Last night's AACA meeting was pretty cool for me. Rod talked about the tendency of Adult Children of Abuse to defend their right to be right at all costs.
I've found that I've been mellowing a lot in this respect since I started going to AACA meetings. My own tendency in the past has been to take extremely principled stands about stuff. Even to my detriment.
One of the ways this used to manifest was in perfectionism in my old career as an advertising copywriter. I would often get into fights with client service people because 'I was right and they were wrong'.
Nowadays, I recognise that sometimes certain clients are idiots with or without my help, and nothing I can do will change them from their idiocy. And this means I'm much less rigid about things. And I'll do the excellent, yet non-perfectionistic thing now.
This is a very tough thing for me to do. Cos I'm into excellence. And to let go control for the sake of a crap client goes against everything I'm used to in myself.
But hey... as the saying goes: 'Perfect is the enemy of the good.'
Thankfully, I have very few bad clients nowadays. I seem to have perfected the art of attracting bright, intelligent, capable clients into my world.
This painting was made in two stages... (1) I doodled it into my Moleskine at AACA last night. (2) I scanned it this morning, and coloured it in ArtRage 2.5 on my Toshiba Tecra M4 tablet pc. And I resisted perfectionism.
UPDATED Friday 7 Sept 2007: I added the bits in green text today, after Jennifer pointed out that I sound like a disgruntled fellow suffering through the burden of only having bad clients. I didn't intend that at all. The poor clients are a thing of the past. The last crap client I had was about two years ago. And since then, they've all been damn cool. My purpose in talking about this stuff is that the focus in the AACA meeting was on people who don't get on well with others, thanks to their background of being abused. I was trying to illustrate that everything can be overcome. I hope this clarifies things somewhat.
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