Thursday, March 11, 2010

Ten Year Self Improvement Challenge

So, I started this blog as a place to keep track of my participation in Mark Watson's Ten Year Self-Improvement Challenge henceforth known as TYSIC (details here: http://www.markwatsonthecomedian.com/web/2010/02/26/ten-year-self-improvement-challenge/). I will be doing occasional (whenever I'm procrasting) updates on TYSIC and possibly also other blogs, but those'll be even less frequent.

My fear of failure - So this is the big one. Whenever I feel like I might fail at something, I avoid it like the plague. It's partly cos I'm lazy, but mostly cos I'm scared. I went to this university because it was near enough my parent's house to go home on the weekends. I picked 'Life Sciences' as a major because I was good at it, not cos I was passionate about it. I started doing a Master's degree in a lab that I didn't really like because I was too scared to change and too scared to apply for jobs at the end of my 4th year uni. It took me 6 months of hating that degree and my old boss before I quit because I was too scared of moving on. I've been single for 4 years cos I'm too scared of relationships. Casual sex is easy, relationships are hard. I got burned by my last and only long-term relationship and I've stayed away from them since.
My goal of the next 10 years is to face my fear of failure, to apply for jobs that I might not get, to make decisions about what I want to do with my life, to move to the UK (at least for a while) and to have relationships, no matter how much they scare me. I'm sure I'll fail along the way, but I need to learn to deal with that.

My first week: So I've wanted to dye my hair fire-engine red for about 5 years. I've always been scared and made excuses not to. But I figured it'd be a good way to start my TYSIC cos if I ever want to go red, I should do it while I'm young. On Saturday I purchased 'red' dye from the store and dyed it. That <-- was the result. Clearly not red. More pink and some bits still brown. So I failed at my first attempt to face my fear of failure. Not sure what I learned there. Any comments of optimistic lessons would be appreciated.
I went back to the store and bought PERMANENT red dye. My best friend is coming over tonight and we're going to dye it. I will post a picture or two of the result.

When I start making progress on any goal that's more significant, I'll post it here as well. Any comments and feedback are always appreciated. Thanks for reading!
x Sarah

4 comments:

  1. i'm reading :)

    as for optimism--you're still gonna dye your hair, right? you're not even near to failure, if you're still doing the thing. there's a big distance between getting things right first time, and failing at them.
    if you'd seen the pinkness, washed the dye out and decided never to try it again-- that would be failure, from fear of failure.

    just my thoughts.

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  2. Hello Ben! Yeah, I'm dying it red tonight. So not failed yet.

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  3. Even if it doesn't work (I do hope it does though) you have not failed as you will have tried and had the courage to experiment with both semi permanent and permanent dye, so well done you! Following and reading always,

    Melissa.

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  4. this sounds cool,

    i did a 30day improvement thing to help with confidence and failure ... i was loadsa fun.

    also i recommend reading Yes Man by Danny Wallace that gave me an optimism that helped me. :)

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