A Mindful Guide to Creating Lasting Habits + Getting Stuff Done
Many people wear procrastination like a badge of honor. Deadline weeks filled with sleepless nights and lots of “winging it” on account of brilliance (or projected brilliance to make up for a lack of preparation). Our work suffers and it can cause a great deal of anxiety and underlying chronic stress. We aren’t living up to our full potential. Our society has taken to the undesirable, yet very human, habit of procrastination.
Before we get to the heart of procrastination and how to not do it, we have to ask ourselves a few very important questions. Be honest. It’s okay, it’s just you:
Are you really doing your best work?
Are you consistently coming up with content or serving clients in a way you can be deeply proud of?
Do you feel balanced?
Do you feel genuinely proud of yourself?
If the answer is an honest and resounding yes to all four questions you can stop reading this (and email me your secret). For the rest of us, let’s keep going:
Why Procrastination happens.
In order to stop living in a chronic state of stress because of procrastination, we need to understand where procrastination is rooted and why it forms so strongly in the first place. Procrastination isn’t just something that happens because we’re lazy. It’s caused by deep, underlying false beliefs we carry... and a little bit of science.
Here are a few really important drivers of procrastination:
1. Fear. Fear of failure and fear of success. Both disrupt our current view of self and potentially change our current situation/status.
2. Inadequacy. Those self-deprecating thoughts such as, ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘I don’t deserve this.’ (this can even be deeply subconscious).
3. Identity threatening. If we were confident but fail then what we thought about ourselves wasn’t true. Or worse, if we were already feeling inadequate but tried anyway and failed, then what we thought about ourselves was true.
All of these drivers, whether conscious or subconscious, will create resistance...