Procrastination is my drug of choice
I’ve been coaching a lot lately on how to manage the thought drama that leads to self-sabotage.
Until a few years ago, I always thought that feelings were involuntary and caused by circumstances outside of my control (he/she makes me so angry). Turns out that isn’t true at all. It’s our thoughts that actually create all of our feelings, and even more importantly often lead us to resist or avoid them.
As a culture we have developed many acceptable resistant or avoidant behaviors to curb our discomfort with certain feelings like fear, anger, frustration – eating, drinking, bingeing Netflix (or the trifecta of all three at once). While these escapes can have short-term benefits, they are also detriments to making progress in your life. For example, getting to work on a project sounds simple enough. Until that creeper self-sabotage shows up creating unconscious thoughts about “putting yourself out there” and “what other people think.” And faster than an internet cookie serves you an advert, your mind pivots to what else you “should” be doing that is so important, like watching the entire season of Bridgerton.
What can often happen between our resistant/avoidant escapes and fulfillment of our dreams is procrastination. Like most actions that block our ability to expand our lives, procrastination is insidious. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I learned the tools of self-coaching and how to apply them to mind management. I really believed that the closet needed organizing (including the trip to IKEA) before I could tackle the thing that I really needed to do. The thing that would actually get me closer to living my dream life.
Whether we are aware of it or <usually> not, our feelings drive our actions, which create results in our lives. Fear drives procrastination, which is why I’ve started to really pay attention to where I’m avoiding discomfort and letting myself off the hook. And since we now know that our thoughts create our feelings (both good and bad), we can make the shift from thought drama to mind management in order to head in the direction of our dreams.