Perfection - Round II

Holy Shit! It came from them! Mom and Dad did this sort of classical parenting technique wherein very early on we were encouraged to make our own decisions. They'd offer their opinion, or advice, if sought, but the decision was ours to make (thus making me feel like this is something I'm good at). The idea is once you make a few 'bad' decisions and deal with the consequences you come around to the notion that maybe Mom and Dad aren't evil and clueless and occasionally do have a good idea or two. Of course, I took this to the extreme, rapidly accepted that Mom and Dad's decisions were almost always better than mine, and instead of trusting my own judgement just got to know them well enough to be able to predict their advice and what they would do in a given situation...ok, but this doesn't completely fit because there are definitely concrete examples of times when I moved away from what they would have done and didn't feel badly about that and in fact felt quite good about it (sliding over from statistics to biostatistics wasn't, strictly speaking, against their advice, but it definitely was against the advice of nearly every single faculty member in my old dept. while that was an incredibly difficult decision to make, I knew what I wanted to do, and once I decided to do it, never doubted myself)...weird. It's the big ones (gymnastics, school, career) about which I seem to trust myself and it's the mundane everyday ones I beat myself up over...