What is one thing that will ruin everybody guaranteed? Procrastination!
It robs peoples goals and dreams and it could rob yours too without you even knowing. Think back to the last time you set yourself an important goal to achieve, you were so motivated, so inspired, yet you couldn’t and didn’t take any action. It probably hurts to think about it and at the same time its also almost predictable.
How often do you procrastinate? Sometimes it isn’t always obvious to ourselves when we are doing it. When you start working for yourself and begin building your dreams; you are challenging yourself in ways you might not have expected or have even be aware of before. You wear many different hats and draw upon many skills, whether you are good at them or not, it doesn’t matter, often you have to do it all.
So procrastination will come up in subtler ways too:
Lets say you have been promoting your business and you get invited to attend a huge networking event with many potential clients. Every time you see the email, you are so happy but you seem to resist pressing the RSVP button and find yourself coming up with reasons why you are not ready to go the event yet. Or you need to create a business plan for your business, but you keep putting it off and then eventually you decide you don’t need one anyway. Or lets say, you need to make a bunch of phone calls to potentials leads, but you keep rescheduling them.
I can name a hundred examples, but hopefully you can see that procrastination happens all the time, and not only with the mundane admin tasks we put off again and again which we know we should be doing.
So why is this so important and how can it help you along your path to success?
The reason procrastination is so bad is because people don’t manage it properly, they come up against resistance, feel nervous or the opposite, lazy, whatever it is; but they still do nothing. A lot of INACTION and that is the problem.
If you take a different approach, your procrastination might be revealing important information about what you need to do to get better results.
Instead of just doing nothing, start to ask yourself a few questions like
- What is going on inside that is causing me to feel this way?
- Why am I resisting?
- What is so hard about this for me?
- What is missing, that if I wasn’t, I could take action?
Your mind will come up with an answer. If we use the examples above, not wanting to go to an event could mean a fear of something or lack of confidence in some area that you didn’t know you had. Putting off a business plan might mean lack of clarity in your vision or some area of your business, or lack of connecting with the objective of doing it (not really buying into it). Not wanting to make calls might mean a lack of confidence in selling yourself or your service or a disconnect in your service somewhere.
Once you have identified a potential obstacle along your path to success you dig more. Ask yourself… In which ways/areas am I lacking confidence? Why? What must I do to feel more confident in this area moving forward?
The more you dig, you will be surprised at what you might find. You might have thought that it was a simple thing like being lazy or not so motivated; after digging you’ve realized you need to change a goal or strategy because its not aligned with your real vision.
If you are at point A and your goal is point Z ?all the letters in between represent those things you need to do to get to point Z. Some of those things will be easier than others, but you cant ignore the not so easy ones and put them off! You have to work out why its not so easy and you are resisting.
Success involves a lot of introspection, learning how to read yourself and identify your emotions, fixing what isn’t working and always taking constant action. Success never involves putting things off indefinitely.
So if you want to be more successful, think of procrastination as a lighthouse, helping you to see your blind spots, what you need to work on to be better, it can guide you along your path to success, it doesn’t need to ruin it if you manage it correctly!
To your Success
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