“Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.” Mark Twain quipped. But the struggle that many people experience with procrastination is anything but funny.
Procrastination takes a variety of forms: delaying starting an important task; getting half-way with a project then not being able to complete it; becoming bogged down in inconsequential detail rather than focusing on what’s truly significant; and of course, finding a million and one other things that just have to be done right now!
I have encountered all manner of creative ways of procrastinating among my clients, not to mention having a few of my own : ). As well as old favourites like eating, cleaning the house and watching TV, there is now a slew of high-tech methods such as updating your Facebook profile, cleaning out your email inbox, and texting friends.
The usual advice given to procrastinators is to break down the task they’ve been avoiding into smaller chunks, set a timetable, and then JUST DO IT! This advice can be helpful, however it leaves out one crucial piece of the puzzle: it doesn’t address the emotional blocks to getting the task started, or completing it. These blocks can sabotage even the best-laid plans.
Emotional blocks are as varied as the people who have them, but they mostly boil down to a few common themes:
1. Safety
2. Identity
3. Secondary gain
Safety is usually about it being unsafe to finish the task. Some examples from my client files include:
- A woman who kept putting off developing a website for an ingenious business idea, because she was afraid that once it was out there people would criticise it;
- Another woman who knew what she had to do to lose weight, but just couldn’t get started because back when she was slim, her partner (who struggled with his weight) was always taking pot-shots at her; and
- A man who desperately wanted to change jobs, but procrastinated about developing his resume because he feared the recruiter would think he wasn’t good enough to get the kind of job he was aiming for.
Identity issues revolve around who we think we are, and who others have always told us we are! If you are the family member who everyone always ribbed for never finishing what you started; or your school reports commented on your lack of follow-through; or you didn’t achieve an important goal you’d set your sights on at some stage of your life, you may come to see yourself as ‘someone who never gets anything done’.
This is always an exaggeration, of course; all of us complete multiple tasks in any given day, let alone a lifetime, but we humans tend to remember our mistakes and failures much more vividly than we remember our successes!
Secondary gain refers to deriving some kind of benefit from not achieving the goal we think we desire, and is generally unconscious.
For example, I saw a client who was frustrated by her inability to finish her Masters degree. As we untangled all the threads of her family history, it came out that she was angry at her father for (as she saw it) valuing her academic achievements above every other element of her character. Avoiding completing her Masters was a way of punishing him for his overemphasis on her brains, and it had the added bonus of depriving him of his ‘bragging rights’ about his smart daughter.
With each of these clients, I used Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and especially Matrix Reimprinting to tease out the underlying emotional blocks, and then release them so the client was able to get started (or finished). The best part of this approach is that rather than it feeling like a constant struggle, the long-feared-and-put-off task suddenly feels easy – or at the very least, quite manageable.
My own experience in using EFT to overcome procrastination, is that I suddenly become excited about getting stuck into the task I’ve been putting off, and my mind starts to overflow with creative ideas about how to do it.
Wouldn’t you rather be buzzing with anticipation about sinking your teeth into a project, rather than pushing yourself every step of the way? Sure, it can be character-building to struggle with big issues, but most people’s lives are so busy and so stressful already, they don’t want to be struggling with every darn thing they have to do!
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