“Why can’t I just DO it? What’s wrong with me?”
I used to ask myself (or rather yell) these questions A LOT after I developed some kind of plan and then never followed through.
Honestly, I still do get on myself sometimes because the truth is as my income and business goals expand, new fears get in the way.
It’s like you don’t know it’s a block for you until you go to do it, and find yourself cleaning the kitchen tile grout with a toothbrush instead.
I have come up with some really inventive (and not so inventive) ways to procrastinate over the years. Sometimes I even pat my ego on the back for it’s creativity. One of my favorites was deciding I needed to “energize” my workspace with crystals rather than make some calls to people about doing a workshop. (What is it about those damn calls??)
I literally spent over $100 in rocks to scatter over my space, of which I did diligently and strategically for several months based on the recommendations of several crystal energy healers online. Oh yes, let’s not forget about my hours of online research here.
But guess where my crystals are today. In a bowl. Are they pretty? Yes. Did they help me book a workshop? No. But they did deplete my bank account some versus add to it.
The kicker is that deep down we know when we are doing stupid shit like this, but head down that path anyway.
Why? Two main reasons:
1. Your primitive brain has a heck of a lot more willpower than you do!
It remembers your negative experiences and encodes any repeat instance as “dangerous” to you. It therefore pulls out all the stops to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
But your amygdala (your little “fight or flight” dongle thingie) isn’t that smart. It doesn’t separate your dad’s anger, often expressed at the dinner table as a way to vent about being “stiffed” by one of his big clients, from your discomfort surrounding these outbursts at age 9.
Therefore, you grow up associating anger and anxiety with having clients. Period. In this case, you will do ALL kinds of things besides work on acquiring clients. Not a great way to be an entrepreneur for sure.
You would be amazed at how many memories and experiences you have that sabotage your goals… even ones that now seem so insignificant.
2. You have some unresolved past-life issues.
That are creating a negative karmic energy that interferes with you making more helpful choices today.
This is the soul equivalent to sweeping the dirt under the rug. Let’s say that you steal money out of your friend’s mother’s purse when you are a teenager. Yea, teenage brain… not so brilliant at times.
You know you stole money, your friend knows you stole money, your friend’s mother knows you stole her money, and your own mother knows you stole money. But you don’t fess up or make it right, for whatever reason. Instead you deny and pretend it didn’t happen. You sweep it under the rug.
How does that feel inside to think about that event? How many years later do you still feel guilty and ashamed, but you now decide it’s too late to do anything?
These energies stay with you, and trigger you in similar circumstances.
Maybe you are now untrusting and believe that anyone can steal your money. Maybe you are over-generous with your money as a means to compensate for the way you feel about yourself. Now you have developed some pretty unhelpful money patterns in your life.
Next, I want you to imagine not just carrying this baggage around in THIS lifetime, but for the next however many lifetimes.
So five lifetimes from now you are so frustrated because you don’t have a f-in’ clue as to WHY you have these weird fears about people stealing your money and hence keep sabotaging your actions toward making needed investments.
The first step to stopping procrastination is to figure out WHY you procrastinate.
If you don’t understand the root cause, then you are just going to willy-nilly grasp at solutions that sound good but are ineffective.
My crystal collection is the perfect example of this. I decided that negative energy in my space was cluttering my mojo. Hey, it sounded good.
But the truth was that I was very much spoiled as a child, and my parents did A LOT for me, including making phone calls to my friends to see if they wanted to come over. This led to a crazy story that I created about myself, back in my elementary school days, that I was incompetent at making calls. Yes, really. See what I mean about seemingly insignificant events?
But I had to do the digging.
In order to help you do your own investigation work, I created a free guide that will walk you through the steps so you can get to the CORE of the issue.
Remember, if you don’t do this part FIRST, then you will most likely waste your time and energy dancing around the problem.