Want to Overcome Procrastination? Focus on this One Thing.

So the method in my new book on how to overcome procrastination is probably simultaneously the easiest thing you can do to overcome the problem and also the most challenging. It's two things at the same time, two completely opposite things seemingly. What's easy about it? Well, it tells you to stop. It tells you to stop pushing, stop recommitting and re-promising, to have boundaries with things. So it's not about taking more action. Instead, it's about developing self-trust in that sense. Actually, most people, when they hear it at first, they'll say, this sounds too easy. This sounds like I'm letting myself off the hook. And that's true. It is easy. It's incredibly straightforward, in fact, the method. There's basically three steps. You commit to a start time. You either show up and do it or you do not. And if you don't, no more recommitting to that task for the rest of the day. Three steps. It's super simple. There's no 15 step productivity hacks here. That's the method. You do that and the promise is that your productivity will massively improve. Your issues of procrastination will resolve themselves very quickly. You do it for five days. So that's the easy part. Why is this method challenging? Dennis left a comment and he was talking about how it might be a challenging thing. He was making some great points. And I want to kind of agree with him here. The thing that makes this challenging is when you stop recommitting, scrambling, re-promising, I'll do it soon. Okay, not 11, 12, 30. It invites you to step into when you step away, but you are open now to reflecting on why did I not show up for that task when I said I would, right? So it invites you to reflect and that is challenging. If you think this is easy, trust me. The openness to being reflective on that is a challenge because typically there could be all sorts of deep pain underneath all these reasons for why we're procrastinating on something. It could be trauma. It could be even addictions or certainly what I would find is the common denominator for all of them is this sort of defective story we have about ourselves. Now, that defective story is so painful that we have created defenses around it. We don't want to look at it. Okay, just get it as far away from me as possible. I do not want to re-examine that because it becomes a belief, right? It's like taken as granted. That's the truth of who I am. There's something wrong with me fundamentally. It's not true. And reflection is required to be able to look at that and say, okay, this is what has been happening here. This is what's leading to this. It's not about tweaking my plan or making productivity hacks or whatever. It's deeper than that. So it is challenging to commit to the process of reflecting, to look at with honesty what's really happening there. There seems to be a conflict. Part of me wants to do it. Another part doesn't. Why am I not doing it, right? Whatever that might be. And it's not about whether you should do the thing or not. It's more about reflecting on what's happening with this conflict within myself. I'm trying to understand it more. But again, that reflection, there is a resistance to doing that reflection, because of that defective story that's there within us. So even though it's challenging, and I'm certainly not in denial about that, I think many people would hear me say this, and they'd be kind of surprised to hear that we have this resistance to reflection. But because it's challenging doesn't mean it isn't valuable, and it certainly isn't something you have to be great at immediately. It's more the book and this method is about inviting you to start looking in that direction, to get curious about yourself, to be more and more willing, not perfectly willing at the start, but more and more willing gradually, even with help. With certain things in life, with serious, serious issues, it is important to get help, to look at those conflicts or that defective story with somebody else, certainly with an addiction or with massive conflict in our lives, things like this. It can be so helpful to have somebody who understands those types of conflicts that you can look at them with somebody else. But the method in the book, it's easy, it's super straightforward to do. But be aware that for most of us, we have created sort of a wall around looking at this stuff. So we kind of stay away from the reflection. But it's an invitation at least to start to get into that reflective mode more and more. So that's what it's trying to instill. It's to get out of the doing and recommitting and trying harder mode into deep breath and slow down here. And now let's just go into reflecting on, and yes, there's resistance. And yes, a part of me won't want to do it. But if we have the tendency to do that more and more and practice that reflection, we start to get the genuine insights and the genuine healing that can come from that. Yes, occasionally, sometimes with somebody else. It's helpful to do that absolutely with support. We have a group we meet on Tuesdays, and I think it's so helpful because all of the people in the group, we're all there for the same reason. We're all being vulnerable. We're all talking about, we're not sugarcoating it. We're telling it like it is, and we're sharing these insights that are coming through reflection. So the links for that are below if you want to join that group. But reflection is not easy, but it is worthwhile, and it's the goal, and it's the direction we want to start moving towards. So that's why it's a challenging method, right? It's super simple in one sense, but in another sense, it will challenge you. More so than you trying to do a 90-day consistency challenge, even. As hard as that can be, torturous as that can be, in my experience, which is why I don't recommend it. But this reflective practice is very, very powerful when we can start to move in that direction. So I hope that's useful, and maybe it'll be useful for people who are trying the method and applying it. Have patience with yourself when you're doing this reflective work. It is challenging, but it is deeply worthwhile, and if you're moving in that direction, you're moving in the right direction, I would say. Thanks for being with me. See you guys very soon. Bye for now.