The vicious cycle of procrastination and how to tackle it

Today’s episode of the podcast is all about procrastination - and if you’re thinking you’ve heard this 101 times before and don’t need to listen, please do, because you’re in for a treat! In this episode I look at procrastination from a different perspective than the way we usually hear it spoken about, and share my real life and practical tips for how to tackle it. If you struggle with procrastination you will learn a lot from this episode, so I can’t wait to hear what your biggest takeaway is, please do connect with me on social media and let me know. And if you know someone who regularly beats themselves up for not getting things done, then please share this episode with them too. I would really love for you to do that!   KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST How to slow down your procrastination process The role of self compassion in procrastination Practical tips to prevent procrastination   LINKS TO USEFUL RESOURCES Join my monthly mindset sessions in the Dream Business Club Teresa Heath-Wareing Instagram Teresa Heath-Wareing LinkedIn Teresa Heath-Wareing Facebook Teresa Heath-Wareing Twitter Transcript Hello and welcome to this week's episode of The Dream Business Podcast. And as always, I am your host, Teresa Heath - Wearing. If you are new to the podcast, let me take a minute to introduce myself. I am a business marketing and mindset coach. I am a speaker, a podcaster, and an online business owner, and I help small business owners through my membership, one-to-one work and my mastermind. So welcome. I am very grateful you are here and if you listen for a while, then obviously I'm very grateful you are here as always. Now, I mentioned last week that I am doing completely clean episodes and they are not being edited. So after 290, whatever this is, episodes, I have always had them edited. And then I just thought, you know what? I wanna simplify my life and simplify my business life. And actually I've been doing this for a long while. I pride myself on being authentic, so I just record them as is, and you get them. Obviously, if I mess up, I delete that bit as I'm recording it, so you're not gonna get me really making huge mistakes or say in bad language, so we should be fine. So today we're gonna be talking about procrastination, but I don't want you to think, oh yeah, we've, I'd know about this, or I've done stuff on how to try and work better and be more organized and manage my time. We're not actually looking at it from that point of view. I listened to a podcast and as if you are in my world and have been for a while, you know, I learn continuously. It's very important to me to constantly develop my knowledge and understanding of things, and I just love it. I'm one of those people that like, Could happily go to university for their entire life, I think, um, if they paid me, obviously. But, um, I really enjoy learning new stuff and I was listening to something weeks back about procrastination and they gave a different view on it. And so then I started to do some research as I do about what procrastination is. And I was kind of like surprised and relieved to find out some of the stuff that I did, because what happens when we procrastinate is we think we're lazy. We think we're either really un organise, really lazy. We get really frustrated with ourselves and we just think, why can't we get on and do it? And that really bothers us. And we know we're smart, we know we can do these things. So why is it that we don't do the things that we know we need to do? And when you run your own business, procrastinating can be really, really damaging for you because if you are putting off sending that proposal or reaching out to that podcast or connecting with that customer, then that can lead in loss of money. It's not just a case of, you know, you're gonna get told of by your boss. It, it really is a case of that could effectively stop you earning the money you should be earning, um, or the potential to earn money that you could be earning. So imagine my delight and joy when I did the research and it said, you're not lazy. People who procrastinate are not lazy people. And do you know what? For a long, long time I was told I was very lazy, uh, by my family for things like I would, uh, park as close as I could possibly park in a parking space, like if I had to walk somewhere. And then I realized actually I'm not lazy. I'm really efficient. Like that's my aim to be as efficient as possible. And I think lazy is such a horrible word, especially to be calling ourselves. So I was over the moon. When I discovered that actually it's not laziness, it's actually to do with your emotions, which I just thought like this is ace, but also like blew my mind a little bit because often so much comes back to us and our feelings and. And our own mind and our mindset, and it was just really reassuring to know that even something as practical of this comes back to it. So it's the fact that you are trying to avoid feeling in a certain way, okay? And by procrastinating, you are avoiding that one feeling you don't want to feel, and you are then moving to a feeling you want to feel. Let me try and break it down and explain it. And I think this is gonna be really helpful to you and anyone else, you know, who is in business that procrastinates. So if this is something that you, uh, can share, I think they're gonna really love this. Especially if they've been beating themselves up thinking, I dunno why I can't get this done. So if any friend has said that to you, you need to share this episode with them, and I think you're gonna learn a lot from it. Okay, so let's take you doing a proposal or something for work. So you've got a proposal to do and you know that you need to do this proposal. You know that that is one of the only ways that you are going to be able to get that business is by doing that proposal. And you know that actually when you've had the meeting with them and you're having a conversation with them, you're really excited about it and you think, yeah, this is awesome. I'd love to work for this customer. But what we try and avoid when. The emotions that no emotion is bad, but what we're trying to avoid with some of the emotions are the ones that don't feel great. So the emotion could be bored, it could be anxiety, it could be insecurity, it could be frustration, it could be self-doubt. So, Actually, when you think about some of those things and you think about, what if I was doing a proposal? Well, there might be an element of you that has serious self-doubt about the proposal. And in fact, when I think about it, lots of people I know do this. So they might be really confident in the work that they can do or, or they might not. They might think, well, I've never worked with this type of person before. And the self doubt is kicking in. They might think, yeah, I would love to do this work. I'm a little bit nervous about how much money I'm gonna charge them. And you might be feeling anxious about that. You might be thinking to yourself, I, I just dunno if this is right or if this is enough. So in our head, before we even get started, We think of the activity and our brain immediately goes, what do I know about this? And it's basically brings up some of those emotion, oh, I'm anxious about it, or I'm having some self doubt. Of course, unless you are over self-aware, you don't know this is going on. This happens in a millisecond in your brain and all it does and the thing that it really kicks in is makes you go, I don't wanna feel like that cuz no one wants to feel like that. Although none of these emotions are bad. And I remember like, You know, some of the things we say to our children or have been said to us as children of like, don't cry, don't get upset. And it's like, no, it's fine. And I have to say, I have conversations with my husband when I'm angry about something or upset about something, I'm like, I am allowed to have those emotions. These emotions are fine when they're in the right place. And actually, you know, I don't wanna stay here very long, but there's nothing wrong with me feeling them. But on the whole, we wanna avoid them and this is what's happening when we are procrastinating. It is just our very, very smart, clever brain trying to keep us safe from those emotions. We don't want to feel, but we probably don't even realise that we're feeling those emotions. Because one of the key things about mindset, and one of the key things about doing this work is slowing yourself down enough, which we don't do. And even with all the practice that I've done, it still takes work. But slowing yourself down enough to go, what's happening here? What's going on here? But okay, so let's ignore that side for to begin with. So what normally happens is within a very quick millisecond of a moment, our brain goes, oh, I don't wanna feel like this. So what our brain does very kindly is go, let's do something else that...