It’s called Procrastination.
In its best sense is the biggest derailer of all goals and achievements. Procrastination is a learned habit that we create for ourselves to avoid something we are not willing or ready to do. Some of the reasons we procrastinate are:
- Avoiding risks – we rather stay in the comfort zone
- Lack of time management
- Sidetracked by other things
- Fear of failure or even success
- No clear focus on the goal
- Lack of confidence or self esteem
- Put it off until another day
Procrastination keeps so many people from reaching their potential in so many realms. For weight loss especially, procrastination allows you to read the health magazines and continue to be inspired by other’s weight loss success stories on youtube and blogs. Then, without fail, gets in your head, drowning your thoughts in all the reasons why today is not a good day to start.
It’s about the fear, the self-doubt, the worry about not being good enough, the doubt about whether being able to finish, and the expectation that it’s going to be a really hard and frustrating process.
Because everyone can make time on other projects that interest them. In fact, many make sure to create the time because of the joy they get from working on them.
Sneaking Past Fear the Kaizen WayThe idea comes from the Japanese art of Kaizen. In his great book
One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, Robert Maurer describes it as a gentle and elegant strategy to maintain excellence and realize dreams.
He explains how when we try to do big things and make big changes, it triggers our stress response and makes us avoid. So the solution is to make tiny, incremental changes, so imperceptibly small that you don’t activate your stress response.
All Kaizen asks is that you take small steps for continual improvement.
1. Ask small questions to dispel fear and inspire creativity.
Big questions, such as “How can I quit my job and find my purpose?” tend to overwhelm us. Small questions help us get around our fear and start making progress, especially when we ask them regularly.
Maurer illustrates this point by asking you to imagine coming to work and having a colleague ask you to remember the color of the car parked next to you. You probably wouldn’t remember. If they asked you the same question the next day you probably also wouldn’t remember. But by the third day, as you arrived at work, you would probably pay attention to the car parked next to you.
Asking yourself tiny questions consistently helps you teach your mind what to pay attention to.
He recommends asking yourself your question a few time throughout the day for a number of days in a row.
I’ve been using this by combining two questions: “If I was guaranteed to succeed, what would I be doing differently?” and “What small step can I take today to move me forward?”
Some other questions you could consider asking yourself daily:
How could I make working toward my goal more fun?
Who can I ask for help today?
What’s the simplest thing I can do with the time I have available?
2. Think small thoughts to develop new skills and habits.
The second strategy involves a kind of mental rehearsal called mind sculpting, which helps you develop new social, mental, and even physical skills just by imagining yourself performing them. Here you identify the task you want to achieve from your questioning process and then begin to imagine yourself doing it.
But instead of seeing yourself on a moving screen, as is the traditional visualization technique, you are advised to feel yourself doing the task and incorporate all your senses.
And the important part—seeing yourself enjoying the process. Because we avoid what we imagine will be unpleasant and painful.
The idea here is that by doing this for a period of time, you start to rewire your association to the task, which makes it easier to then take small actions.
So choose a task that you’re afraid to do or something that makes you uncomfortable and decide how long you’ll practice for each day. Make the time commitment so little that you’re going to do it consistently, as repetition is important. Maurer recommends starting with a few seconds a day!
510 Wisconsin St.
