Overcorrection. That’s the biggest obstacle to your personal development that you are not paying attention to.
Just wanted to give you the answer right away if you are in a hurry. If you want to hear an explanation through examples, keep reading.
Overcorrection is a major issue in today's society. However, this time I want to make the point that overcorrection is not just something we should be careful about on a societal level but also, perhaps more importantly, on an individual one.
As you go through life and meet different people who have made some significant changes in order to improve themselves, you start noticing one thing: The biggest danger for a person who is actively trying to improve is to go too far when trying to "fix" something about themselves.
For those who are not sure what kind of correction I'm talking about on a societal level, let alone an individual one, let me give you a quick example.
As stated by its early proponents, feminism was originally about gender equality. And I believe that no decent and mentally healthy human would argue against the original mission of feminism.
However, today, the so-called "new wave feminism" gets a bad reputation, even among a lot of women, precisely because of overcorrection.
From fighting for equal rights, it's come to the point where a man opening a door for a woman is regarded as toxic masculinity. How is that possible, you might ask? Apparently, it's because he is opening the door in order to express that it's in his power to decide whether a woman can enter the room or not.
And yes, this was an actual statement by an online feminist activist. I am not saying that this is how all feminists think. I believe they don't. But this is also not an outlier.
However, as I said, I am not here to talk about overcorrection in groups of people, but rather in individuals.
(If you think this example of overcorrection was not fair, I am open to having a civilized discussion about it. As someone who was raised by a woman, I am confident in how much respect I have for women.)
I want to give you two examples of overcorrection on an individual level, both from personal experience and recent.
About a month ago, I met a young man who had been dealing with low self-esteem in his teens and early twenties, but he managed to turn his life around and change the way he looks at himself.
You know how much I love stories of self-creation, so I was genuinely happy for him and curious to get to know him better.
(I also have to admit that I am kind of selfish, because meeting a person like this means I can learn from them and then write about it, hopefully for people dealing with the same issues to read and be encouraged.)
However, it didn’t take too long for me to notice the overcorrection. He went from having low self-esteem to being overconfident. If you don’t think there is such thing as being overconfident, I just thought that word was slightly less critical toward him. To be honest, he became arrogant and maybe even narcissistic.
The point of every single conversation was to show how great he was. You could say that all of that was still coming from a place of insecurity and low self-esteem. You could say it’s not an overcorrection, it’s just a mask. Well, if it’s not an internal overcorrection, it’s at least an overcorrection in his behavior.
If there was no overcorrection and he was able to express his newfound confidence and self-esteem while still maintaining humility, he would be one of the most interesting and even most impressive people I’ve met in a long time.
However, the constant "me, me, and only me" talk simply made him not fun to be around.
That’s the difference that overcorrection can make.
But who am I to talk? The second example is about my own overcorrection.
For most of my life, I had trouble making decisions on my own. Even those small daily choices, which had no effect on the course of my life, were often too much for me to handle on my own.
Whether it was deciding what type of cereal to buy or which movie to watch, it would take an embarrassing amount of time and energy to decide.
This naturally led to me being unable to make major life decisions confidently and on my own.
This aspect of my personality, as I’ve already explained in some of my writing, is a big part of where the "overthinker" name comes from.
I decided to change this about myself about three years ago.
With the help of different philosophical ideas, conscious effort, and simply "throwing myself into fire," I made a pretty significant change.
In the last 2.5 years, I’ve made more life-changing decisions than most people make in a lifetime. Every single one of those decisions directly affected the course of my life. Most of them altered the course of my life in a way that cannot be changed.
And I made every single one of those decisions on my own.
Some of them were not the best decisions, at least compared to what the alternatives were. And some of them ended up being the best decisions I made in my life.
But all of them are equal in my eyes. Because they were my decisions, and because after making them I didn't look back or overthink them. After making them, I was able to proceed confidently and course-correct as they played out in real life.
And although this change I was able to make in myself is something that I’m extremely proud of, I recently noticed that I took it too far.
I overcorrected.
Making life decisions entirely on my own and then proceeding to act on them without consulting anyone gave me a sort of a natural high.
It felt so good, after years of being an indecisive overthinker, to be able to move confidently through life.
It felt so good that I forgot that not every life decision can or should be made entirely on your own.
It felt so good that I forgot that I was blessed to have some well-intentioned and wise people in my life.
I became aware of my overcorrection through a habit I’ve kept all these years and will hopefully keep forever: having honest conversations with myself.
What is it that I’m doing wrong at the moment? Is there something in my current way of thinking or my behavior that is going against the person I want to be?
It was almost instantly that I was able to say to myself, "You are on your way to becoming a hard-headed prick who won’t take advice from anyone."
Because that’s essentially where my newfound decision-making confidence was leading to. It was leading to a person who would say, "I was able to make the biggest life decisions on my own, who are you to give me any advice?"
And I couldn’t allow myself to become that person. Or, should I say, I cannot allow myself to become that person.
Because this is something that I’m dealing with as I’m writing this.
As I’m writing this, I have created the intention to ask some people in my life for advice that I actually don’t want to ask them for.
I don't want to ask, not because I doubt the quality of their advice, but because I am scared of letting go of that feeling of making all decisions on my own.
But I’m aware that this fear is just overcorrection trying to trick me. That’s why I know what I'm supposed to do.
And, of course, this is my challenge to you:
There are plenty of examples of overcorrection in our society, but I challenge you to look for overcorrection in yourself.
If there is something that you overcame - a way of thinking or a behavior pattern that you managed to fix - did you go too far into the opposite extreme?
If you ask yourself honestly, you will receive an honest answer.
And maybe there really is no overcorrection in you at the moment. I’m happy if that’s the case. But it is still useful to be mindful of it so that you may notice it if it starts creeping up.
And, if you notice an overcorrection, you know what to do.
Restore that balance. And don’t be afraid that you will end up in that place you were before. That’s just overcorrection trying to trick you.
Thank you for reading.
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Thank you for writing this piece. I admire your ability to write about yourself so frankly and honestly. That is something I’d like to develop in myself as well.
this is like the hegelian dialectic. extreme1 -> extreme2 -> synthesis