Cracking the Procrastination Code Ep.02

Welcome. I’m so glad you’re joining me today for this topic. Especially as I have been in a period of procrastinating on preparing these very episodes for you. I really am familiar with this.

In a Battle With Yourself

Most people will tell you that you need to overcome your procrastination of marketing. This push and pull of wanting to be able to connect and share your work and feeling hesitant and holding back is an energy drain and hugely frustrating.

I absolutely understand the desire to overcome it, the process that we’re often given by productivity culture and mainstream marketing advice is “feel the fear and do it anyway.” Seems like we always need to be doing and that our feelings and sensations are not legitimate. This puts you in a battle with yourself – and in that scenario who loses? You or yourself? When you battle yourself – either you or yourself comes out on the bottom – not a good situation.

What if instead we lend ourself some grace and rather than bringing a conquering energy to our relationship with procrastination (and maybe even ourselves as a person who procrastinates), rather than seeing it as a flaw to be ashamed of or be fixed, and we instead approach it with a neutral or curious frame in order to understand it better and deeper.

Not as a way to overcome or become a conqueror and lean into learning how to live in gracious acceptance of this aspect of ourselves (and indeed of being a human). 

I was going to say in these times and actually I believe it was Socrates and Aristotle who were discussing, questioning and yes, battling the tendency to do things against our better interest. So, not a modern result of our current culture.

How do we move towards a more accepting relationship? 

The Myth and Reality of Procrastination

Actually, before I go there… What might be keeping you from an accepting or even a neutral relationship with procrastination….

I think it’s the idea that if you accept that procrastination is a part of you that will either make you fundamentally flaws (and therefore a less valuable human) – because hey – that doesn’t benefit capitalism) AND/OR that acceptance will be like permission for procrastination to take over and start running the show.

That’s what we imagine will happen.

What I find is ACTUALLY the opposite. When we move into a gentle, curious relationship with our procrastination it means that we have a deeper understanding of it, have gained more conscious awareness of procrastination patterns, and acceptance creates more of a “seeing” presence. Like we can see our procrastination rather than it becoming part of us. Kind of like mindfulness, where you can have thoughts but you aren’t your thoughts.

Accepting procrastination rather than resisting it puts you in a position of being a conscious decision-maker rather than reacting.

Does this mean you will always decide not to procrastinate? Sorry, no.

It does mean that when you are in a procrastination pattern that you don’t have to feel like a failure or a worthless POS. You can bring kindness and grace and love EVEN when you’re procrastination. And my gosh – if that isn’t so much more motivating than shaming and shitting on yourself.

The Root of Procrastination

OK, so now I’ve already prefaced that moving into this more accepting relationship is about deepening our understanding of procrastination… here’s what I want you to consider.

Procrastination is a sign/symbol from our body or our system (neuroception, perception, our intuition) that something about this is unsafe, a threat or a risk.

It’s not always obvious what that is. Often we generalize to this whole thing is a problem, is misaligned, is overwhelming, is pick your pattern – and we procrastinate on the whole thing. Then we shame and should ourselves or try to push through to motivate a different behaviour (a strategy that seems to implode nearly every time). I lovingly refer to this as the Swirling Toilet of Marketing Terribleness. And perhaps, you know as I do, that it can swirl for a good long time.

A New Way Forward

I’d like to offer you an alternative – instead, with curiosity we can use our procrastination as a signal to lean in and find what SPECIFICALLY may be creating this perception, neuroception, intuitive sense of risk, danger or threat that’s the real cause of our response. Because from this curious, exploratory space we can address and reverse the risk or design new safety mechanisms so that we can proceed with care. We can tip ourselves into the task, idea, project, strategy and allow it to expand us into our courage zone without sending us into a fight-flight-freeze reaction.

And in our courage zone is where we can learn and grow.

Let’s look at a concrete example in marketing to help this make more sense and hopefully make this idea applicable for you.

One of the women I know was procrastinating on promoting and offer to work with her and when she got curious what she realized was that she DID NOT want to fulfill the offer as she has designed it. She realized that if anyone took her up on this offer it was going to have her tied to her computer and on Zoom calls and she was dreading working in that way. The offer she had created was threatening her sense of freedom and it wasn’t allowing her to be her true self in her work with clients.

You can maybe see how “pushing through” or “feeling the fear and doing it anyway” would have put her in a situation of serving clients in a way that was uninspiring, draining and would have, in all likelihood led to resenting her clients and depending on how long she was doing it – burnout or even leaving her business.

The problem wasn’t procrastinating or avoiding sharing an offer, nor was the solution letting her business fizzle and struggle to get clients.

From this place of compassionate honesty she could uncover an aligned solution to the REAL problem, which was a misaligned offer. She recreated the offer focusing on audio coaching and training and set up expectations and a container that she was excited to show up to and was excited to share and invite people into.

Listening to Procrastination as a Valid Sign

Hopefully that helps illuminate how being curious about your procrastination and deepening your understanding can help create a much kinder, and gentler and more win-win feeling as a result of accepting your procrastination as a state of being and a warning signal you can use to serve you (not be frustrated by) to be used to keep you on-track with your values , your principles and your commitments to showing up in your marketing as truly yourself. Rather than seeing it as slowing you down or taking you off-track.

Personally, making this shift to begin to accept my procrastination has opened up a new supportive sense of myself in the world, where I can be honest about my needs and tend to them with genuine care. And it has helped me move and take more aligned, safe and sustainable action, like bringing you this new podcast. and one that I continue to explore.

The Next Episode

In the next episode I’ll be building on the idea of procrastination on marketing and why learning more about marketing is rarely the solution and why in some cases may even make the procrastination patterns worse. I hope you’ll join me.

Until next time,
Stay Courageous.