You've All Been There

You've all been there.

Procrastination is a challenge, and you struggle with:

Making decisions - any decision from small to large.

Delaying, ignoring, or avoiding actions.

Making excuses for yourself and your actions.

Remaining in the background at a job/career.

Taking the initiative or completing tasks.

Practicing proper time management.

Procrastination can lead to and often results in daily burnout. It can negatively impact your self-talk, self-esteem, worth, emotions, and your state of mental health. Even short spurts of procrastination can leave you feeling overwhelmed, insecure, lacking motivation, and wanting to avoid everyone and everything around you; in short, you feel like crawling into a hole and never coming out.

Procrastinators can be energetically withdrawn from people, preferring to be by themselves; are time-wasters and avoiders, often blaming others and themselves, and generally have a noncommittal attitude towards projects, goals, or anything long-term, usually feeling 'why bother?'

Procrastination rarely, if ever, leaves you in a better position, although you might make excuses that sound very convincing or legitimate, yet all they are are 'beefed-up' versions of the original excuses you made to start with.

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Practice the Five A’s to Overcome Procrastination

Here are the steps:

1. Choose one task, chore, project, or anything that you do not at all like to do.

2. Commit to doing it first over any other.

3. Use the Five A's below to go through each phase of overcoming procrastination.

4. Repeat the Five A's with every task; positive results compound over time.

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Here are the Five A's that you'll repeat with every task you commit to.

Attune -

Phase one:

Here, you attune yourself to your reactions and thoughts to the task you chose to do first. You withhold any and all judgments and do your best to create a space in your mind to put your thoughts and reactions in, so they don't consume your life.

Awareness -

Phase two:

Here, you develop more awareness around your reactions and thoughts, and you begin to see the truth behind why you procrastinate in the first place. And by opening yourself to the truth, you are better positioned to succeed.

Acknowledge -

Phase three:

Here, you take a serious and honest look at the pros and cons of your procrastination by acknowledging and being 100% truthful with yourself about the results of your actions or inactions based on your original reactions and thoughts. Acknowledgment can be a hard pill to swallow, and sometimes, it can be where you might get caught up in the trap of self-pity and want to quit.

Accept -

Phase four:

Here, you make a choice to either take ownership of the truth of your reactions and thoughts, or you can choose to continue to procrastinate. It's up to you. It's only once you decide on ownership of your stuff that you can begin to shift your behaviors, which, in the past, have kept you stuck due to procrastination.

Act -

Phase five:

Here, you take action on the task because by now, you've gone through the Five A's and are 100% willing and ready to engage in, do, and complete the entire task because you have a higher confidence level in seeing and experiencing real, measured, and positive results.

Remember: Overcoming procrastination isn’t easy; I don’t believe anyone ever said it was. Yet, you can achieve the desired results with the right tools. Any change you want to make possible comes from within you; no one will do it for you.