The Brilliance of Procrastination

I can make things happen. I’ve been doing it for a long time. My partner lovingly (and sometimes accurately) calls it stubbornness but I prefer to call it stick-to-it-iveness, perseverance, a strong work ethic or what my mother used to call good old fashioned elbow grease.

The feeling of procrastination used to drive me up the wall. I often felt lazy and I managed to heap all kinds of ugly stuff on top of that feeling that really ate away at any sense of self esteem I might have had at the time.

And then I heard another perspective: Procrastination as an early warning system that something is a little off at the moment? Hmmmmmmm – I was intrigued, so I looked at the perspective a little more closely.

The idea was to ask a question when procrastination came into the picture. And the question; what’s really going on here? The idea is to wait and let the answer come. And what does “waiting” look like? Well first I had to learn to curb my well-honed skills at making things happen and allow myself to step back from the situation in order to find out what was standing in the way.

Sometimes I “waited” by distracting myself with another task entirely, sometimes I focused on all the things that are going well in my life. If the situation allowed I might take a few minutes to meditate or breath deeply (sometimes adding the question – what’s really going on here?) And sometimes I simply took the dog for a walk or pet my cat. The point is I did something that allowed me to “hear” what was really going on.

Sometimes the answer came that I had some fear around the task (fear of failure, fear of disappointing someone, fear of looking foolish), sometimes the answer was that I didn’t have enough information to do the project as well as I wanted to and I needed to wait for that piece of the puzzle. And sometimes it was an indication that this wasn’t something I was suppose to do at all and I was getting the message to walk away. And way at the beginning, as I was learning to tap into my own intuition - it was my inner beings first attempt at getting my attention and letting me know that there was more going on than I could currently see. It was the first way I noticed that my higher self was actually balancing my desires in the moment with the “bigger picture”.

So, if the answer came back as fear, it was often enough to recognize it for what it was and do the work at moving through it (if you’re interested there’s some great resources on RubyShuze to help with this process). If I was simply tired or I didn’t have enough information then I allowed myself to walk away, get a rest (remember a rest can simply mean a change of perspective or 10 minutes of quiet somewhere) and allow myself to get back into balance with the task at hand. If the message was to walk away then taking the time to breath often gave me a stronger impression of that and I found a way to move on or at the very least find a different approach to the task.

Oh don’t get me wrong – I can always choose to motivate or psych myself up. I can push through, force the issue or convince someone else to take over. It all works. But then I find myself asking another couple of questions; do I want this; the easy way or the hard way?

Call me crazy but the older I get the easier I want things to be. And the wonderful thing about developing this “hearing” and actually listening to my inner voice is that one of two things tend to happen either the task is all of a sudden completely unnecessary or it gets done in a way that I get to marvel in the miracle of it – in knowing that it unfolded in such a way that was way better then I originally thought it would be.

Perseverance doesn’t have to be the answer to procrastination, but “just wait a minute” could be.

If you want to get better at aligning yourself before you take action, www.RubyShuze.com has some information that can help.