There’s Always Some Good in the Ugly Landings
When I was learning triple jumps as a young skater, I’d get really frustrated when one wasn’t landed to my satisfaction.
I didn’t like a landing that was scratchy, a jump that was overly tilted or a landing with a lack of speed; I didn’t like a jump I had to “save.” If I knew I could do the jump better, a less-than-stellar landing didn’t satisfy me.
My coach at the time had a different perspective.
Whenever I’d skate back to him after an “ugly” landing, he would appear somewhat pleased. With a slight smile on his face, he’d tell me—over and over again—if I could land the ugly ones, I was making progress. At the time, I didn’t understand what he meant.
Landing a jump when everything is working—the takeoff, the timing, your air position, your speed—is ideal. But to him, those “easier” landings weren’t always as impressive as finding my landing foot and saving a jump when things weren’t working.
While ugly landings aren’t the goal, he was teaching me to reframe my perspective of these attempts. In turn, he was helping me reduce frustration, manage perfectionism and stay motivated as I worked towards more ideal outcomes.
If you’re a high achiever, it can feel really frustrating when you’ve been making progress towards therapy goals and then have a week or two—or many—where it feels like you’re stumbling. It can be easy to focus on the perceived lack of progress when former maladaptive coping skills re-emerge. It can be easy to beat yourself up when symptoms of anxiety result in a return to avoidant behaviors or when depression symptoms come back into play, leaving self-care and motivation on the sideline.
When we have these tougher weeks, it can be easy to get stuck only viewing ourselves through the lens of the negative and discounting the positive.
But even when a week feels incredibly tough, and progress doesn’t seem like it’s being made, we need to look for what’s working.
Why?
Just like focusing only on the ugly landings, when we discount the positive, we’re left in a negative feedback loop. In this loop, we like to home in on what’s wrong, where we believe we’re falling short. This often results in a shame spiral and a loss of motivation.
When we reframe our perspective to focus on the overall progress we’re making—just like my coach did—it doesn’t mean we are engaging in toxic positivity or avoiding improvements we want to make. Instead, we are giving ourselves a chance to see the bigger picture, assess what we’re doing well and increase motivation to problem solve and act towards change.
For example, if we are working on intuitive eating and have noticed an increase in emotional eating and restriction over the past week, we want to zoom out and see the week through a wide-lens view. Did we struggle at every meal? Or were there meals when we were able to pay attention to hunger and fullness cues and give our body the foods it was craving? Even if we can find one meal or snack when this took place, we want to focus on what worked during that experience. What did we do well? What helped us?
From there, we can look at another time when maybe we didn’t have as much success. Maybe we struggled to stop eating when our body was indicating fullness. Rather than label that experience as “bad,” we first want to explore what went well. Maybe being able to identify fullness is progress compared to when we started therapy. Or, maybe during that meal we were able to choose foods that sounded good rather than choices that we used to believe were “better” due to a lack of calories. This shows progress with changing restrictive and maladaptive beliefs about food.
After identifying some points of progress, we can problem solve what might have been driving us to emotionally eat in that moment. We can start to brainstorm how we could have met that emotional need in a way that did not involve self-soothing through food and help ourselves process those emotions today.
Similarly, maybe we are experiencing depression and of our goals is to increase self-care. Perhaps we struggled with taking care of ourselves daily over the past week. It can be helpful to ask, “Did this lack of daily self-care mean there were no moments of self-care throughout the week?” Often, even going to therapy to discuss what we’ve experiencing is an act of self-care. By exploring what has been working amid what hasn’t been working, we are being honest with ourselves. We are softening perfectionism, increasing self-compassion and allowing ourselves the opportunity to accept the messiness that is required for growth.
We are all works in progress. High achievers love all-or-nothing thinking. We love good/bad, the black and the white, and it’s hard to look for what’s working when part of us feels like we’ve failed. But progress and growth live in the gray. I have learned in my practice, when clients come in after tough weeks, there is always progress that has taken place—even if it doesn’t look that way on the surface. When we are honest with ourselves about the entire picture, we give ourselves an opportunity to see the weeks where there are ugly landings aren’t all bad. This allows us to uncover and magnify the good. And there’s always good to uncover.
The content on this blog is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for therapy. The content does not replace a therapeutic relationship with a licensed mental health professional.