I had a professor once who said that one of the best stages of learning to be in is that of ‘unconscious competence’, the place in which you don’t realize that you’re actually doing a good job. His argument was, because you don’t realize you’re doing a good job, it’s pretty hard to screw up your winning streak or sabotage it the minute your neuroses kick in and/or you start overthinking everything. Point taken.
He went on to say that admittedly ‘conscious competence’ – knowing that you know what you’re doing and applying that intentionally in all of life’s situations – sounds great on paper but that hardly anyone is really emotionally healthy enough to handle that. We often do better when we don’t analyze too much. Again, point taken.
Somewhere about the middle of the day today – probably fueled by the fact that Dr. Feelgood really came through for us yesterday as evidenced by a much more well J-Man today – I found myself thinking, “You know, I’m really not sucking at this parenting thing anymore.” Believe it or not, this is a profoundly positive statement within the interior confines of my brain.
Seriously, I feel like I’m totally in the zone parenting-wise lately, and I don’t have the foggiest idea why. I start feeling somewhat depressed in general about November and don’t get out of that low-grade funk until about March, and that’s somewhat debatable I guess. I just really have no clue about this. Not fighting it, mind you, but if I can reproduce it in the future when things go down the toilet again, that would be awesome.
Perhaps the best solution is to go back to being unconsciously competent again. Thinking too hard about things often gets me into trouble.
I probably just jinxed the whole day tomorrow, too.
