Episode 4 - Unpacking Mike's baggage

Hello and welcome to the fourth episode of The Imperfect Clinician. It's Yuen here.
In the last episode, we looked at my baggage. We unpacked it a little to try to understand where it brought me.
In this episode, you will hear how difficult and awkward it feels for Mike to dive into his past.
We know most of us struggle to reflect on our own past. This is the reason why we should do it.
Freedom starts when you overcome fear. Let Mike take you through some events that brought him here today.
It may not be an easy lesson, but might help to bring courage to those who struggle to bring back the past.
Let us know if facing your demons is a good idea, or if we got it completely wrong and should forget our past.
I've told my story. What's yours Mike? Tell us about how are you as a child.
Let's start with the child in school growing up. What were you like?
The beginnings are always the hardest because I've not been put in a position to...
I'm not very good with starting the stories because I don't know what's interesting. I don't know what's relevant.
I don't feel like... And there is a lot of things that I simply can't remember that might be important in me now, in that sense.
When I was born, then I was a child, and then I was a teenager. And I consider myself to be pretty average at school.
I wasn't particularly... I mean, in the primary school.
So talk me through before we get there. How were you as a child? How were you as you remembered?
How were you when you were told by family, friends? How were you like as a child?
I was a rather happy little boy.
Keep going. That's okay. Keep going.
As a boy, I was quite happy, quite open, and friendly.
I mean, we always had a lot of people coming round to our house, and we've been coming round to many family, friends, and people from the neighborhood.
So we've always had contact with other kids, and I was never confined to the bedroom where I had to study or do the important from the parent's perspective.
This is a contraposition to probably you were as a child.
I was managing well at school. As my mom always used to say, I was clever but lazy.
And she said that I was capable of doing a lot more, but for me that wasn't the only priority.
And I wanted to develop myself with my own head and slightly off the beaten track, I guess, in terms of the music I was listening to, the books I was reading.
I don't think I fully read any book in high school, that's later on a bit, that I had to read for school.
I had a massive library of things that were completely unrelated to the studying, to the school textbooks or whatever, but I was reading other things.
I was listening to different music. I was in a bit of a...
Rebellious is a big word for somebody who is not escaping homes or making big dramas.
In your way of rebellious then rather than what we see, a different range of rebellious I guess, but in your way you want to choose.
It seems that you want to choose to do things your own way, so choose the areas that you want to do.
Yeah, and I consider myself as quite reasonable. I wasn't going all in into things that I shouldn't be going in.
I had quite, I want to say quite clearly defined music taste and the ideology, because when you grow up you go through pretty much everything that is out there.
And you're trying to find to, that's the thing, not to fit in, but to try to find something that you are part of, that you belong to.
And I wanted to be quite honest with myself. And that's why the search wasn't through the mainstream, whatever everybody else was doing, listening to, wearing or the time that people spent.
When I was much younger, yeah of course I was playing football, but I was never a football fan. I've been to a football match, and you have to remember that football is a very big thing in Poland where I come from, and we're really rubbish at it in general.
So you commit the whole nation to a sport that we are relatively average. And yeah, I've been to football match twice, once to observe Polish league, which was rather shocking.
And once with a bunch of my friends, we went to see Euro semi-finals when it was going on in Poland. So that's my experience. I don't quite remember a lot from the second event.
It might have been due to the fact that the company was more important than the actual event. But yeah, at school I was rather, the primary school was, I don't have a lot of memories from primary school other than the people that I was surrounded by, my classmates and people around there.
So I remember people more than the school itself. I was always considered to be quite clever and bright and intelligent. And it's not hard to be that in primary school in general. I don't think that was quite easy.
And although I wasn't absolutely top of the class, I was a good, strong performer in academical terms. In high school that slightly changed because my high school was full of people who were really the elite of brains.
They came from very academic families, from backgrounds that were really inspiring. And I thoroughly admired a lot of people in high school, but I was rather average, if not below.
But that's never been a problem. As I say, the school and the grades, despite what parents would prefer to see, that's never been my top priority.
How was your parents' approach to grades for you?
I think it depends on the time of my educational career. So in the primary school, that was rather, my mom thought that it was more motivational.
If my grades weren't that great, she would have a conversation with me, which was rather to shake me up, to bring me to speed and to make sure that I try a little bit harder.
Tell me more when you say shake you up. What did you mean by that?
Well, as I say, I don't think there was particularly a lot of occasions like this in the primary school.
But in high school, there was a situation where I didn't have very good grades from a few, probably, subjects.
And I remember, you see, when you're coming from a primary school, where your grades are really good, to a very good high school,
that grades are all of a sudden, they just go through the floor and all of a sudden you realize that what you knew before and what grades you were used to,
it's a hard clash with reality. And all of a sudden, you start to bring those very low grades. Then parents get a bit concerned.
My mom was shielding me from my dad because my dad's rather rapid and relentless approach to, and very explosive approach,
wasn't the most inducing when it comes to pursuing academic career. But my mom was rather shielding, but she did have a usually stern word with me.
So look, here's where you are, and it's not really looking good. So I think you need to buckle down and try a little bit harder.
And I think the better example of it was in my uni, when during the first year, I started to, well, I carried on realizing that academic life is not the only thing I want to do in life.
And social life, maybe it wasn't that much of a priority, but it was on par with academic challenges and exams and everything else.
And there were other things that were rather more important. So my second year, I got a little bit probably scared in the first year.
I said, right, if I carry on like this, it's not going to end up well. So in my second year, I was really putting my head into it.
And I buckled down. I started to study really hard. And that was really smooth. All the exams were passed with relatively good grades.
And I was never at the top of the class again, but there was nothing to be ashamed of.
So what changed then from the first year to the second year? Was it your own understanding has changed or was it what your parents have said that's changed you?
That was my own realization. I think I realized that second year is going to be harder. And if I carry on like this, that's not going to end up well.
And I didn't really have a lot of alternative. That's what I wanted to do. I decided quite early that I wanted to study pharmacy.
And being there, realizing and or passing few exams, not in the first attempt, really opened my eyes to say, well, actually, if I carry on a bit, I might just cross the line where there's no coming back.
So I then decided to buckle down and I probably went to every single lectures and probably most likely I've been to every single lecture.
And I was a very careful student then. Third year was a little bit less successful in a way, because you realize that right, second year, two years, I mean.
So, yeah, I know that there's three more years to go before I graduate. But then so I decided to just release the throttle a little bit.
And again, the social life took quite a considerable chunk of the time that I was spending in uni.
Yeah, fourth year was much, much easier. And the fifth year was very difficult because of my diagnosis at the time. And that had quite a big impact on me.
Tell us more about the diagnosis.
I was trying to think which year it was. In the year four, I was misdiagnosed at a time, of course, I didn't know. I was told that I have cancer, something to do with the blood.
I had basically a little tumour for the lack of a better word. It appeared to have been like a tumour on the side of my leg, probably after accident.
Could have been, I don't know, when I was playing some games or whatever, contact sports or whatever, football, basketball, whatever.
And then it became like a bruise and the bruise turned into a little bulb on the side of the leg.
Well, there was and there was a growth.
Yeah, growth on the side of the leg that did look obviously worrying. And then when the doctor started looking into that, they operated on it once, removed and cleaned.
But they couldn't really decide whether it was all cleared and all removed within the area of healthy tissues.
So then they operated second time and a few weeks later. So I said, were you trying to make me into a lab rat?
Were you going to cut me every couple of weeks to try your theories?
And the histopathological examination revealed that there was some dermatofibrosarcoma.
And that prompted me to, I couldn't quite understand.
For people who didn't understand those terms, can you just explain briefly what that means?
Well, there are basically cancerous cells that are growing and potentially can lead to further spreading of the disease.
And I decided to run away from that hospital in a way, because I didn't want them to cut me every couple of weeks.
The professor that operated on me, after quite a lot of drama trying to find the right professor, because in Poland at the time it was who you know rather than where you go in, important.
And I was operated and I think he was quite arrogant as well.
I was in the fourth year of pharmacy and I knew a little bit about, let's say, medical problems.
I mean, if you're in a medical university, you have to know what you're talking about.
So this professor says, oh no, this is bacterial. We're going to just cut it out and clear it.
I said, this is blood. These are scabs inside.
I said, no, no, no, this is bacteria. And he cut it.
And he said, do you know what? It wasn't bacterial. It was, you know, the blood clots and it was all scabbed in.
I said, yeah, I know. I told you, but you weren't listening at all.
And then I, after they did the histopathological examination, they said that there are cancerous cells.
I decided to run away from that hospital with the help of my then girlfriend's mom.
She arranged a meeting with some specialists that were specializing in cancer and surrounding conditions.
And I sat in front of them. There was probably about six or seven of them just scratching their heads, looking at the examination and everything else.
I said, oh yeah. So you have to, you know, cut it out within the area of the muscle.
We might be able to stretch the skin. If not, we're going to transplant it from your butt.
So there was no talk about MRI scan. There was no talk about any anti-cancer antibodies testing or anything like that.
No further investigation.
Just jump into, you know, operation. Yeah, let's do it quick and everybody.
I said, if you cut out good part of my muscle, I'll end up on a wheelchair.
So I run away from there. And with the help of then director of a sports club, I got to the clinic where that was again through credit to my then girlfriend.
Went to Germany, to Freiburg, to the clinic, sport clinic, which looks after really important sports people, tennis players, footballers, and everybody else who need to be looked after by the best.
And I took all the examinations in the briefcase. I waited for my dad. He was coming back from holiday.
And then we went to Germany. And after a few days of examination, again, MRI scans or whatever, doing the proper diagnostics.
They just said, well, these are scabs and they are healing. And there was nothing there to worry about.
And being put in a position that you are diagnosed with cancer and then to say that it was misdiagnosis after deliberation between many professors, doctors from from from uni in Germany, there in Freiburg and from the clinic.
They just said, no, just do some blood tests now and again to see if everything is stable. And that's it. That was a big relief.
Because when I found out later, when my dad was talking to doctor who was his friend, he said, if this is the diagnosis, that it might be three months.
So when you realize when you're 20, I can't remember, 23, 22, and that you have three months, that changes the perspective in your life rather drastically.
And I realized that this is, I'm now in credit and this life may not have carried on.
And so I stopped worrying then about many things, you know, because all of a sudden your perspective changes.
This was many years ago, this was 20 years ago. And to be fair, I couldn't even identify the feeling of relief because it was very surreal.
I mean, it all happened rather quickly. And now to show off, I have a scar on my left calf and not had problems ever since.
So it is important how clinicians decide about patients and it's important on how they communicate their findings.
I simply didn't believe because I thought that not everything just felt right. I wasn't a very experienced clinician then at this point at all.
I was just a student in the fourth year. I knew a bit, but not enough to be, you know, that advanced on that level.
And I just didn't believe it, just carried on doing things. There was no really time to consider what would have happened.
I just did my thing. I said, no, that doesn't sound right. I need to go away because I'm not getting right advice.
I need a second opinion from somebody who might put a different perspective on it. And yeah, and that's what happened.
How do you think this... Thank you for sharing that. It was a harrowing experience just by listening to the details of it.
It just kept me holding on to the edge of the sea. And I wonder how did this experience change your perception or change the way you deal with life, afterwards and now especially?
First I'll tell you how I think this was the moment when I probably realized that I am 100% sure that what I chose as my life as a clinician was the right thing to do.
Because I know firsthand how this communication and how care in general should not be delivered.
And I had to do something with it to make a difference.
And I mean, as I say, I chose my uni in my course. I wanted to be a pharmacist since I was probably about 14, 15, quite early in the day, even before I had influence from my parents.
Because a lot of, in Poland, there was still a big contributing factor is the parents. And studying is in general a very big thing.
It is considered that you need to perform academically to be able to secure a decent job, decent life. And this was always a big priority for all the families, I want to say.
How did it change me in life? I, as I say, I stopped worrying about things that were not important. I mean, if you have the ultimate fear in your life, then everything you do, it's a bonus.
So I think, what was the movie about? A spy who was caught by other forces. What was it? Some title.
I think it was Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, the movie, where when the agent of the foreign forces was caught, he didn't appear to be worried at all.
And they asked him, why are you not scared? Why are you not worried? And he answered, would it help if I was worried, if I was scared?
So then I realized that there's no point really to be scared. You have to just do your thing the best you can, make the most of every day, and just enjoy and go forward.
And so when you, there's no point feeling scared, does it? Because you can't, I don't feel that you can completely remove your ability to feel scared, because that's an emotional reactivity that people have.
That's what keeps us alive.
Yes, it's a defense mechanism. So then when you have those fear arises, what's your usual way of dealing with it?
I, of course I do get scared. I am scared. You know, if you have family, you're always scared. If you have people you love around you, you are scared. You are worried.
One of my very deep fears is, for example, I can't imagine what it's like to lose eyesight. It's a huge fear that I have probably always had.
And I think that it's, once you deal with the ultimate fear, it can lead to numbing yourself in a way, because you dealt with a very big stress.
And you dealt with the situation that could have ended completely, you know, unfavorable, shall we say, to yourself.
I could have died, be disabled, whatever. It was a very big health scare, if anything.
And then you deal with being scared by, for example, numbing.
Numbing is one thing that puts away of your mind things that you need to decide about, that you need to look into.
And I always used to say that, oh, if there's a problem, all I need to do is just sleep here.
Yes, that's really frustrating. But going back to what you said, so it feels like because you've dealt with the biggest fear of losing your life,
and how scary it was, and how vulnerable you felt, your brain sort of perceives it as, I don't want to feel that way ever again.
So if you have any fear coming up, your initial reaction is to not go there.
Yeah, it is. If you are scared, and you're still going into a difficult situation, it feels not natural for me to want to be in that situation.
This is probably for people who are brave and who like to be beaten up in that situation. I am not a hero.
You always say to me, when we talk about emotions, you said, what's the point? What's the point of identifying it?
And when we talk about, when we identify the fear, you have to understand the fear to identify the armour that you've got around it,
because the armour is your reactivity, or how you react to a certain situation.
So when you talk about numbing, that's one of your areas of improvement for the inventory, is that right?
Yes, that's correct.
What is your usual way of numbing then?
When I was younger, I believed that the ultimate numbing for a lot of people, and a lot of people until now, even probably older than me I suppose,
gaming is a good runaway, because you just immerse yourself in a completely different situation,
and you come back older, a few hours older, and you think that you're wiser,
you think that all of a sudden you're going to find a solution to a problem,
that you're going to try to…
The thing is, with my sleeping and just brushing it, sleeping is a way of coping with stress,
and say, right, I'm going to look at it tomorrow.
I hope that I'm going to dissect it into smaller bits and deal with them one by one.
But what actually happens is you just brush it, and you don't quite have the opportunity to react, to deal with it.
To sit with it.
To sit with it, yeah.
So then what do you find happens when you sleep it off? Does it feel like a way of avoiding it?
It feels like, no, there are things that are inevitable, there are certain problems that you can't run away from,
but at a time you're not prepared to find the answer for it,
and you're hoping that with time you might be able to think it through a bit better,
or that the problem's going to go away, which from experience it sometimes does, but most often it doesn't.
But there's this element of hope in it that things are going to work out.
So what happens when the problem doesn't go away, but are you still afraid to sit with it?
Well, you ultimately have to make an attempt to break it down into pieces.
So before you attempt to break it down to pieces, so let's say you had to study recently, haven't you?
Oh yes, recently I had to study, yes.
And it's out of your comfort zone?
Yes, I've not done it for a while.
There is a lot of it there, with anything that is out of practice, it's quite scary going back in again.
So talk us through how you find the avoidance and numbing, how has it helped and not helped in this particular challenge?
Well, I was meant to write a paper, and in this reflective essay I had to, well, write a reflective essay.
It wasn't particularly complex or complicated, I had to pick something, a case study that you were going to discuss.
But I couldn't start it for a few reasons.
One of the reasons was that I've never done critical writing in English before.
And the rules of regulations of this type of writing were, well, they weren't completely new because I had to write papers in the past, back in Poland.
But I didn't feel comfortable doing it in English, that was one thing.
Second thing was I just couldn't find the case that was good enough, that could allow me to dissect it, to write about details of it.
So I could be frozen for a whole evening trying to write a sentence and I couldn't put it together.
The hardest was to start it. I just simply was blocked out and I didn't know how to put the sentence together.
And I'm normally quite easy to generate ideas, and I consider myself as a relatively creative person, but at that time it was just impossible for me.
And I needed help to do it, and it took me a while to get this help. It was a process.
And how did the numbing come into place?
So you said, you know, sometimes you'll spend the whole evening not able to write anything.
And would you then go to go to sleep?
And you try to look for ideas, and your phone or your computer, where you're sitting in front of the word processor or somewhere you're trying to make notes or trying to write it,
and you jump into your browser and you just start going through internet, okay?
I wouldn't say that I've reached the end of internet when I was writing this paper, but it certainly, as a numbing, as a coping mechanism, was quite...
Well, it wasn't effective, but it was...
An easy way out?
An easy way out. I was hoping that all of a sudden the idea is going to bang, spring to mind, and it's going just to happen.
Yeah, but with your help, I finally got off the starting line, and then it was much easier.
It was just this impulse to push yourself to start dealing with it.
And I think that now and again we find difficult situations, even in our professional life, in personal lives, that can just stumble us, and we cannot start to find solutions.
I don't want to make mistakes, because that would put me off even more. So that was holding me back from starting in the first place.
What does make mistakes mean to you when you say make mistakes? I think my perception and your perception, perhaps the listener's perception, might be different.
I think everybody has a different view on how they see making mistakes. For me, making mistakes is wasting time.
And sometimes it is a paralyzing thing, because you try to write. If I'm going to, say, go back to this paper, write something, and I'm going to write it wrong, this would have been a waste of time.
So I have to go back all over again, and this is a knockback. So, of course, in my case, the knockback was not being able to start it.
But you look at it from a different perspective, from a perspective of a person, and say, right, I don't want to be knocked back by doing something wrong.
And this goes to, in terms of writing a paper, being judged. Because someone's going to send me feedback saying, this is not good.
You completely miss the point, and it is completely, you know, you have to rewrite everything in it.
All in all, the paper went fine, and I passed it, and that wasn't even very hard later on. But the initial setback lasted quite a lot of time.
So it feels like the fear of being judged, the fear of making mistakes, or the fear of taking risk by writing, you avoid it by not making any progress.
Because you don't want to be judged, you don't want to make mistakes. But when you take a step back and not do anything because it's so fear-driven, you are not making any progress at all.
Yes, yes. On the other hand, it stands in the contraposition to how I am in my professional life.
Yes, I am risk-averse, but I am not scared of my decisions.
There is one policy and one policy only, no sleepless nights. And when I, during my practice, whatever position I'm working as, and whatever challenges are in front of me,
I always want to make sure that it is as safe and as best advice and well-researched advice as possible.
So I'm not quite sure where it stands in the personal life when you have to, saying that, you know, oh, it's no good to be judged, but we always judge.
Yes, I agree. I think both ways, judging other people, it's very, very hard to stop.
And the fear of being judged is impossible to extinguish completely.
I want to go back to what you said about in the professional life and in the personal life that's different.
Do you think that's coming from practice? Do you think it's because it's something new?
Just like you said at the start, this is not something that you're used to. So that fear might be…
It might be fear of the new. The other point that was raised by the inventory that we did was anxiety.
Yes, anxiety as a lifestyle.
And I think it comes from this defending mode that I like to be in.
So I think it comes further down from the past in my family life.
My dad was always in the attacking mode. He was always going further, faster, harder, and it didn't always pay out.
But it taught me that I think I am more comfortable with defending what is around me and mastering that.
There are people who approach challenges by jumping from one to another.
And people who just go for it are in for it for a kill, and they're going up until they get what they want.
When I start something and it's not coming easily enough, I probably think, well, I don't think this is for me.
Unless I really care about it, I wouldn't pursue it. If I'm trying to, say, find a car, find a house or whatever,
if there's a problem you can't see, something is not glowing, right?
You have this feeling that this is not for me, and I have to carry on looking for something else.
And you can call it good feeling. I'm not the best fan of good feelings.
But the truth is that we always decide with feelings. I mean, our head can tell us whatever we like,
and it is completely irrelevant, because ultimately we will always decide with our feelings.
We know that going to the gym six times a week is good for you, but we choose not to.
So the head is telling us we will be better off not drinking glass of wine, because later I'll be able to drive or whatever.
But we choose to drink that wine, but we choose to stay at home rather than go to the gym, because it's not the head that's deciding.
The head's decided that it's good for us. The head's decided that we should do reasonable things,
but then feelings ultimately overrun everything.
How is anxiety as a lifestyle, is it more prominent in the personal life or in the professional life for you?
I think it's in both. I mean, as clinicians we often seem to be quite…
We like to be risk averse, primum non nocere, so first do not cause harm.
And this, whenever we are providing advice, whenever we are recommending a course of treatment,
we want to venture on the side of caution, always.
You can't put patients through uncertainty, so you choose to discuss the risks first.
I mean, to quantify it, I want to say that if you were to tell patients that this might be something serious,
you would probably first discuss the possibility of everything that is mild as while you make this build-up.
But as a clinician, you have to first exclude the most difficult diagnosis and the most urgent.
So you're reassessing your head from red flags downwards?
From red flags downwards, but when you're communicating to the patient, you have to do it the other way around.
So it's not to alarm the patient?
So not to alarm the patient, but you're still venturing on the side of caution.
You're still in this defensive mode that you want to prevent the risk. You don't want things to get worse.
It's even this anxiety as a lifestyle. I always check if all the doors are locked in the house.
When you say always, is it like once or several times?
No, no, just have a good look or try to think about the memory that I locked the house.
No, I wouldn't go 16 times to go and check the locks.
I wouldn't go many times to check whether the car is locked or anything like that.
No, I wouldn't go as far as that.
But for the peace of mind, this is what I often do.
But not always. The one example that I quite like is whenever I have to do something more, the requiring peace of mind,
say we're doing our podcast, we're recording this and we decided that tonight is the night.
I like to make sure that there is nothing else sitting at the back of my mind that I have to do to have a clear mind.
So the anxiety in this respect is to make sure that everything is sorted before I deal with the important issue,
important conversation, important or things that you even want to do for fun,
because this fun would be spoiled by something that I still have to do something that I planned or that I need to do.
It has to be done things, yeah. And so the opposite to anxiety as a lifestyle is calm and stillness.
How do you feel in those two areas?
I'm getting calmer. I want to say that I'm getting calmer.
I'm getting calmer through the fact that I started to realise when this anxiety kicks in.
Okay, so you're having more mindfulness about the situation.
I'm mindful about it and I also try to prevent it.
So trying to get all the jobs done before, try to plan myself a bit better, to be in a better frame of mind,
even to enjoy myself, to watch a movie or whatever.
I like to do it when I can have my focus on it.
What's your version of stillness?
Bottom.
Hard with young kids.
Yes, I don't do still very well.
And I think that, whereas staring at the ceiling, I don't consider as stillness,
because occasionally you need a moment where you're going to just to reset.
You do your meditation.
I occasionally have a chance to stare at the sky.
I don't class as being still, because this is the creative part where you try to think of a new thing.
Try to think of something to do, something for kids to do.
It is the creation term.
It is something that allows you to venture outside of the daily routine.
I think it's important to have time like this.
And I don't really like to waste it on things that are secondary.
There are primary creative things where you think of a completely new thing to do,
that you sit down with the guitar to try to make a tune,
or try to write something new, try to paint something.
That's for me primary creation.
Secondary way of spending time is that creation that comes with, for example,
watching a program that's not really going to benefit you.
It's just going to waste you, or you might think, waste your time.
Is it more watching to noumia?
Watching to noumia, but you can still learn with everything you do and whatever you do.
And sometimes it is necessary, but this is different to play.
It's something that doesn't really yield any personal achievements,
because it's usually based on something that somebody else has done.
Would you say you don't feel as great after doing the secondary side of things compared to the primary?
The outcome in terms of your feelings, how do you feel after?
So after you've played on the guitar, and after you've created some tunes,
you feel, let's say, relaxed?
Is that the feeling part that's different?
The feeling part is different.
You achieved something yourself that you can be proud of.
I'm always very wary about being proud of something that somebody else has done.
I never say to my child that I'm proud of her doing something.
She should be proud. She's done it.
And I'm grateful, I'm happy, I am amazed, amused, and entertained, but I'm not really proud.
I don't get the proud feeling from somebody else's doing.
I like moments of creation because they allow your mind to be provoked in a new way,
because it's something profound and new that just happened,
which probably may confuse everybody listening when I'm talking about the defensive mode.
I like to be defensive about many things in my life, personal, professional.
We are complex creatures, whereas we can be defensive in one area of life, or in two or three,
but then it's got to have an outburst somewhere in the creative and progressive manner, in a progressive way.
Would you say, I would agree, I think we're quite paradoxical creatures,
and would you say you're more inclined to pursue the creative endeavours
because you feel safe by defending your area?
Yes. So when I'm relatively, you can never be sure of things.
I mean, anything can happen any day.
When you are sort of contained with family, with life, with work,
then you learn to become a master of your routine,
and when you master of your routine, you are more likely to find time for the things
that will make you more creative, better.
You will just organise yourself better.
So you say, right, I've got this base,
and I'm not going to completely abandon it to do something completely crazy new.
That's not me. Some people can do it, others won't.
But I think that by creating this capacity, I am able to do something for myself in a way.
It's like a prize, some form of self gratitude,
an attitude of being able to find time, capacity,
and there's something that we haven't really spoken about,
which is the bandwidth of our thoughts of the things that we do in our lives.
There is only so many things you can do at the same time.
So if you get more efficient in doing your daily activities, your routines,
then you generate space for your creative side, for your relaxing time.
You can't stretch bandwidth, that's a set, it's a given.
You can't do more in any given time, but you can organise it a bit better.
Thank you for sharing your story.
Thank you.
It was horrible.
Why was it horrible?
Because I'm not used to...
I don't think that these stories are often relevant.
I don't know, maybe it's myself.
I'm sure that there is plenty of people that can think,
or have similar histories, similar experiences.
But then I'd like to think that I'm unique,
and my example may not be relevant to anybody.
I mean, you want to see yourself as a relevant person in the modern world,
but are we really, or maybe we are, and we shouldn't be.
I don't know what's the answer here.
I think usually the beauty of stories is we won't have overlapping stories,
but we will have an underlying, or we will have similar fears that's driving us,
or that was driving us, or that might be driving us now.
That fear of being judged, the fear of what if I'm perceived as this way,
if I'm making a mistake, and the avoidance.
I think to a different extent, people, it's hard to sit in with their fears
unless you have years and years of practice of doing it.
I think what also matters, I think I'm my own...
I'm not perfect by any means in many different areas of life, but...
Hence the title.
Very imperfect.
But I want to say that I am my own harshest critic,
and I think many people can see themselves as being really conscious of how they are,
how they come across, and it can be a good thing if you're happy with it,
if it's productive, if it allows you to progress,
but it can be also a stumbling block, and you will struggle to get over it,
to do new things.
Can I just say I relate completely with what you said about having a very loud self-critic,
a self-doubt gremlin almost, and it never goes away.
When I have a good day, then the gremlin is not as loud.
And when I have a bad day, then the gremlin is shouting in my ear.
And so I appreciate you opening up and telling us your personal story,
because I can relate to the feelings, how it made you feel in my own way.
So thank you for that.
Thank you.
It's been Yuen and Mike, and you have been listening to the imperfect clinician podcast.
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