Overcoming Procrastination

happier wealthier Jan 28, 2021

Why do we Procrastinate?

Inside us are internal voices are protecting us. However, sometimes these voices are actually holding us back. These voices stop up from doing the things you know you should do. As Dan Lok so elegantly put it, these are our procrastination demons.

Procrastination Demon 1: Perfectionist
Procrastination Demon 2: Lazy Good-For-Nothing
Procrastination Demon 3: Measurer
Procrastination Demon 4: Futurist
Procrastination Demon 5: Idiot
Procrastination Demon 6: Dumb Listener
Procrastination Demon 7: Hopper
Procrastination Demon 8: Troublemaker

How to overcome these demons

Just start
Learn as you go
Don’t compare others
Describe your future in positive terms
Define a minimum that you will stick with it
Get a coach

[ The following is the full transcript from this week's post. This is a health blog with a focus on weight loss. Please consider that all episodes are unscripted, direct to camera, with focused talking points. ]

Hello, I am Kelly Cox, and I am glad to have you here today.

I want to talk to you about procrastination. We often have goals and objectives in our life, and we have this plan, and it is easy to be forward-thinking or future thinking. And then say “Okay, tomorrow, I'm going to start this workout.” or whatever it is.

And you are excited about it. You feel ready to go with it.

But when it comes time to take action.

And for whatever reason, that does not happen, and you think there is a why. You ask why is this not happening?

Well, you know, we have these internal voices in our heads.

There is kind of a subconscious level. In here is this dialog going on and it is our subconscious mind talking to us. And often we are not even aware of this “subconscious mind.” It is there to protect us and to keep us safe.

And that is great if you live in a world where there truly is a lot of things that are unsafe. For example, in prehistoric times, you did not want to go out and be eaten by a lion or something like that.

But we have adapted to where really, we live in a relatively safe environment, yet the subconscious mind interprets anything abnormal or foreign to us as potentially unsafe. And so, it is going to do things to try to get us to not take action because it is really trying to protect us.

As I said, there are times that this is good, but there are times that this is detrimental to you. Because the action you need to take is really something you need to do or something you should do.

And so, these voices kind of become kind of accomplices, if you will.

So, there are friends to support and help you to move forward.

But then, there is what I call accomplices. So, that means that there are some others still working with you, but they are really kind of working with you in a way that is not good, or we are producing bad things if you will.

So, I want to talk to you about these, these voices.

Dan Lok, does a great presentation, and it kind of breaks it down. He calls these procrastination demons and he kind of breaks it down into different demons.

I want to go over that.

The first demon that stops you from doing things, known as the first procrastination demon, is the Perfectionist.

That is someone that says, I need to do X, Y, and Z, but things are not perfect.

So, use the analogy of doing a push-up you decide. You know it, “Tomorrow, I'm going to start working out. I'm going to start by doing push-ups.”

Well, that time comes, and you sit there, and the perfectionist starts to question it all. Is my hand space incorrect? Is my form correct? Have I dressed appropriately?

And that voice starts to tell you that if things are not perfect, so now's not the time.

That gets you to procrastinate because you are a perfectionist and you are going to be telling yourself,

No.

Do not go.

Because things are not perfect.

That is one of the inner demons.

Another one is called, The Kind of Lazy Good for Nothing, and this is the one that is telling you “You know, we'll do it later. Let us watch this Netflix thing. Let us watch one more episode.

Let us go get something to eat.” Really it is just trying to find all these reasons to not do it.

The reasons are not good, but they are less painful or directly rewarding to you, so you kind of listen to that voice and you do not end up doing whatever you need to do.

The next voice would be what is called the Measurer.

This is where you are comparing yourself to others.

So, you think, “I am going to start doing push-ups, oh, wait a minute. My friend can do 30. I do not think I will be able to do 30, so I better not start yet, because I'm just not ready.”

You are comparing yourself to the external world.

So, you talk yourself out of doing that, because you are measuring what you think your performance is, going to be to others. And that is going to stop you from doing it.

The next procrastination demon is the Futurist.

That is the voice in your head that says.

“What if I do this? And I do not get the results I want. Or they are producing things that are byproducts, that I did not anticipate. And they are bad things. So, I should not, I should not even undertake this because I think it is going to give me X, Y, or Z. But the reality is, in the future, it might not, making it not worth it. Therefore, I shouldn't do it.”

They can tell themselves a story that, if they do, it may not produce the results they want, And, therefore, let us not even undertake it.

The next voice is what I would call The Idiot or The Procrastination Demon Idiot.

And this is someone that they know what they are supposed to do, but they just do not do it.

They just say, “I just don't understand it yet.”

This is kind of similar to the perfectionist, but the perfectionist is really driving on, I need to be perfect, whereas the idiot is just saying, “I just don't know how to do it. Let us go watch some YouTube videos or let us go read a book about it. Before we undertake this, and I'm just not qualified to do it.”

It is like the perfectionist. But it is on the other end of the spectrum because they are not striving to be perfect, instead, they are just saying I do not know how to do it, so I am going to do these other things to kind of get myself ready to do it.

The next procrastination demon is the Dumb listener.

And you see this, all the time that people will, say, I am going to do X, Y, and Z, and then their friend says, “Oh, no, no, no. You don't want to do push-ups you want to do cardio, that's the better thing for you.”

And they just start listening to the external world telling them what they should be doing as opposed to what they had planned to do. And those things basically become kind of opposition to what you are trying to accomplish. So, you end up not doing anything, because you are listening too much to the external world.

You see this all the time on Facebook, where people will put a question out there, and they are looking for a response, often they are getting responses. But they do not know anything about the qualifications of these responses. And they are starting to allow this to influence their behavior.

And the reality is, they did not need to do that in the first place. They need to basically, go ahead and execute their plan.

The next procrastination demon is what we call the Hopper.

This is someone that basically starts up and then quickly moves on to something else. So, they are never giving their plan time to produce any results.

So, they start push-ups, and day three. They say “You know what, I don't feel stronger and we're not getting bigger. My clothes do not fit any different, I am going to try something else.”

They are basically jumping and jumping, from a plan, to plan. So, they never stick to a plan long enough to really do things.

That is one of those voices in your head, that you need to silence. Because it is trying to get you to move to something else, Really, what it's trying to do is just get you to not move at all.

But it is doing that by telling you, “Well, maybe we should try this. Or maybe we should try that.” It creates confusion for you.

The final one is what I call the Troublemaker.

And this voice is basically telling you that you just cannot perform.

Let us use an example of push-ups. The voice is saying, “You can't do a push-up here the floor is dirty. You are not ready for this; you do not have the right equipment. You are not trained.”

The voice is really just disrupting your plan by basically trying to point out all these potential negative things.

The voice is trying to de-motivate you to not even execute your plan.

These are some of the demons, we all have demons in our head that are doing this.

One of the things you need to work on is becoming more aware of these demons in your head. Not necessarily responding to them.

In fact, the more awareness you can create, the more then you can say, “Hey, I hear you, but I'm not going to listen to you.”

Elevating our awareness of this is one of the things we can do to overcome these procrastination demons. It helps us to really understand “Why today did I have a plan to do X, Y, or Z, and now I am pushing it off, what is stopping me? What is that friction point?”

It is going to be one of these procrastination payments.

Well, how do you overcome these demons?

The simplest way is just to start. When it comes time to execute your plan, you start it. You are going to have all these voices in your head telling you all the reasons that you should not start. Specifically, if it is something that is unfamiliar to you or new or stretching you out of your comfort zone. These voices are going to be screaming at you.

And need to say, “I hear you, and I am still starting.”

The next thing is you need to accept that you can learn as you go, so you do not need to have this perfect mindset or the idiot mindset.

You can say, “Hey, I'm going to start, and starting it is going to create me the opportunity to learn. And as I start and continue to grow, I am going to become more efficient and better at it.”

That is part of the plan.

These voices could tell me all the reasons I am not ready, and they may be somewhat truthful, in the sense that I am not 100% ready. But how I am going to get to that point is actually starting and then learning from the process.

The next thing you need to do is you need to describe your future self in a positive term.

So often I hear people say they want to lose weight, but when you talk to them about their description of self, they really describe themselves in a negative manner.

“I am overweight.”

“I cannot move.”

“I cannot breathe.”

All these negative things.

And you need to reframe your future self into more of the self that you are striving to be. In more of a positive way. You must think that you deserve to be healthy. And so, therefore, I am putting in the work I deserve to have that. You need to look at your future self in a positive way.

The next thing you need to do is when you develop your plan, you needed to define what your minimum expectation is. And what I mean by that is, let us say you are going to start doing push-ups to increase your health.

You need to really think about the plan.

How long am I going to run this plan?

There is a point in life that sometimes the plan is the wrong thing to do, and you need to pivot to something else.

But the reality is, often we start kind of that pivot, really because we are driven by frustration because we are not progressing what we want to do. So, we abandon a plan too early.

You need to say, “I am going to do push-ups daily for the next 12 weeks and then I'll re-evaluate.”

Do not let the plan be impacted by your frustrations that happened during the plan.

So, if your plan already says, I am going to give it this much time, until I re-evaluate is this plan the right thing. Then that is going to help you not quit. You are going to have frustration during the execution of a plan that is new. And sometimes you got to give this plan time to really formulate and form the results you are pushing for.

So, if you pre-determined, “Hey, I'm going to say, I'm doing push-ups for 12 weeks and then, I'll re-evaluate.” versus doing push-ups, with no time, period, minimum. And day three, you are frustrated. Often you will feel the need to just abandon this plan.

If you can find a minimum amount of time of how long you are going to stick to this plan, it is going to help you.

Then, the final thing is, get a coach.

Anything you do in life, whether it is business, personal, financial goals, health goals, whatever it is. A coach is going to help you significantly, and what a coach does for you is, first of all, they help you see your blind spots.

So, by definition, a blind spot or something you cannot see. You may behave in a way that you do not understand or see the impact it's having on you and a coach is going to help you course correct.

That secondarily, they are going to make it easier for you because they are probably going to have tools or suggestions. Things you can do that allow you to produce the results you want. Without going through some of these negative things that other people have gone through because a coach has that awareness on things you can do.

These are just some things.

Procrastination is a real thing; we all struggle with procrastination. Remember, listen to that voice, acknowledge those internal voices, but then understand, you don't have to do what that voice says.

If it is one of these demons speaking up then acknowledge it, but then go ahead and move forward and execute and accomplish whatever goals you set out for.

So again, this is happening in your mind, and the more you can create your awareness, the more likely you are going to be successful.

So again.

You got this.

And if there is anything we can do for you, just let us know.

Thank you.

Kelly Cox MD, FACEP

Member, American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine

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