Anth Quinn

Experts agree that one of the most important skills you can develop in life is the ability to create your future in your mind before it happens.

This is commonly thought of as creating your personal vision of success or even just simple goal setting, but you may be surprised to find out that it is also crucial to overcoming many forms of procrastination.

If you think about it you can only procrastinate on something for which you have some form of outcome, otherwise how could you be procrastinating on it?

Are you someone who feels they would benefit from procrastinating less? If so read on…

You’ll hear a lot of people say that procrastination is often caused by fear of success and in some cases this may be true.

But in my experience having helped people from all walks of life to become more focused, fulfilled and productive, this is not what it seems.

I’ve worked with lots of people who thought they were held back by their underlying fear of success and as we’ve explored this it soon becomes apparent that they have a very hazy view of what success actually means to them.

If you’re someone who thinks they have been holding themselves back for fear of success, I’d like to suggest you grab a pen and paper and stop for a minute and answer the questions below:

What specifically does succeeding actually mean to you?

How would you know if you had succeeded already?

Really take the time to answer this in sensory detail, what would you see, hear and feel – what would other people actually see you doing?

Imagine walking through a specific example of having been successful.

If you don’t like the description of succeeding you might like to rethink, because if you don’t like the result – maybe it’s not really success to you?

One of the important points here is that it’s not fear of succeeding that has held you back, it’s what you have been believing about success that has been holding you back.

But that’s not the point of this article, the point of this article is that it’s only be taking the time to actually describe in detail what you want that you can actually make progress.

Your enemy in overcoming procrastination may not be fear of success and it is very likely being vague and unspecific!

By far the most common trigger and cause of procrastination that I have come across in listening to hundreds of people is a sense of vagueness about the tasks to be completed.

If you aren’t clear on the outcome and the task then it’s all too easy to turn to something else for a quick fix of completion – surfing the net for that book, answering emails, phoning a friend – before you know it your minds in a tailspin of unplanned activity and you’re beating yourself up for another wasted hour!!!

It doesn’t have to be that way.

One simple “quick fix” is to use the magic question “What’s the next step?” mentioned in an earlier video on the Blog.

But a better long-term strategy is to develop your skills in mental rehearsal.

A lot of people can get hung up on this because they think of it as visualisation and they don’t see clear mental images in their head. Mental rehearsal does not require you to have clear pictures in your head - I don’t “see” clear images but I can still imagine and that’s all you need to do.

Why not try it now?

In a moment, I’m going to ask you to close your eyes – but read the instructions below first :o)

Sitting at your PC, close your eyes and imagine going to the kitchen (or coffee machine etc. if your in the library, school, office etc.) Are you walking? In a chair? How does it feel, what are you aware of? What sounds can you hear? As you mentally run through the process of going making yourself a drink and coming back to the PC?

When you’re ready, close your eyes and run through the process.

That’s how easy mental rehearsal is and as you practise using this skill to imagine doing the activities you’ve been putting off you’ll find that the more detail you add the easier it is to do the task.

This may sound simple but I promise you that if you develop the habit of mentally walking through, imagining the task with increasing detail you’ll find yourself naturally taking action without realising how easy it’s become.

To make it even easier on yourself, just pick on simple activity you would prefer to change and imagine walking through it now.

When you’ve done this, see if you can spot something red in the room and then…

Repeat this process but now imagine how you would prefer to behave.

Add lots of detail as you relax and just imagine moving through each step of the process – how will you be sitting/standing/ walking - where will you be most aware of in your body? What will be the most obvious things you notice as you begin to focus on the finer details of your experience? Run through the process until you’ve completed the activity in your mind.

Repeat this 5 times and then just do it once a day for a week and see what happens as you get better and better at adding details to your desired future

If you don’t think this will work, let me know and if you do decide to give it a go now, come back and tell us how it helped below

Have fun,

Anth.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 5th, 2008 at 11:03 am and is filed under Procrastination. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.