( 2 Votes )

There's that article that I've been wanting to write on procrastination... and you know what, I'm going to do it now!

I've been trying to write it for ages, starting and stopping, swapping and changing things, re-starting again, and it just didn"t work. Because it was not working, I stopped writing, "to give it a break". And then, when the time came to take up the pen again, I just couldn't - or wouldn't.

Then, as I was duly procrastinating -surfing the net, I came upon one of Isaac Newton"s principle of physics:

"An object at rest will tend to stay at rest". Eureka! How astoundingly profound! How deeply inspiring! Of course, it"s so obvious, if you"re slumped on the couch, you tend to stay on the couch; if you stop writing, you tend to not write and when you"re not acting, you have difficulties starting to act again. Suddenly, this made a lot of sense to me. I had stopped writing and now I was finding that I just couldn"t start again; didn't feel like it, wasn't inspired. Inertia had set in.

Lots of questions poured into my mind. So, is this what happens with procrastination? Is this what happens with exercise? With eating well? With new resolutions? With all those things that we have put off for such a long time? Then, what do you do to get things moving again when you haven"t been active for some time?

The amount of effort required to get that inanimate object into motion will be more substantial the longer the object has been at rest. When you"ve been at rest for so long, just the idea of starting to move again can be overwhelming. You need to start slowly by doing baby steps. A question that I often ask my clients is: "What is a small step you can take today towards your goal?" And if what they tell me is still overwhelming to them, I ask them to go even smaller until they find something that they feel confident they can do. And then they go: "Hey! That wasn't so bad!" So they try another step, and again: "That wasn"t that bad either!" And as they try just one more baby step, they suddenly start to get the ball rolling. The problem when we want to overcome procrastination is that we often see the whole picture and it gets too much. We go into overload and we feel like giving up before we even get started. In order to get in full swing, we need to take smaller chunks. One of my friends has a not-so-funny-joke that relates this principle quite well:
"- How do you eat an elephant? - One mouthful at a time."

This also reminds me of a book I read where a pilot tells how he survived in the snow after his plane crashed in the mountains, and how he was able to make his way to a place where he could get some help. He was constantly thinking of his wife and children and was determined to live through this to get back to them. What got him through he said, was the thought "just one more step, I"ll do just one more step". And each step he took brought him close to his family.

This brings me to the second tip: Having a goal worth going for is also important. This guy was able to survive because he wanted to see his family again. Somehow I doubt he would have succeeded if he had thought: "I really need to be back at work on Monday!"

So some questions for you... Why did you stop doing whatever you were doing? Why did you stop exercising? Why did you stop acting? Dancing? Singing? Was it worth stopping? Is your goal worth going for? Then what is one small step you can take today towards it? Something small, something easy. What would it be: pick up the phone? Make that appointment? Call a friend to ask for help?

If your goals aren"t satisfying enough to keep you going, if they don"t inspire you and don"t pull you forward, maybe you should review them. Perhaps they are wrong for you or you"re not meant to be doing them.

However, if you are determined to get to your goals, then start now. One small baby step is all it takes... before you know it, you"ll have written a whole article!

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