As a professional life coach, and someone who often helps people with productivity, today let’s address one of the all time most common questions a coach will ever receive:
“Why do I procrastinate?”
I’m going to cut through the fluff and get straight to it.
Here’s how it plays out for most of us:
STEP ONE:
We start by default in a state of pure awareness and presence, with nothing on our mind and an awareness of the Divine. (Of course, this doesn’t last long for most of us, and it may have been years since you remember experiencing it. Perhaps you only remember it happening once in a while on a particularly spiritual evening when you were engaged in prayer, or when you are walking in nature, or when you first saw your newborn baby. However, I can assure you, this pure presence is the actual default for a human being and with a bit of training and practice you can discover this truth for yourself.)
The problem is, sometimes when we have a job to do, we jump to…
STEP TWO: Negative Feeling
Because the nature of personal thought is that it continuously changes form, pretty soon we make up a thought in our mind that has a negative feeling attached to it.
And we really don’t like those negative feels. So we instinctively jump to…
STEP THREE: Mental Thought-Form Stories
We immediately run from the negative feeling in our minds, in an attempt to avoid feeling upset or disappointed or angry or guilty or anxiety. We typically do this by immediately creating a story in our mind. This may be a story of our past, or an imaginary future, or an imaginary conversation with someone, or it could take any other form. This story in our mind typically comes with some amount of internal drama and conflict and we may switch to and fro, back and forth, from the negative feeling to the story.
STEP FOUR: Distraction & Procrastination
Eventually, we get fed up of this self-torture so we look for a way to numb ourselves by engaging in other people’s thoughts. Instead of watching a movie in our minds, we watch an actual movie. Instead of our own thought-created drama, we engage in a social media or reality TV drama. We do whatever it takes to get our mind off the topic.
Before long we discover that we’ve spent a few hours not doing our work, all because we went to a physical distraction, like watching sports, or playing games, or watching TV shows, or engaging in social media or any other compulsive addictive behaviour that seems to temporarily quiet the mind.
And we do this because we’re fed up of the stories and dramas that go back and forth in our own minds.
We make up those stories and dramas because we wanted to avoid a negative feeling that was coming up in the present moment.
And we want to avoid the negative feeling because we don’t realise that if we just stay present to it, it will dissipate within a few moments, and we will go back to pure awareness of the present moment and to enjoying the bliss of Allah’s Presence.
So that, my dear friends, is why we end up procrastinating.
If you’re ready to transform your level of consciousness and mindset so that procrastination becomes a thing of the past, not an ego-trap that sabotages your future, then don’t wait any longer.
Stop procrastinating right now by on tapping the link below and get started coaching with me:
