The Most Dangerous Word in Your Vocabulary When Recovering from Procrastination

If you struggle with procrastination, this is the most dangerous word you will have in your vocabulary. And it's not things like, oh I'll do it later and all that kind of stuff, right? Here's the most dangerous word that we have when we're struggling with this issue. That word is hopefully. Hopefully. Okay, so what do I mean? Procrastination is a guilt cycle we get into and we beat ourselves up for not following through, right? But when you zoom out a little bit, you realize, well actually, but more awareness you realize I'm actually setting up a system that's designed for me to fail. So before you even try to engage and try and get consistent in it, you realize when you look at the big plan that you've created or these intentions for yourself, there's no actual way that you could have stayed consistent in it. So it's almost a definition of what they would call, people refer to as self-sabotage. Create all these big elaborate plans, fail to follow through on it and then just crucify yourself, attack yourself and judge yourself very harshly for it. So why is the word hopefully so dangerous? Now I'm not saying we take away hope, right? We want hope. We want confidence actually in our abilities and our capacity to do things in life. Absolutely. And I'm going to make more videos on the topic of confidence because I think having confidence in yourself is actually a primary need we have. But why is this word hopefully so dangerous? Well, when we're constructing these plans, when we're recovering from this issue and we're starting to really develop consistency in a healthy way, it's done in a very realistic, sustainable sense. Now the old plans, the way we usually plan, which we're overcompensating, we're trying to make up for lost time and we're feeling under pressure, I have to do this, I have to do all these things, we make this huge elaborate plan. The sense of, so let's say you sit down and you make this big elaborate plan. If you stop and you just look at that plan and you might think on paper it looks really impressive and if I could do all those things, it would be wonderful for me. And then you stop and ask yourself this question, will I be able to do it? What are the chances of me doing that? If I'm honest with myself, will I be able to follow through on what I've set out in this big plan? And the word comes back, hopefully, hopefully I will. That's the problem. So if you look at, you can have intentions, right? You can reflect and you can find strategies in what you're going to do. I keep emphasizing that you make it so that it's not hopeful. There's no hope involved in it at all. You don't want to feel hopefully I'll be able to do it. If you're feeling like that, see that's, it would be one thing if you could say to yourself, there's no way I'm going to do that, right? That would be much more honest and helpful. It's the hopefully thing that keeps you attached to that big elaborate, unhelpful plan, the self-sabotage plan effectively. Hopefully I'll do it right. Sounds reasonable almost. When you create any sort of a strategy or an intention or a plan even for yourself, you should not feel hopefully I'll be able to do that. You should feel certainly I'll be able to do that. Why certainly? Because it's so easy. Because it involves so little. It's going to move you in the right direction, right? You're going to be making growth and you're going to be making progress towards your goals. But it's going to be so that it's the furthest thing from being overwhelming that you can possibly think of. And I encourage you to challenge yourself to really reduce it and reduce it and reduce it to the point where you're actually saying, there's no hope needed for this. I mean, of course I can do that. That's almost harder not to do it than to do it. That's how easy it would look. That's how you breed consistency. That's how you start certainly getting over this problem of procrastination. It's this big elaborate plan that we keep making that sabotages us. Nobody can do it. Nobody can do it consistently. And certainly sending that message to your nervous system, which is we're going to go do this huge thing. It's going to take like 10 hours. Your nervous system is going to be like, really? I've got other ideas actually about that. Starting from this baseline of not being active at all with this. We're not going to go to that level right now. And it shouldn't. Why would it? Because you feel too threatened by that, right? So it has to be much more gradual. But actually what isn't gradual, what never changes is telling yourself this is so incredibly easy. You only ever commit to small, easy things that you know you'll be able to do, not hopefully be able to do. That's the difference, right? And even after you've been doing this and what will happen is it'll work. You'll actually start to become consistent. You'll actually start to engage with those things. You'll have to start. You'll start stacking up these small wins. You're building psychological momentum for yourself. Now what happens at that point is you're going to notice I'm engaging more. I'm doing more. So then is it appropriate for us to come in and say, well, okay, well now I am really going to go back to that big plan because I've been taking more action. Maybe now I can make a big elaborate plan and set those higher standards for myself. And that's a big mistake. That's in fact the thing that brings people right back to square one. You never consciously want to tell your nervous system, I'm going to do a huge amount of work today because the nervous system will be like, well, so you're basically sidelining me and I don't have any say in this anymore. You start off with the super easy approach and then you continue and you see where you're going with that for as long as it continues, right? That's how you get worked on. But you never start off with this intention of I'm going to command or demand that I do a herculean amount of effort today in this. That's going to shut you down. That is not helpful and it doesn't facilitate you doing the work or moving towards your goal, whatever it might be. So the topic of this video, the takeaway from it is maybe you do make these plans for yourself about what you're going to do, what your strategy is, and you got to be honest with yourself. You might say, look at that. Well, I should be able to do that. I mean, it's logical. It's going to move me in the right direction. I should be able to do that. Should doesn't mean anything, right? Is it easy? Do you know you'll be able to do it or is there a hopefully I should be able to do it? That's where you go wrong with this. So it's about scaling back, scaling back, removing as much as possible. What's the least that my way of thinking about it is the way I always repeat this often is what's the least I can do and make progress. The procrastinator will say, how can I squeeze as much stuff into this day as possible? Completely overwhelmed with themselves and then leaning to that massive internal resistance to take in the next step. So what's the least I can do today to make progress? That's your baseline. You don't have to think about anything else until that's taken care of. Then after that, you can, you can revisit it, right? But what's the least I can do that will move me in the right direction. So remove the word, hopefully, you don't want to have hopefully in if you're struggling with procrastination, that's been a big problem, right? And you may not have identified it as such. But I'm telling you, that's an issue, right? Remove that and go back into what's certain for me, what do I know, I'll be able to handle. Keep it in mind. Hope it's useful. Like the video, share, do all those great things. Subscribe to the channel and you can contact me below. My information is there. Thanks for being with me. Hope it's a useful video and I'll see you again very soon. Bye bye.