, steered back, causing it to wobble side to side on its wheels, and causing the crash alert system in my car to start beeping at me. Everything was fine in the end, but it served as a very visceral representation of the thoughts I’d been having about overcorrection.
That driver unnecessarily freaked themselves, and every one else, out with their overcorrection. It would have been enough to lightly tilt the steering wheel or accelerate forward a little, but instead they ended up rocking in the middle of the motorway. And that’s what we do in our decision-making too. We experience something as so painful, so frustrating, so unbearably uncomfortable, that we turn the wheel a full 180 in our efforts to get away from it. And sometimes that works. But often it is an overcorrection, we just don’t realise it.
The clearest example of this is clients I’ve worked with in the past who were unhappy at work and left to do something completely different. This has happened more than once. Stuck in the discomfort of a miserable job they dreamed of an online shop or a consultancy, of mornings walking to the post office or creative freedom, and they took the leap and left their job and started their thing. But the reality never quite sat comfortably either. They’d struggle with what it took to build the thing, it always felt like there was something lacking, they were always coming up with new ideas rather than committing to one. And eventually they’d realise the problem was that they were missing what they were doing before. That it wasn’t the work that they didn’t like, it was the context in which they were doing it. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to design anymore, it was that they didn’t want to design for that company. They’d overcorrected.
I’m not saying, of course, that everyone who leaves their job has overcorrected, because that wasn’t the case for me nor the majority of the people I know who have done so - I’m just saying, to illustrate the point, that often we can turn 180 degrees when really we probably only need a 40 degree shift. You can see this at different levels. In some ways I have overcorrected in recent years, after being burned out from daily Instagram posting and twice-weekly blog posts I got to a point of posting once every couple of months. You could argue that booking a three week trip to Lisbon was an overcorrect from existing in February. I am also pulling myself back from an overcorrect now, as my desire for freedom in my work meant that I went all the way over to kinda just not working at all.
Why do we overcorrect?
An overcorrect is a natural reaction to, just like the driver in that car, get away from danger or discomfort as quickly as possible. Even though we may spend a long time thinking and planning it, it is an emotional and impulsive action - what you are spending months planning is an impulsive decision made from feelings. Which is not to say that those things make an overcorrect bad, just that’s the reality of what we’re dealing with. Because it is emotional it feels high stakes and urgent, which exacerbates the situation and creates an even more acute angle of overcorrection because we are turning harder and harder away.
We also overcorrect because we’re addicted to immediacy. We want the change we long for to happen right now this second, we’re not willing to wait for anything and so we make the hardest turn on the steering wheel, take the most drastic action in order to make everything as different as possible as quickly as possible. The idea of taking tiny steps out of a situation feels uncomfortable and unbearable and boring and also terribly risky.
How do we know we’ve overcorrected?
Often the realisation that we’re following an overcorrected course comes long long after we veered into a new lane. This is for a few reasons. One is that we have applied logic to the emotional impulse which has convinced us that this is a very sensible and well-thought out idea. It might well be a good idea, but it is not usually a logical one. It is the same brain that made the overcorrection and the reasoned argument for it, so there is some confirmation bias there - the call is coming from inside the house, as it were. You are coming up with reasons to justify something you already believe is the right course of action, so how logical can those reasons really be?
We also come late to the realisation because we are having a lot of fun in this new lane. It is all new and exciting and we’re doing all the right things and stuff is happening so we are getting yet more confirmation bias that this is the right path for us. Novelty can really trick us into believing something is IT, when really we’re just on a wave of newness. And of course, we commit wholeheartedly to this new direction - we burn bridges, we move 200 miles away, we make announcements online - and that makes us want to keep on sticking with it.
The “how do I know if…” questions are the hardest of all, because the only way to know is to identify a feeling that is very similar to a feeling that means something else. It’s like having a barrel of identical snakes and trying to pick out the one named Bill. For example, the feeling of “this is an overcorrect” is going to be very similar to the feeling of “this is the wrong thing” or “I’m not cut out for this”. It is a feeling of your clothes not quite fitting, being too big in some places but too small in others. A wondering “why isn’t this working??”. Feeling unsettled becoming a watercolour wash over your days. There might be some feelings of longing or nostalgia for the things you did before.
Let me try to use my own overcorrect as an example. Following my 2019 burnout where I did nothing but work (check out episode 139 for the full story on that), I overcorrected into freedom being the guiding light of my business and work. Over three years I was doing less and less, helped by a traumatic break up in a pandemic, until eventually I got to a point where I really had so much freedom but also I wasn’t really making any money and was filling my time mostly with overthinking about stuff. The overcorrect happened when I decided that in order to be happy and to feel free I had to be doing as little work as possible, and only work that brought me pure joy at that.
I veered off into that lane at the end of 2019 and got confirmation bias from how good it felt to not have a full calendar and from the government grants topping up my income. By the time I moved to my new house at the end of 2021, I had got to a point where I didn’t actually know what to do anymore. But still, I didn’t recognise this as an overcorrect, I simply thought I hadn’t hit on the right thing yet, that it was outside circumstances and not the lane I was in causing my malaise.
It was a month or so ago now that I thought, hmm maybe this lane isn’t working anymore. It did for a time, but it’s as if my overcorrected steering wheel has taken me across that lane into a whole other one now. I began to feel worried about money and about my work, the same kind of trapped feeling that I’d been trying to avoid all along. I felt like I was continually pushing against doors that wouldn’t open and getting quietly more and more panicky with each one. I began to crave the competency that comes with productivity, to miss what it felt like to try hard and make something and release it. I began to look back at the version of me who had doubled her old salary with awe and disbelief, and wonder how I could get some of that energy back.
Sometimes I wondered whether I was still cut out for this, whether I should go back and look for a job, although those thoughts usually lasted about three minutes before I knew that wasn’t my true self talking - an indicator that the overcorrect didn’t go that far back. Eventually I think I realised where the overcorrect happened because I realised that the stories and beliefs I had about work - that I didn’t want to make effort, that I could work or be free, that I should be creating for free - stemmed from the conditions of the overcorrect.
How do we get our wheels back on the ground?
Needless to say, let’s try to not overcorrect our way out of an overcorrect! Like that car on the motorway, let’s not yank the steering wheel back as then we’re at great risk of spinning out completely. Let’s also not look at our overcorrect as a failure or something we did wrong - I want to be crystal clear that overcorrecting out of a bad situation is better than staying in it. What the overcorrect has done is give us information - we can figure out precisely what we didn’t like in the old situation, what isn’t working for us in the new one, and from there figure out where we need to gently turn back to.
For example, and I’m changing the specifics here to protect identities, a former client of mine was so miserable and stuck shooting weddings that she overcorrected into building websites. She really wanted to like building websites, but she couldn’t get excited about promoting that business, didn’t like clicking a mouse all day, missed the photography but was scared to burn herself with it again. So she eased the steering wheel back a little and started teaching photography - she was back doing the thing she liked, but at a safe distance.
With my overcorrect, the easiest thing for me to do right now would be go back and do client work again - but that too would be an overcorrect. I know that a calendar full of calls is not right for me, but I also know a to do list with no real urgency isn’t right for me either. So I am going back just a few degrees into course creation and running a programme. I’ve been experimenting a little with what kind of 121 support I can offer that works for me, and have found that text messaging office hours is not only good for me, it is also actually better for clients than a call too. Rather than giving up on a tricky piece of content and going out in the name of freedom, I’m sticking at it a little longer, sitting through my mental tantrum and enjoying the feeling of completion afterwards far more than I liked the giving up.
It’s all an experiment, and as ever, the only way to know is to do. It won’t be immediate, but just remember that you are trying to negotiate the vehicle of your life back into a lane you might not be able to quite make out - you are going to have to keep lightly adjusting for a while.