Elimination

Five things I would like to eliminate from my life, and how I would get rid of them:

1.  Fear.  I'm not scared of things like spiders or heights or anything, but I'm terrified of major life changes and meeting new people and being wrong and lots of those sorts of things.  I know I can't really get rid of these fears completely, but I can make it more manageable.  I need to learn to figure out when my fear is rational an when it's not, and if I'm afraid of something that I can't control, or that isn't really a big deal and I shouldn't be afraid of in the first place, I need to learn to let it go.  If I'm afraid of something I can control, I need to do what I have to do to make the situation work out in a way that I don't need to be afraid of it.

2.  Indecision.  I have a hard time with making choices.  I especially tend to have problems with the small choices that I don't really care which option I go with, so I just don't decide and end up being paralysed by the indecision.  I can eliminate this by recognizing when the decision is insignificant and just going with my gut response rather than over-analysing it to try to find the best option when there really isn't a best option.

3.  Procrastination.  I've gotten quite bad about this one over the past few years and it really does affect my life.  Wasting time on pointless things not only hurts my academic life, it also cuts down on the amount of time I have to do social or creative things.  I have some methods of cutting down on procrastination, like the StayFocusd extension for Google Chrome, and using a timer to make sure my breaks are reasonable.  These are usually effective for awhile, but I can only go so long before I give in and go back to my old habits.  So, to help get rid of procrastination, I'm going to try to make myself busy enough that I literally don't have any time to waste.

4.  Self-doubt.  This one is a lot harder to get rid of.  I need to change that little voice in the back of my head to be a little bit nicer.  I may not be perfect, but I am capable; I just need to be convinced of that all the time instead of just some of the time.

5.  Not asking for help.  I have a hard time asking for help even when I need it; I always feel like I'm imposing too much on people, even though I don't mind if someone asks me for help and I know that other people won't mind either as long as it's something reasonable.  Something about asking for help just makes me feel incompetent, I guess.  There's really no way to get rid of this problem except for just doing it, so that's kind of hard.  I don't really have a plan for dealing with this one.