How do you work with “procrastination”?
Curious about the new idea that flowed in?
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0:00 So I've been thinking and talking and hearing a lot lately about procrastination, about motivation, about yeah, like what do we do when we're finding it hard to make progress on things that are important to us.
0:29 And I had this experience today that I thought might be helpful in explaining how I think about this a little differently, I think.
0:40 So I almost never think about myself as procrastinating. I think the thing that I'm usually trying to pay attention to is where there is flow and where there's blockage.
0:56 And this comes directly from my teacher, Staci Boden, who from her teachers you know, learned about and then refined this idea of following energy, which I also support people with in my practice, but you know, I'll just, I'll just give you an example, because I think that's the easiest.
1:16 So today, Monday, is my admin day. And so in general, I don't take calls and I instead do, you know, catch up on emails and do paperwork, but especially it's my time to reach out to people.
1:33 To set up conversations and meet new people and potentially create opportunities to serve and coach people so that eventually maybe there's an opportunity to, you know, become clients.
1:47 And so I have goals for myself about like how many emails to send and, you know, stuff that I'm supposed to do.
1:55 And I, I ended up with way more free time than I even thought today because I had someone cancel and things moved.
2:01 And so I, for a while, I was sitting there and I was kind of like doing the things I was supposed to do and I just could feel it just felt like push.
2:12 It was just like, oh, I don't want to do this. This doesn't feel like I want to, what I want to do.
2:16 I don't feel like I know what I'm offering people or how I'm serving or what I want to, you know, how I want to be helpful.
2:24 I don't want to waste their time, like whatever. And so I just gave myself permission to just take the last hour of the day and just brainstorm ideas of, like, who to reach out to and why and how I could be helpful.
2:40 And what the problems I thought they had that I could maybe help them solve. And then that turned into when I was debriefing with Jackson for the day of like what I did today.
2:53 I mentioned it and then we went down a whole rabbit hole, like we often do, of thinking about different things that I could do and how to be helpful and useful.
3:04 And after about another hour and a half of that conversation, we hit on something really interesting and fun and compelling and motivating.
3:13 That I am just like, now, tomorrow and the next day and the next day, I don't have big blocks of time.
3:21 But I’m going to, like, find a few minutes in between all the other things that I'm doing to get those things done. Right? And so I could see today as like, oh, I'm procrastinating.
3:32 Right? Because I don't feel like, whatever, I'm not doing this thing. Like why am I not doing this thing that I'm supposed to be doing?
3:38 Right? But to me it was like, it was more like, oh, I'm feeling really blocked on this. Like there's just a block here.
3:47 And I, if I can figure out what the block is, and not necessarily from a head space either, right? Sometimes it's more just like a sense or an intuition or something.
3:56 Or if I just give myself space to think about something else or journal. Or to go for a walk or something, often some clarity will come in.
4:06 And then there’ll be flow, right? Like then suddenly you can just feel the energy is like, [flowing] right? And now I'm right.
4:13 And then I'm ready to go and that distraction or procrastination thing is not as big of a thing. And I'll just put a plug in.
4:22 This is why I love astrology, too. And this is how I work with it. Because I listened to my astrology reading, you know, for the week ahead last night.
4:31 And one of the things she specifically said was, like, Monday is a great day to give yourself space to just think about things and you might have some new clarity about work things.
4:38 And so whether that's confirmation bias or not, I don't really care because it helped me get to something really useful about my business.
4:47 And if you have any interest in knowing anything about the idea that I had, I'd love to talk about that more too.
4:52 Let me know. Thanks.
Better Than Procrastination