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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this episode of the Stable Parenting Podcast. My name is Shane Jacob, your host, and I thank you for taking your time to be here with me today. Today, I got a topic that everyone can relate to, okay, and that is, I want to talk today about procrastination.
So procrastination, according to me, is something that everybody does. And that because we that do it, we think lesser of ourselves because we do it. So I want to get into how to do it less. Because that by itself, if you do think lesser of yourself when you procrastinate, is enough to say, this is something that needs some attention, if you ask me.
Another definition that I found, this is interesting, it says that a voluntary delay of an intended action despite knowing you're going to be worse off for the delay. Now it says a voluntary delay, and sometimes it can be involuntary. Okay. It's like, we don't, it's almost automatic. If you talk to people, they'll tell you sometimes they'll say that it doesn't feel voluntary. Like it feels like that they have no control over it. But for some people, it feels totally involuntary, like they can't help it. Like they can't help themselves.
So what is going on? Okay, so what is the deal when we're putting things off that we don't want to be putting off? Why are we putting them off if we don't want to be doing it? And if we regret it and we wish we wouldn't have, and if it causes a negative, net negative result, then why do we all procrastinate to one degree or another?
So first thing to remember, number one, is that what our natural default setting, our natural man brain, is doing. It's called the emotional triad. Our brain wants to remember, seek pleasure, avoid pain, and conserve energy. So if anything feels a little bit uncomfortable, we're going the other way. We're going to try to find something else to do rather than do the thing.
So basically, I'm saying that procrastination is just, it's naturally, we're going to be drawn to avoid things that seem a little bit uncomfortable because that's the way our default God-given brain guides us to do it. So the challenge, like in with discipline and with a lot of our thinking, okay, a lot of our mind management, the challenge is how to override our brains.
The amygdala part, the part that is the less evolved, not the thinking part, not the prefrontal cortex. But basically, the bottom line is that our challenge, one of our challenges as human beings in this lifetime, is to learn how to make decisions for our brain that wants to make, give us auto decisions. Okay. So we need to learn how to override our natural instincts, is kind of another way to say that.
A lot of times what we do when, when we procrastinate, here's an example. I say that I'm going to do something, and then it comes time to do it. And what I'm, if I don't think about it, if doing the thing is a little bit uncomfortable that I have scheduled, I automatically, I'm looking, my brain's going, don't do that. It's not a conscious thought, but our brain a lot of times can find something that seems to be as important or similarly important. Or we kind of need to get around to doing that thing too.
And this thing feels a little bit easier. It's easier. It'll give us a quicker reward. So maybe we want to check your email and clean it up real quick because it would be easier than writing that paper, or easier than making that phone call. You ever need to make a phone call or have a conversation with somebody that could be a little bit uncomfortable, a difficult conversation, or do a difficult task, or write the paper, or whatever the thing is that you want to do.
You find something easier, and you sort of, we justify it. Okay. So we don't do the thing, but we justify it by what we do do. That's the next step. A lot of times, we justify what we're doing by, if what we set out to do is the best thing, we do something that's good. You know, there's this idea of good, better, best.
So if we have the best thing on our calendar, that's what we plan to do. And then it comes time to do it. I'm like, yeah, you know, your brain, if you're not really intentional about it, goes, you know what, you still need to do this other thing. You're like, hell yeah, I'll do that right now. That needs to be done too.
And so I don't procrastinate on the thing that I had scheduled. I don't do the thing, and I justify it by saying, hey, I needed to do this other thing, and I got it done, you know, but I still procrastinated the other thing. And so justify, there's lots of reasons for justifying, but having another thing to do or accomplishing another lesser, it's not quite as uncomfortable doing something like that.
A lot of times, that's a way that we can, that we naturally, our brain just does it. We just justify not doing the thing. That's one of the justifications that we use.
A lot of times we also, procrastination, you can think that, hey, I'm just being lazy, or I'm just not motivated, or I'm not this. And you can kind of, when we procrastinate it's not good for our self-image. It's not good for our relationship with ourselves. It's not good.
We want to be people that we can count on. We need to trust ourselves. And so when we make a commitment and we don't keep it by, put the thing off, okay, we don't do it when we said we were going to do it, we, that's why we justify it because our brain gives us messages like, “Hey, you don't do it. You don't follow through. You don't do what you're saying you're going to do.”
And so we were like, that doesn't sound very good. So then we justify to ourselves, and that it's just a bad cycle. Okay. But another, it's not laziness. Okay. It's either our natural brain, just trying to avoid a little bit of discomfort.
A lot of times also, it's just the negative emotion. We don't want to feel the negative emotion that might come as a result of doing this thing. In other words, you know, while I'm dialing the phone to have this difficult conversation, mean, it's going to be, I'm going to be having some anxiety, right? Or while I'm driving to go do this thing, or while I'm preparing to do whatever, or in the process of doing this thing, I may have anxiety. I may be bored with the thing. So I don't want to do it.
It may cause me to have frustration or it may cause me to have self-doubt. And I'll talk more about that in a minute. But these kind of feelings are associated with these kind of tasks. And so if we can see that, if we perceive that we're going to feel that way if we do it, then we automatically don't want to do it. Okay.
And so if the task seems like it's going to be difficult, stressful, tedious, then do, we just try to delay it to escape these unpleasant feelings. And this avoidance behavior, it does give us temporary relief, okay, because we don't have to go through that uncomfortable negative, quote unquote, negative emotion at the time. So we get this temporary relief, but ultimately all it does is it reinforces the, because the task remains incomplete. Okay. And so it reinforces that we're a procrastinator. Okay. And the negative emotions resurfaced about ourselves because we can't count on ourselves to follow through. Okay.
And plus we didn't get the thing done. We could have got a long-term reward. We could have had the win, you know, of accomplishing the thing. Didn't get it. We didn't get it. Plus we got the bad feeling of not doing it. So just learning to tolerate and manage negative emotion is a critical skill in procrastination.
Okay. Just feeling, being willing to handle negative emotions. One thing that I have adopted, I can't remember where I got it from, but I would suggest this for you also. And that is, is that I have one of my daily goals is to do two things that I don't want to do before 8 AM.
Okay. So every morning I just look at what's on my list. If it's, a lot of times it's a conversation that I've been putting off or it didn't seem urgent or I didn't take the time to do it. It's not always a conversation, but whatever it is, a lot of times I'm going to have a little bit of fear wrapped up in it. Fear is also an emotion that I'm trying not to have.
And so then I keep putting it off and putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. And then I get into this cycle that I'm a kind of a person that put things off. And so when I follow through with this, and most of the time I do. I do two things that I don't want to do before 8a.m., it already starts a day off and I'm ready to rock and roll.
But learning how to tolerate emotions and go through those emotions and feel that fear and do it anyway or feel whatever the negative emotion is and just be able really to not fear the emotion. To be willing to experience the negative emotion that comes with some of the things in life is a skill. Okay, and it's a willingness. And it takes a little bit of practice just to be able to accept that this isn't going to feel good and I'm going to be okay anyway.
And be willing to just sit with it, to be able to experience and have it be there. Not try to fight it off, not try to avoid it by procrastination, but to allow the feeling, to allow yourself to feel that way and have it be okay even though it's not desirable, it's not good, it is uncomfortable.
Okay, that's a skill in overcoming procrastination. It's also a skill in developing yourself because there's so many other positive benefits of having the willingness to go through negative emotion.
The thing about it is, is we all have this tendency to care too much about our present selves and really not to care so much about our future selves. Okay. Because we're feeling it right now, okay? We like to enjoy the immediate benefits and be in the present, especially if the cost of our choices don't become apparent until way down the road, you know?
Like if we don't get experience the win for a long time down the road, it's kind of like saving money. It's so much fun to spend it right now. You know, I want the thing. I don't want to save it till I'm whatever X-amount of years old. I don't even know if I'll live to be that long. Maybe I'll just spend it right now.
Okay. I don't know, you know, if I go to the gym or if I do my exercise and if I go for my walk or whatever I'm going to do, or if I eat it, you know, healthy as opposed to eat in the way that I want to, none of that seems real fun. But because it's stuff that I'm out in the future and I'm really focused in the now, okay? I'm focused on how things now, and I'm not willing, a lot of times we're not willing to trade discomfort now for, for the big reward in the future.
And a lot of this is called the present you versus the future you. Right? Present you versus future you. Okay. So here's the deal. This is the future you problem that most of us have. Okay. So you know that you should do things and that they're going to lead to a big benefit in the future in the long term, but the present you, it's just overvaluing future you. It's like, “Hey, you're not that important. What's important is right here, right now, the immediate benefit.” Okay.
Okay. The procrastination can be a symptom. Okay. It's not the problem, but the procrastination can be a symptom that you're not feeling real good about you. Okay. Like, for example, this is another thing about another reason that we procrastinate. If it's a symptom that you're not feeling very good about you.
So if you feel like you need to be perfect, you might not do the thing because you might not get it good enough and then you might be disappointed in yourself, or you'll think that somebody else is disappointed in you if you didn't do a good enough job. And if it isn't damn just done exactly 100% perfect, I mean, just don't even do it. Don't do it. Okay.
Because of how you will look to yourself or how you'll look to other people if it's not done good enough. And so you just don't do it. You put it off and continue to put it off. Okay. And so that's why one of the big things, one of the most significant things that contribute to our procrastination is fear of failure.
So none of us like to say, I have fear of failure, right? But some of us do, a lot of us do, more than is willing to admit it or understand it. Maybe it's just that we don't fully understand it.
And what I'm talking about is that a lot of people, a lot of us, okay, we avoid even starting and for sure avoid completing certain tasks because we might not meet certain expectations. So whether those expectations are set by ourselves or set by other people, we're afraid that we might not measure up.
We might not get it done good enough. We might not just show up, and it might not be good enough. And so we're just not good enough, so we just don't do it. We just don't do it. Just in case we couldn't do it good enough, we don't even try. So we just put it off because we're afraid of what? Basically that's one of the ways that it's a fear of failure.
And this fear can literally like paralyze us where we're doing nothing. Okay. We're not doing anything about it. And it turns into like a cycle, right? We don't do it, so then we feel bad. And it's just like, we're just stuck in this not getting anything done cycle.
And a lot of us have a lot of anxiety wrapped up in this, you know what I'm saying? Because we feel bad because we're not doing the thing, but we don't do the thing because we think we're going to feel bad and it's going to be worse. So we're just stuck in this anxiety of not getting things done and feeling bad about it. There's even when the things are like high-stakes tasks, okay?
It's like we put things off as a way to protect ourselves from potential disappointment that we might have or being judged, even if it's judged from ourselves or from what other people would think.
My, one of my mentors, Brooke Castillo, is an advocate and she believes and promotes B-minus work. So what that means is, and you've thought, you've heard this, that done is better than perfect.
Okay. And what Brooke says is don't dive into this thing and have it take twice as long or 10 times longer. First of all, don't procrastinate it, do it, and then don't get in it and then just never finish it. Don't not start it and don't not finish it because you don't think it'll be good enough and it has to meet a certain standard. She's like, get it done.
Okay. Go for B-minus work. Done B-minus, fully acceptable, move on to the next thing. If you want to, you can go back and clean it up after it's done. But done is better than, done is much better than perfect. Okay. And go for B-minus work and have that be okay. Have done be better than perfect. Okay.
And I believe that, and it works. When I look at things, and then sometimes I will go back, say I want to go back and make this better. I want to go back and improve it and look at it. And so that's another thing, and I can go back and do that. But if I'm getting paralyzed from even doing the thing to start with, that's the problem.
And if I accept the idea that I'm going to do B-minus work up front, boom, good, good enough. It's done. Okay. So that keeps me having the willingness, and you, if you will accept the idea to do B-minus work, it gives you the willingness to know that it doesn't have to be perfect for you to have it done.
Okay. So that immediately lets you move forward and not be stuck. Okay. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't do good work. It just means don't let having it be perfect be the enemy of getting it done and don't let that be that way.
Your fear of failure can be, of course, tied to how you value yourself, your self-worth. A lot of us, it's easy for us to equate our value with our achievements, right? And so a lot of times that we’ll procrastinate to avoid situations that will, that will devalue, let's see, what am I trying to say, that will make us look incompetent.
Okay. So what I'm trying to say is is that procrastination can be a defense mechanism, okay, that shields us. It's like a shield from confronting something that could make us look bad, or inadequacies or deficiencies. And so we want to protect ourselves from looking bad, and so we just don't do the thing. We don't want to prove it to ourselves that we suck, and we don't want to let the rest of the world see that we suck, so we're just not going to do it.
And a lot of this stuff is just running inside of our heads. It's not conscious thought, it's just happening. So if we're not intentionally thinking about what we're doing and what we're not doing on purpose, sometimes this stuff is just running as a default setting. But this is how it works, okay? Procrastination is not just your laziness, okay? It is natural, almost physiology of what's going on in your brain and our natural tendency to avoid pain and protect ourselves.
When we delay tasks, we temporarily escape the uncomfortable emotions that come with failure. But usually, of course, the strategy backfires and leads to even more negative outcomes. And those negative outcomes reinforce our feelings of inadequacy and deficiency and self-doubt, and it is a bad cycle.
So that's why when we say, when we make commitments and we don't follow through and we procrastinate, it has a net-negative outcome. That's what I mean. We get caught in the cycle of not doing it, and then we feel worse for not doing it.
When we judge ourselves harshly, when we come down on ourselves for procrastinating, we feel guilty, we feel shame about ourselves, and this just fuels the avoidance that we have going on.
When we, and we talked about this on this podcast before, when we can forgive ourselves, when we can fully accept ourselves and we can practice self-acceptance, we actually have higher odds of procrastinating less in the future. Okay. When we're willing to forgive ourselves and fully accept that we're imperfect, it actually allows us to change.
So the likelihood of repeating the procrastination in the future is lower when we accept ourselves more.
What I'm trying to say here kind of works backwards. It's sort of a little bit of a paradox for me that we have to accept the way we are in order to be able to change and move forward.
And I've also talked about, you know, we've talked about self-acceptance and forgiveness on this podcast. And this idea of self-acceptance for me, and I'll say it again, was so hard to understand because I didn't want to accept it.
Just to use procrastination as an example, I'm supposed to accept that that's okay? I didn't get the thing done. I put it off. I went and did something easier and I feel terrible about it. How's that supposed to be okay? That's basically it.
But what I'm saying is, that might not be okay, but I'm going to separate me doing that from who I am. I'm okay. I just didn't do that thing. And now that I know I'm okay and I didn't do the thing, I'm an imperfect human being, but I want to do the thing because that's what I value and that's my goal and that's my purpose. You know, that's what I would rather be doing and I want to procrastinate less.
Now that I'm okay with me and what I haven't done, then I'm more likely to not procrastinate in the future. It's just the way it works. I don't know if you have a hard time with that, but I did for the longest time.
By, when you acknowledge, when we acknowledge that procrastination is common, it's part of the human experience, and that we treat ourselves with kindness. Okay, it allows us to be able to break the cycle of self-criticism, and we can start to build confidence that we need to procrastinate less. Okay.
So I have, here's how I procrastinate less and here's how I recommend it. I think I have four steps. One, two, three, four. Okay? Here are the four ways to go about procrastinating less. If you follow these, you will procrastinate less.
Number one is I believe in calendaring my life and living on purpose. So I have a schedule every day and I schedule in 30-minuteincrements from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. Okay, and Monday through Saturday, that's the way I roll. And I also have things in my calendar for Sunday, but that's the way I do it.
But anyway, my point is to, if you have a task that doesn't seem really pleasant, I think you should be scheduling your life and live and doing your time, doing things with your time that you want to be doing anyway. So put it into a calendar. Okay. So that's one. Put it in writing, live on purpose. Okay. Put it in your calendar so that you have something to look at. It's much easier when you have something to look at. It's much, it’s easier to do it than put it off.
If you just have the thing that's just sitting over there in your mind, it's a little bit easier, I think you'll find it has been for me and my clients, to put it off. So the first thing is to put it in writing, put it on your calendar, put it in the plan.
Now, just because you put it in the plan, things are going pretty good so far. It's in the plan. I got it. I got you. I'm going to do the thing. When it comes time to do it, I'm doing the thing. Okay. So the first thing is to put it in the calendar. That feels good.
Except when it comes time to do it, then it doesn't feel good. Now I'm looking for every excuse and reason, and I'm trying to look at all the other things I need to do because I need to do them. And I'm trying to figure a way out of this thing because it's kind of uncomfortable.
And so now what do I do? Okay. Now what do I do? Because now's the difficult part. I got it in the calendar. That was fun. That felt good. But now it's here. I got to do the damn thing and it's not feeling good.
Okay. So how do I get through that in the moment? Okay. How do I honor my calendar and myself? How do I do that? One of the things that works best is to visualize, talk to future you.
See, visualize future you. When you visualize future you, you take yourself out of this present moment and what you want, want, want right now, now, now. And you see yourself in the future having the reward of what you're doing and what it'll look like.
Let's just say it's at the end of it. This task is a two-hour task. Even look at yourself in your future self, two hours down the road and having it done. And then look at all the things that you felt, how you felt because you had it done. What you were able to accomplish because you had it done. And it can be anything. And maybe it's a really, maybe you're thinking about saving money and it's a longer-term thing.
Okay. You're not going to get the result in two hours. You're going to get it when you're, I don't know, when you quit working when 60 or whatever how old you are. And you, that's just hard. But if you stop in the moment and visualize yourself having the money, spending the money, seeing the money, do the best you can to visualize future you. Future you is gonna thank you. It's gonna love you. And if you can go right there, right then, and talk to future you and see what the deal is, you're more likely to do the thing than not do the thing.
Okay, imagine the benefits that your future self is gonna enjoy and imagine what your life's gonna be like. You know, if you lose those 30 pounds, what are you going to feel like? What are you going to look like? Okay. Right now you got a chocolate donut in front of you with the vanilla icing and it's looking, dripping all over the place, looking good. Okay.
But if you can just say, wait a minute. If you can checkout, and this is not always easy, just like right now I'm thinking about a damn donut. Okay. Check out and go, what am I going to be? What am I going to feel? What am I going to be able to do? What am I going to look like in the mirror? Huh? When I hit my ideal weight. Okay. And it makes it less likely to do, to do the discipline and not procrastinate. Okay.
If you can pull in the future payoff to the present moment, that's what I'm talking about. So that's step two. Okay.
Some of the thoughts that I use, just consider them. Maybe you want to adopt them, maybe not, but here's what I, in those moments, here's some of the thoughts that I go for, that I use.
Okay. This is my moment. This is my moment. That's a thought that I use. I only have one life. What am I going to do in this moment? This is my moment and I only have one life. What am I going to do? No regrets.
My future self is gonna love me for what I'm gonna do right next. I also have the thought that I'm willing to do what most won't, so I'm gonna have what most don't. Okay, that's my thought. I'm willing to do what most won't, so I'm gonna have what most don't.
And another thought that I use is, I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I just, that's a thought that I have. I am not afraid. I am not afraid of this thing. And so in those moments that I described, like I do two things, and like I said, sometimes they are phone calls or texts or they are one-on-one conversations with people. I just tell myself, I am not afraid. I don't have anything to fear.
And it still doesn't feel good when I do it, but in the end, it feels so much better. Right? And I don't begin that vicious cycle and I don't take on this meaning.
If, we don't even know what's happening. But when we procrastinate, we are feeding our mind beliefs about ourselves that are not helping our life. They're not just not helping our life. They're not helping anybody around us, anybody that we interact with in our lifetime. Okay? So this is really a big deal. It's not just like, you know, making sure that you get the paper done before it's due for your school assignment.
This is, that's part of it. And that's one of the things, we have these little decisions happen hundreds of times every day.
Number three, already talked about the third thing on my list to conquer, to say no, to have less procrastination in your life is to be willing to embrace the uncomfortable. Be willing to sit with negative emotion. Don't fear negative emotions. Let it be okay. Uncomfortable as it is.
You know, Ed Mylett, I was listening to him one day and he was saying that he does this cold plunge or cold shower or, I don't know, sitting in cold water. I don't know his process, but I heard him on a podcast say that there's also evidence that this cold-water business is not healthy for you. And he said, I don't care which is right or wrong.
He said, the reason that I do it is not for the health benefits. He said I do it because it's difficult, and I do it just to prove to myself that I can do difficult things. And I went, dude, right on! And so I started doing my own version of this cold-water thing just to be able, just so I could do it, just to do it because it was difficult. Okay.
And that, what I found was that in doing those, that difficult cold water thing, it actually helped me in other ways to be able to accept and to be able to take on other negative emotions because I was willing to do things. It was just the mindset that I had. Okay.
It's not pleasant. It is not pleasant. They call it negative emotion because it doesn't feel good. Okay? It is uncomfortable. There's no two ways about it and it's not going to be comfortable. There's so many things in this lifetime that are just not, it's not going to be comfortable. I don't even know... It shouldn't even be the goal.
I think the goal should, a lot of times in our lifetime, a good percentage of the time, half of it should be to go for the uncomfortable, you know, because in the end, that's how we're going to get more joy. Be with it. Be willing to be with it, sit with it, and have it be there rather than try to avoid it, rather than trying to go change it by doing something else that feels better, drowning yourself in all the things that have big net-negatives like over drinking, overeating, over, over, over all the things that you can do that you wish you wouldn't have done when you were done. Okay.
Most of the time when you are able to accept negative emotion and feel that discomfort, you know what I realized, and the people in my coaching, you know what they tell me? The same thing. You know what that is? That it wasn't as bad as what they were making it out to be. Most all the time. Never said it was good. Never said it was wonderful. Never said it was so happy. Never said it was a great time. Just said it wasn't as bad as what I thought.
Andin the end, it felt better to do the thing and not procrastinate.
And number four, this is the biggest one and this is what I'm all about, and I want you to be all about it too. You know why I want you to be all about it? I'll tell you why. Okay. Because you're going to have a better life experience. And so are the people around you.
And that is is to commit to improving what you believe about you. And this goes both ways. If you do the thing and don't procrastinate, there is a message already said there, a thought is going into your subconscious brain.
Whether you think it consciously or not, there is a thought going into your brain saying, “I keep my promises, I don't procrastinate,” every time that that happens. And as you do things intentionally, to intentionally improve the relationship that you have with yourself, as you make promises and keep them, make a promise, keep it, make a promise, keep it, go through discipline, do things that you keep your word to yourself, be somebody that you can count on and trust yourself.
You can count on you, believe in you. You know why I can believe in me? Because I know that when I put something on that calendar, it's going to happen.
If you do those four things, you will override your default setting and you will override your tendency to procrastinate. You will procrastinate less and less and less. Every single day we are faced with literally hundreds of little teeny-tiny decisions. Okay. When we have to make those, we make those decisions on an ongoing basis. You're making them right here and right now.
And as we move the needle, okay, on less procrastination and less and less procrastination, and as we love ourselves and forgive ourselves more and more, the more that we come to fully accept ourselves, if we move those needles, okay, our life experience, our total life experience, our existence is enhanced.
And our capacity to give to the people, to give love and to support and to be able to give because we have it inside of us to be able to give away. Our ability and our capacity to give to the people that we care about is increased.
In Stable Living Coaching, we dive deep into these subjects and so much more. You can always join us there at stablelivingcoaching.com.
Thank you so much for being with me today. Remember, you cannot fail as long as you Don't Ever Stop Chasin’ It.
