2.3: Procrastination: The Strategy
Seeing your procrastinating as a strategy and learning how to curb or master it when its not useful…
OK, stay with me here, hear me out… What if your procrastination was a skill?!! In a way, it is! I mean its something you can do in some situations, but not others, which suggests its triggered by certain things. And if your actions are triggered by specific things, then we need only control the triggers, or reprogram the response… correct? Excellent! We’re already starting to re-think procrastination in a more useful way!
Add to this the idea that procrastinating is likely a learned (and tried and tested) strategy too. That means it serves some sort of ‘positive’ purpose, even if overall the experience isn’t a positive one.
Stick with me here… Procrastinating, the way you do it, is not something everyone can do. I mean, for example, someone with OCD simple cannot procrastinate closing the door x # of times or washing their hands just so (or whatever it is for them)… Yet you can procrastinate on doing the washing, going to the gym, planning that girls night out… whatever it may be… So thought of in this light, your procrastinating could be considered a skill AND as something that is unique to you and controllable only by you. And there is power in that!
But you’re ready for change. Am I right? You’re ready to find a BETTER way to meet the positive intention of this strategy, that gives you more choices and flexibility… Excellent! I’m loving your new choices already!
First, I’ll run you through now to use this sub-modality-based technique (anchoring) and your new awareness of HOW you think, to help you create a motivational mindset. Because often we think of procrastinating as something we do when we aren’t motivated toward a particular task. So OK, lets do motivation INSTEAD! The outcome of you installing this anchoring technique is a greater ability to control your emotional state to help you feel ready to create that epic life you’re envisioning.
This 22 minute video both explains HOW COME some of our thoughts/feelings feel so real and seem to have so much ability to control our experience and actions. In NLP terms I explain the sub-modalities which describe how we program our thinking and experience, and anchoring which is a process we use unconsciously and automatically to trigger specific reactions to certain stimuli. If you want a longer explanation please reach out to your coach and we can go through this in more detail.
Watching this will also help you with the HELL NO-procrastination technique I want to get round to introducing you to in the next video, so watch them in the order they are shown!
Understanding Procrastination
Procrastination – its a really interesting skill, and it’s a strategy with a positive intention – even though the result is very often not so positive.
The thing to know about any strategy is that they have a beginning (triggered by something), a process you run to do the thing, and an end (with some form of test that lets you know its time to exit). Any strategy can either be tweaked or interrupted to change its effect OR you can choose to replace it with another strategy that works better for you, when you bring you attention and mindset skills to it.
If you interrupt the strategy continuously, you can disorient yourself and that can lead to unsuccessful procrastination – this is a simple, fun strategy you can use to change your procrastination response. I will demo this in our next live call. For now, I want to go one deeper, to transform how you FEEL about the task you were procrastinating on – for me that is more powerful.
So, in this NLP process I’m going to introduce you to that’s the approach, we first take the good parts from the strategy (the higher positive intention) and then we replace procrastination/excuses with more aligned actions…. Sound good? Good! Let’s do that. This process has lots of steps, so stick with me. You can read the basic process in the PPTs that I use in this video too, which are attached in the pdf below. I’ve also included just the process steps as an image for your easy reference.
I can’t wait to hear how you experience and enjoy this one, and what you notice about your productivity and new actions afterwards!