Are you procrastinating or just out of practice? For many of us, the first response to noticing we are procrastinating is self-criticism. But this actually makes it even less likely you’ll get the thing done.
Sometimes, it’s actually not about your desire to do something but your ability.
At the start of a recent session my client explained that they had a big written piece of work due in a month’s time. But they couldn’t start it. Every time they sat down to do the work in the time they had allocated they did “everything but” start the work.
We delved into this and it became clear that the only thing my client ever wrote these days was text messages.
Their writing ‘muscle’ was never flexed.
So, I suggested that maybe the way to tackle this particular type of procrastination was to begin by getting back into the habit of writing. To bring it back inside their comfort zone.
Procrastinating is never about being lazy
It’s almost always about fear or shame. But as long as we criticise ourselves we can’t see the true cause and so we can’t do anything about it.
Especially if you have a strong inner critic you might rush to find fault in yourself as soon as you hit any obstacle in life. As soon as you do that – start blaming, criticising, shaming yourself – you’ll get stuck in an anxiety spiral that will make it EVEN harder to take any action because of the impact criticism has on your mind and your nervous system.
But take the emphasis off finding fault and move it onto getting curious about why this is happening and you’re much more likely to spot the real cause – and understand what could actually help you. It’s much more logical than losing all that time and energy to paralysing yourself with self-criticism.
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