I’ve written about procrastination before and usually it’s about how to get over it or around it. Certainly a useful skill to build because procrastination plagues us all at one point or another.
When we procrastinate, usually it means one of a few things: we don’t actually know what to do, we don’t know how to start, or we’ve hit a block we can’t move.
This post isn’t about any of those.
This time, I want to give a little nod to the times when procrastination is actually HELPFUL because it’s telling us something important…
That we shouldn’t be doing the thing at all.
It is incredibly hard to make this distinction (because sometimes we really really REALLY don’t WANT to do the thing we DO actually need to do…) and yet if you can learn to split that hair, you may start to crack the code on honing into our best focus.
Because sometimes we are putting something off because it is actually dissonant. It is a thing we actually SHOULDN’T do. And something in our body and our energy is telling us that by pushing us away from it, over and over again.
Sometimes we have to take a long hard look at what we’re avoiding to see if our avoidance is actually telling us something important. Like looking at:
That coffee you never scheduled
That hobby you never started
That trip you never planned
The next time you find yourself procrastinating, consider: is this an issue of HOW (what to do, where to start, a roadblock) or is this an issue of WANT (you don’t truly want this thing)?
