Shades of Gray

Nope. Sorry. Not Fifty Shades of Grey.

I’m talking about a different sort of shades of gray — with gray spelled the good old all-American way, you know, with an “a.” Although, really, that’s the least of the differences between that spurious book and my topic today.

My Shades of Gray is about how we – and by we I mean me – often don’t see shades of gray. Instead we see black or white. Success or failure, All or nothing.

In the world of therapy (because, yes, thinking like this is a bonafide psychological problem), this is called splitting, “the failure in a person’s thinking to bring together both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole.”

All-or-Nothing thinking dictates: “Either do this perfectly or don’t even bother.” Assuming you do take action and accomplish something, all-or-nothing thinking frames it this way: Either what you did was flawless or it was hopelessly flawed. Given that those are the only two choices, and given that “flawless” is generally unachievable, failure is pretty much assured. Which doesn’t mean you’ve actually failed – not at all – just that 100 percent A+ perfection was not the outcome. Easy to see how all-or-nothing thinking can sabotage effort and create enormous road blocks to positive change.

Well, easy to see in retrospect.

But not so easy for me to see last Monday, the very first day of the January Barre3 challenge. I had been looking forward to the challenge, building it up in my mind. January was going to be THE month. With perfect (there’s that word!) attention to body, mind and spirit in January, with four studio classes and two at-home, online work-outs every week, with a smoothie/salad/soup daily regimen of healthy, whole food, with insistently self-compassionate self-talk, I was going to launch the new year in a big way. It was going to give it my all (there’s that word!).

Instead, it snowed on Sunday followed by sleet and freezing rain, and come Monday morning I could not drive up my steep access road to get to the B3 studio. Or to the store to stock up on smoothie/salad/soup ingredients. Instead of ALL, I was left with (I thought) NOTHING. Why even try to rescue the day, do the online exercises, see what I could pull together from what was in the cupboards? My Monday fresh start to my January fresh start was RUINED. Poor me. Poor loser me.

Embarrassingly, it took me most of the day (during which I did NOT log on to do the online exercises but did find plenty of time to mindlessly eat handfuls of granola) to recognize my erroneous – not to mention damaging – all-or-nothing thinking.

On Tuesday, when the ice hadn’t melted, and I still couldn’t make it up the access road and into the studio, I did not self-sabotage. I hauled out the yoga mat. I breathed and asana-ed my way into a better head space. I did two online work-outs. I threw together a bottom-of-the veggie-bin soup. It wasn’t ALL. But neither was it NOTHING. It was a Shade of Gray.