Why We Procrastinate and Some Tips on How to Overcome It

The Self-Awareness and Self-Compassion Podcast

When we’re stretching for a goal, we often find ourselves procrastinating and not understanding why we aren’t doing it.

We can easily self-sabotage when working toward a goal by believing that it’s not worth bothering to try because we have unreasonable expectations about timelines.

One of the lies we tell ourselves is that we can start tomorrow, and we believe that somehow tomorrow we will feel better about it or it will be easier to start than it is right now – but that’s not true. It will be just as hard tomorrow, we will have only succeeded in putting off what we could have started today.

We think something outside of ourselves will make it easier to do something, but really it is through the action of doing a thing that makes future repetitions easier.

When we know that, we can relieve ourselves of the expectation that it will feel better tomorrow or that it will be easier another time. This frees up more space to tackle the issue with the energy we have now.

It is wonderful to nurture the thought that you can do hard things and that having some stress in your life is a good thing. Especially if the stress is from something you chose to do rather than something outside of your control.

A great strategy to overcome procrastination is to allow yourself to consciously indulge in something restorative before tackling the goal – and then stick to your timeline and practice your goal for a short burst of time. This is more doable than dedicating an entire day or several hours to your project and can jumpstart your ability to begin.

Setting our sights too high to reasonably accomplish also can derail us from starting.

There is a lot of energy gained from building in praise for yourself for your efforts and rallying yourself and/or others to cheer you on and give positive feedback to you to sustain your efforts.

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