I am the Queen of faffing. The lengths I will go to avoid something I don’t want to do are quite remarkable. The task that brings my faffing to Olympic levels is going for a long run. When I was doing my marathon training, I would get up early on a Saturday, eat my porridge, lace up my trainers and then faff for hours before eventually forcing myself out of the house at midday. I have faffed for over a year about making this Substack paid.
Procrastination is a pain in the arse, it stops us moving forward, it can make our bosses furious, it can cause us untold stress and get in the way of what we really want at work. If go to extreme lengths, it can even get us fired. I know it is not good. I spend a lot of time coaching clients on the way forward through procrastination.
And yet. It isn’t always bad. Because it can teach us things. It can show us what we care about. For example. Me, putting off making my Substack paid has taught me a whole lot of things. Namely that I was avoiding it because it was easier to avoid the feelings that came with doing it. There were a whole lot of feelings that were to do with my Values. And this is where I think this example might come in handy to you. Have a read through, and I’ll give you some pointers at the end as to how you can do this for yourself.
I care about succeeding (ACHIEVEMENT) I want lots of you to sign up to give me £6 a month to support my writing. Because if none of you sign up, my brain’s immediate response will be to see that as a failure, and if some of you sign up, my brain’s immediate response will be to see that as a success (although this won’t be as powerful as if you don’t, because like your brain, mine has a negativity bias).
I’ve been putting it off, because if I don’t do it, I can’t NOT succeed. We often procrastinate because we don’t want to fail at the thing we’re putting off, and if we put if off for long enough and don’t do it, we can’t fail!
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