In defense of tinkering: the most effective mindset for personal growth
I have spent a lot of years of my life trying to “self-improve.” Obviously, this is now a big part of my job but even before I found coaching (as a client and a career), I was already deep in self-help books and “how to build the right habits” and testing to do list apps and productivity systems.
And in all these years of trying to use all the tools available to me in order to make myself happier, more confident and more productive, I have realized that I picked up a philosophy that extends far beyond each of the individual areas I was focused on that is so powerful for determining the difference between self-improvement feeling like “there’s always something wrong with me I need to fix” and “I am getting better month after month.” (Notice the difference in the energy between those two sentences? Which woman do you think feels better about herself?)
The philosophy that I want to talk to you about today that’s been so powerful for me is…
Tinkering.
Why tinkering is the best way to approach personal growth.
What is “tinkering”
This word is probably bringing up images of an old man in a woodshop, puttering around on whatever project he’s working on.
And you’re not wrong.
My unofficial definition of tinkering is the ongoing approach to find small areas of improvement in an area of your life.
When you tinker, you are always circling back to the project at hand to see if you can find a way to make it 1% better. You often are rotating between a handful of progress in order to keep things interesting or from getting redundant and will return to a previously started project after some period of a break.
Tinkering allows you to move on to another part of the project or a different area entirely before you’ve fully completed anything because of a continuous commitment to improve and a knowing that you’ll eventually circle back to those projects if they’re important.
For me, this has popped up in areas like my productivity system (my system of to do lists, notes, how I motivate myself to get things done, habits, etc.) or healing anxious attachment.
In terms of the productivity system, I am always asking myself if there are ways that I could be more efficient or make it more enjoyable to get my work done. This has looked like testing different systems of managing email, using different to do list apps, goal setting differently and so many other things. But I haven’t tackled these all at once - I will often circle back to actually thinking about this system on about a quarterly basis (but in a very unstructured way - basically whenever it comes to me or I notice a problem or an inefficiency).
As a result, over the last 10 years, my system has gotten more and more robust and effective and now I’m able to tackle big projects without overwhelm, rarely get stuck with that “I know I’m forgetting something” feeling and feel like I’m squeezing the most juice out of my hours. But that has built up slowly over time.
Similarly, as I set out to heal my anxious attachment style, I understand that this isn’t the sort of thing you do overnight so at any given point when my attachment style is being triggered, I focus on what I can do in that moment to make myself 1% less triggered. Often this will look like using one of the tools I teach in my Private Coaching, and then moving about my day. I don’t belabor the fact that I haven’t fully healed it, but rather celebrate me putting one more penny in the piggy bank of healing and trust that I will circle back to do more when it is next relebant.
So why do I believe that we should all adopt this tinkering approach?
Why tinkering a more helpful mindset/approach to self-improvement
As I mentioned above, in self-improvement, I find that you can be working on the same area, say losing weight or your approach to dating, and have two very different experiences truly based on your energy.
One approach emphasizes that you still have areas to improve, implying that as long as they exist, you have not completed what you set out to do. Said simply, if you’re not at 100%, you’re at 0%.
Obviously thinking about the human experience, none of us will ever reach 100% of who we want to be because when we improve in one area (or all areas) then we’ll see the possibilities to go even further.
So this endless striving to improve, but telling yourself that you haven’t done enough is a recipe for continuous disappointment.
On the other hand, the second approach (tinkering!) emphasizes the continued commitment and celebrates what you have already improved on as motivation for the next stage. Said simply, if you are are 50% of the way to where you want to be, you’re 50% further than when you started!
Now this may sound like a semantic difference but this philosophy has made such a difference in my life and there’s a reason why I think it’s beneficial for you to implement it in yours:
Motivation.
When you think back to the old man in his workshop, you can almost imagine him disappearing in there for hours, tweaking the legs on the chair he’s building or the design of the handles, or whatever visual you like 🙂 He is enjoying himself which makes him want to come back and do more the next afternoon.
When you are enjoying the process of self-improvement, not just the outcome it gives you way more motivation to stay at it, which ultimately leads to greater and faster results.
When you love or enjoy the process, you stay more committed because there’s more natural motivation. When you are constantly focused on the outcome, or the fact that you’re not yet there yet, it saps your motivation. Not what we want.
So let’s dig in a little further to why tinkering is so beneficial…
3 reasons why you should tinker:
Tinkering cultivates mindset of celebrating progress
If we think back to the alternative to tinkering, what I’d describe as the “black and white” approach, you are also aware of something that you want to improve on, but the moment of celebration in this approach is on completion.
We identify a problem or an area for improvement, focus in on finding a solution, implement it and then don’t think about it again.
On top of the fact that this philosophy is unrealistic, it puts the enjoyable part of self-improvement in the part of the process that’s almost by definition unachievable.
If you only allow yourself to celebrate when you have 100% achieved what you set out to do, you make it very very rare for you to every get to celebrate.
The majority of the problems that we tackle or the areas of our life that we want to improve are not resolved in one fell swoop. They take days, months, even years of consistent effort to yield results. But if we address something, and we try to implement a solution, and we check back in and we noticed that it isn't fully solved, and that makes us view it as a failure (if we’re in black and white thinking), it’s natural that we’d feel bad about ourselves of feel discouraged. Which discourage us from first of all tackling the problem again, and getting closer to the desired outcome. So we stay stuck in the place of incomplete or in this school of thought: “failure.”
Now in comparison, in tinkering, if you have made an improvement, brought yourself closer to your ultimate goal in any way, then you have cause to celebrate because you are emphasizing the progress not the completion.
Tinkering encourages us to improve where we can and consistently circle back to find ways to improve. But each time you circle back to a topic you’ve already worked on, the focus is on the progress you’ve already made as proof that you can make more, as opposed to the areas that haven’t yet been improved as proof that you’re likely to fail.
Which sounds more motivating to you?
It’s easier to work through smaller components of an area of life over time
Whether you’re interested in making more money, improving your confidence, finding a long term relationship, there are a lot of parts that go into achieving those outcomes.
It’s obvious that if you want to go from making $50k a year to $250k a year, there are going to be a lot of steps to get there, some of the practical about how you’re earning money and the rate you’re making it but others more mindset-oriented, like addressing how you feel about having larger amounts of money flowing through your accounts.
If we start to tackle an area of our life, like making more money, it can easily be overwhelming all the things that we will have to do in order to make the shift. And if we let that overwhelm stop us from starting, from beginning to make progress, we will stay exactly where we are.
This is the most frustrating pattern, self-sabotage - where you are the one holding yourself back.
We cannot control the number of steps it will take to get to our ultimate goal but we can choose our mindset in how we think about the process. And it behooves us to choose a mindset that makes it easier to achieve our goals than harder.
Which is where tinkering comes in.
When you are consistently thinking about your self-improvement from this tinkering mindset, it’s okay for you to jump in and tackle one small component of the project to make progress and not have to bite off a huge chunk. This is still worth celebrating because it’s a step in the right direction.
This might sound self-explanatory but how many times have you looked at something you want to do - maybe get a new job - and thought to yourself, “ugh, I probably won’t get that job, so it’s not even worth putting in the effort to update my resume.” In that moment, you were black and white thinking. Because you couldn’t achieve the ultimate goal (which is an arguable conclusion anyway!), you don’t start at all.
If we were comparing two options objectively, having done nothing to get a new job and having updated your resume, which actually puts you closer to finding a new job?
Obviously having completed one of the steps! Yet, so often we don’t do the little steps if we can’t complete the task (and get our rush of validation) and in doing so we keep ourselves stuck.
Tinkering is the opposite, in that it gives us permission to celebrate each incremental step of progress, making it easier to start to begin with!
Tinkering forces you to identify what’s working as what isn’t
If you take a tinkering approach, you’ll be circling back to areas that you’ve focused on before and asking yourself, “Okay, what do I still need to solve?” and as you’re reflecting on that, you’ll be asking yourself “what is currently working and what isn’t.”
This seems obvious but it’s so powerful because tinkering focuses you in on understanding how the progress is made so you can be more accurate in assessing what is still actually an area that needs improvement vs. something that’s already working.
Because you don’t want to look at an area of your life and go redo a system that was already working!
Think about it this way, if you have a bike, and you're working to bike to the park, you are biking and the wheels are turning and pedals are spinning but then there’s a grinding sound and you notice the tire is flat.
Now imagine you looked at that and said to yourself, “oh the gears are broken.” You’d spend all this time and energy fixing the gears and then get on the bike only to realize that the tire is still flat. You’ve created more work for yourself because you still need to address the flat tire and it’s likely you’d feel some frustration that you put effort in and didn’t notice any progress.
This is often more subtle in self-improvement but it’s so important. Often we get frustrated and discouraged because it feels like we’re not making progress but we’ve been trying to fix the gears when we have a flat tire.
This is part of the reason I’m so emphatic about tinkering because with any philosophy where you are circling back to projects over time, you’ll develop a greater awareness of “oh I tried this and it worked last time” or “I haven’t really looked at this area and I’m still noticing some issues so maybe that’s worth checking out” and ultimately, it makes it way more likely that you identify the root cause and can address it.
As a result, we waste less time with effort that takes us nowhere and we stay more motivated to look at the next area or reinforce a habit that’s already working.
This solutions-oriented thinking doesn’t waste downtime of focusing on your failures because you won't see them as failures. You'll see them as learning experiences that got you started, or pointed you in the direction of an area that needs more focus or an example of something you tried but didn’t work so you don’t have to repeat that again.
As with all things mindset related, this is a muscle that you build over time, and it comes through really fed through self awareness that gets stronger of being able to reflect and identify an area of say your confidence or the way you speak to yourself or your approach to dating and accurately notice - what are the inputs that contribute to it working effectively or not working effectively and not?
Now, to tie this up with a bow, notice by getting clear on the parts that are and are not working, we’re making it easier to tackle projects in chunks like we talked about above and because we are acknowledging that some areas are working, we’re already celebrating ourselves!
If you are in “black and white” style of thinking where if you have not fixed everything, you have failed, you don’t really allow yourself to spot parts of the system or area of your life that aren’t working because to you, it’s either working or it isn’t. And that makes every project seem larger and more overwhelming, getting in our way to achieve the ultimate improvement that we want!
How to switch to tinkering vs. absolute success/failure approach
Okay, so you understand why the philosophy of tinkering is so beneficial and you want to implement in your life. How do you start?
Some easy ways to begin switching your mindset to a tinkering approach:
Pause to notice what areas are already working - whether you are starting a new project or circling back to an area of your life that is a ever-present focus like confidence or mindset, before you launch into doing anything, pause and notice what is working well
Use any opportunity to celebrate progress - this might just be while you are sitting on the train, you can reflect back on how much stronger you are than when you started working out last year or how much more confident you feel at work than when you started. You don’t need a reason, just notice and celebrate your progress as often as you can!
Break projects into chunks - if you want to improve your confidence, it can feel so large and overwhelming. But you can say that your focus in the short term is confidence at work or confidence in your body to give yourself a more manageable starting point
Make the process more enjoyable - there will always be effort and focus required to make changes, whether it’s behaviors (that require the mental focus to shift a pattern) or something more tactical like the actions of cutting and nailing and painting of a renovation project. But the more you look forward to the process, the more you will come back to it regularly and make progress faster. Look for ways that whatever the necessary steps can feel more enjoyable - need to sit down and write? Can you light your favorite candle? Need to go to the gym? Can you reward yourself with your favorite smoothie afterwards? Want to do your journaling around your fear of rejection? What cozy music can you put on and blanket can you pull out to make the “work” as enjoyable as possible?
And the joy of all of this, you can tinker with it! Even the process of thinking about self-improvement in this way will require some tinkering so the best thing you can do is one little thing to start today. You got this!
Do you want to improve your mindset so you can get rid of that critical inner voice but don’t know where to start?
The second guessing yourself, needing to check with the group chat to analyze what might have happened, the constantly worrying that it might not work out?
Shifting your mindset requires overcoming the very source of the problem, which for most people can feel like a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma. But if you want to be able to make decisions big and small without relying on others (new job, whether the guy is a fit for you, you name it!), want to feel comfortable in your own body without constant comparison-itis and want to feel like you have a toolkit to support yourself when bad habits pop back up…
