We all start innocently enough. In childhood, I mean.
Then life gets increasingly complicated. Very fast.
My understanding of Procrastination includes a recurrent theme I see in my Procrastinating clients. Adult Procrastinators are so often just the adult form of the super-intellectually-bright young children they once were. They are also often the adult version of the super-entertainingly-gifted children they once were. For example, they used to breeze through acting jobs on the side when they were little.
When I meet these people as adults, it is difficult for them to comprehend how their childhood experience (no matter how dramatic) might influence their tendency for delay and Procrastination now.
It makes a lot of sense, however. You are a whipper-snapper of a second-grader and thus, you make an early splash in your town and within your family. Even if everyone else is pretty cool about it, your own ego starts to build and to strengthen. This ego building happens at the same time as the excellent performances you give in school or on stage. You, being the bright child you are, begin to associate feeling good with doing well in your performances. Actually, you associate feeling well with doing extremely well and noticeably better than others in your work. This will go on for a few years, but then the trouble starts:
- you find that your school work is getting harder and you can’t just wing it anymore to get good grades
- you delay your work because you think your work will not be good enough
- you become perfectionistic
- you start to feel increasingly bad about yourself as your own method of improving your self-esteem (i.e. performing well) is now on hold because of Procrastination
- you begin to stand still developmentally as you wait for your pizzazz to come back
- you feel stuck in a time warp
- you wonder how your peers are becoming so accomplished as you were the original wonder kid
- you start to hide your Procrastination from others
- you reach a point where you cannot work at all because it would expose you to potential judgment and criticism
Procrastinators wonder how will it be possible for them to change this bond between performance and self-esteem? Well, most people try to break this bond by not doing their work. Not a good or useful method. It gets you stressed and very certainly does not undo the link between performance and self-esteem. Here’s what I do indicate:
- Mindfulness of the link between performance and self-esteem is weapon #1 against it. Move away from the idea that what you do is who you are.
- Begin to work with pleasure about the work again. Reduce all of the pressure you tend to apply to your work, your work process, and the meaning of your work. It’s just work. Plain work. It’s not that interesting.
- Avoid projecting into the future to try to predict how your finished work will affect others. That is too much to think about when you are trying to write good work. It is also a true form of distracting yourself from the present, which is rarely good for getting work done.
- Be patient. You will need to adjust to getting real feedback from people. You will learn step-by-step that you can withstand any criticism that may come your way.
- Accept that you are imperfect and very much like everyone else in that way.
- Your efforts to move away from Procrastination will be worth it. You will find yourself thinking more broadly and fully. You will spend less time managing floating anxious thoughts that clutter your mind. You will become a better performer all around when you unshackle yourself from the performance-and-self-esteem bind.
When it comes down to it, even if you follow the steps I’ve just suggested, you will still struggle when you work. It is human to do so. It is inevitable to do so. Effort is part of work. But you will be open to your work, and the frustrations you feel when you work will therefore be much less than when you were hiding behind your former glory. In reality, we all have so much to live up to. In some ways, it is a constant pressure. We will never fully reach our potential, so please don’t let your enormous potential keep you down.
