Ep. 159: Procrastination Isn’t the Problem: The Truth About What’s Actually Keeping You Stuck

Earlier this week I led a powerful workshop inside my coaching community where we talked about an issue I work on with my coaching clients somewhere nearly every single day - procrastination. 

We so often see procrastination as a productivity issue - and we see it as a personal problem where we just need to be less lazy, 

But, this isn’t what’s really going on at all - and in order to get unstuck and stop procrastinating it’s necessary to figure out what actually is going on. 

We’ll unpack that a bit on today’s episode of The Intentional Midlife Mom podcast. 

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Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Procrastination: The Real Issue
• 0:58 Unpacking the Symptoms of Feeling Stuck
• 1:11 Embracing the Present as a Midlife Mom
• 1:49 The Key to Effective Home Management
• 2:19 Understanding Procrastination: Myths and Realities
• 10:27 Root Causes of Procrastination

Transcript

All right, so let me just say this clearly upfront. When you find yourself procrastinating, it is not that you are lazy. It is not that you are undisciplined. It is not that you are bad at time management. But these are all the most likely culprits that we blame. Here's what is actually going on. It could be that you're tired. It could be that you're over capacity.

It could be that you've been holding everything up for everyone else, for who knows how long, maybe even years. It could be that you're struggling with the idea that you have internal limitations that mean that life must be different from what you wish it was. It could also be that you're dealing with external limitations. Could be things from work, could be caring, caring things for other people. It could be caring for family members. It could be dealing with

home projects and home repairs that just never end. And while you're carrying all of this, it's true that you're still functioning, which means that most people have no idea what's actually going on inside. You might not even know. And when I work with women who come to me and say that they're procrastinating, they come to me and ask for my help with procrastination. They truly see it as a productivity problem.

They think things like, I just need to get more motivated. I just need to have more willpower. I need your help in stopping, avoiding this thing. And in reality, what these things really are, let's call them sister symptoms. They're sister symptoms. But you're not procrastinating for any of these reasons. These aren't really even reasons. They're symptoms.

And so it's a matter of knowing that you need to get underneath the symptoms and underneath the realities as you see them and are experiencing them. You need to go deeper and figure out what's actually going on. And what I almost always find underneath the surface in any of the cases I see with my coaching clients where again, we're dealing with avoidance, feeling stuck, procrastination, lack of motivation.

closely related to procrastination, motivation procrastination, they're very closely related. But what's going on underneath is often one of these things. Number one, emotional exhaustion. You know, I had to get into my 40s before I really realized how much it takes out of us to process hard emotions and to process emotions at all. And as women,

Man, we're emotional beings, aren't we? You know, we go so deep on emotions a lot of times. A lot of times unnecessarily, a lot of times much to our, much in a self-sabotaging way. And so we could just be experiencing emotional exhaustion. And especially if we don't realize that we're emotionally exhausted, we don't know to fix it. We don't know.

to give ourselves some attention in that area. don't know that we need to fill ourselves back up because we are just emotionally depleted. And so for a lot of women, especially midlife women, they are just kind of in this chronic, emotional, exhausted state. And so I often see that. Another thing that I see, again, when someone comes to me and says, I just can't stop procrastinating, and they just keep avoiding and putting off, is perfectionism. You know, I have audiences all over the place. I've got...

email audiences, I've got Instagram, we've got the podcast here, other things. And I survey women a lot and I survey women a lot because I want to know how can I help you? I want to know the things that women just like you are struggling with. And so rather than speculate or assume I know, I ask a lot of the times. And within almost every survey that I send, there's a question that will help me know. Sometimes I come right out and ask about perfectionism. Sometimes it's

a little bit, it's a little bit of a masked question. But what I end up figuring out is that every time I ask about procrastination in one way, shape or form, between 80 and 85 % of the women that I ask raise their hand and self-identify as someone who struggles with perfectionism on some level, at least some of the time.

So perfectionism, and it's not always that I have to get this perfect. A lot of times what this actually looks like is that we have an idea in our mind about what it would mean to do something right. I want to do this the right way. I want to do it the way that I want to do it. And that's actually perfectionism also, right? There's one right way of doing it. And I've got it in my mind. And if I'm not doing it that way, I'm not willing to do it.

By design, our brains are wired to be very black or white. We are very right or wrong thinking. If you're not doing it right, that means you must be doing it wrong. And why would I want to spend my time and energy doing something that's ultimately just going to be wrong anyway? And so we don't. Perfectionism, that's also what I see a lot of the time. Another time what I see, and other times what I see with procrastination, is this fear of judgment. And

A lot of times it's fear of judgment from others, that is true, but also we're afraid to judge ourselves. This is a little bit like fear of failure at the same time. So fear of judgment. We're afraid of what other people will think. If I can only do it this way, what will others think? What will I think if I have to do it halfway or part of the way?

or not perfectly. So fear of judgment. Something else that I see underneath the symptom of procrastination is decision fatigue. Mental load, decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is something that we feel all the time. I wish that I could remember the number, but I remember that I was shocked when I read how many decisions we make as women every day. Like it was a...

Huge number. I mean, I would have guessed a lot, but this was far exceeding what any of my guesses would have been. How many decisions we make. And decision fatigue, is it any wonder we have decision fatigue then? And every time that you avoid making a decision, your brain is still trying to make the decision. even if you don't come to a conclusion with a decision and actually make it,

Every time your brain circles back to the fact that you need to make a decision about this thing, that's taxing your brain more and that's adding to that decision fatigue. I taught a whole class inside my coaching community called Living in the Land of Indecision and How to Get Out of It. Man, we spend a lot of our lives living in the land of indecision for multiple reasons. But decision fatigue, that is often an underlying root cause of the symptom of procrastination.

And it could also be that what's underneath procrastination is just never having learned the importance of asking ourselves, what is actually going on here? Or what is it I actually need? what would it actually take for me to do this thing? So these are all the root, the most common root causes that I see underneath the symptom.

of procrastination. And so if you've ever found yourself delaying, avoiding, or just flat out ignoring something that you know you should do, I want you to know this. It's not that you're lazy. It's that you're overloaded in some way. And so this brings me to something I've been teaching a lot lately through a tool that I created called the I'm Fine Decoder. Because procrastination, doesn't happen in a vacuum. It shows up.

when we've been pretending that everything is okay for a long time. And so then by default, we get to the point where we think we just need to try harder. So let me share a few of the signs if you, these are some of the signs you might recognize if you are someone who has been saying, I'm fine, but you're really not fine, fine on the outside. Number one, you look like you're functioning, but you're running on fumes. You never stop.

moving, but it's actually not momentum, it's avoidance. You keep going because you're avoiding certain realities.

Another thing you might experience is that you spend a lot of time resting and you hate it. You feel guilty because you're not doing it, whatever it is. And so then you pile on the shame, you pile on the self-hate, you pile on the resentment towards yourself and maybe others, and now you're supposed to somehow move forward underneath all of that weight. You've just completely crippled yourself.

I also see, and maybe you can relate to this idea that you feel guilty when you rest because there is always more to do. It could also be that you're the strong one that everyone leans on. But in reality, if you got honest with yourself, you're tired of holding it all. It could be that you check the boxes, you say the right things, you keep smiling, even when you feel disconnected. So if any of these things hit home, I just want you to hear this. You are not alone.

And it really isn't about fixing yourself. It's about understanding what's actually going on underneath the procrastination and giving yourself a way out of survival mode. So what do do if you've been procrastinating? And what do you do if you see yourself in all of this, in some of this? Here are three small but powerful steps you can take right now. And this is what we talked about in the workshop this week. And the women I was teaching really found

really found it to be helpful. Number one, it always starts with honesty. so step number one is to start with honesty. Ask yourself, what is it I'm actually avoiding? It's probably not the thing because oftentimes the task itself isn't that hard. A lot of times it's the emotion that's attached to it. What does that even mean? Well, could be a few different things. Could be fear of some of the most common ones or fear of doing it wrong, fear of failing, fear of judgment.

So figuring out what it is you're actually avoiding and asking yourself, is it an emotion that I'm avoiding? Because when you can name it, then that's when we can deal with it. If you can't identify what's actually happening, you don't know how to do it differently. And so that's where again, if you're, I call it treating the symptom, I'm procrastinating, you just try harder, you try to white knuckle your way, you try to push your way through it.

That's what we do is that's what it looks like to treat the symptom. But what we want to do is identify why am I avoiding it? And a lot of times there's an emotional connection, an emotional connotation associated with whatever it is that you need to do. And so figuring out what that emotion is and naming it can help you actually shift it. So starting with honesty, identifying. Then step number two is to take imperfect action. One of my favorite mantras to use to reframe

my mindset or my clients' mindsets is this doesn't have to be perfect. I just need to start. I like to talk about aiming for 80 % work. What would it look like to do this 80 % of the way? What would it look like to get this done good enough to be 80 %? We do not have to shoot for straight A's. We can shoot for B minus, C plus work. That's 80%. So it doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to be 80%. Doesn't that change

how you look at it. Start small, start with five minutes, start with one step, start with one email, start with one drawer. Procrastination hates momentum. And so if you can just get started, it doesn't take long for the momentum to kick in. And once the momentum kicks in, now all of a sudden, it becomes easier by default. So taking imperfect action, be willing,

to take any action at all and allow yourself the freedom to say, it's OK if it's not perfect. And then the third step here is to do what I call become a student of yourself. Becoming a student of yourself means you're just looking and interpreting and asking questions of yourself. You're looking for patterns. You're looking for the conversations that you're having in your head. You're looking for what you're actually saying. You're looking.

for what you're actually feeling. And you are also continuously kind of evaluating. How am I doing? How is it going? What's working? What isn't working? And for what isn't working, what might I try differently? What could I do differently? Always judging your effort, the things that you are doing or not doing. You're not judging the results. You're not becoming a student of the results. You're becoming a student of

What is the effort that I'm putting forth? How do the actions or inactions that I'm taking align with what I'm trying to do? Or how don't they align with what I'm trying to do? So if you have trouble kind of being this student of yourself and you kind of have trouble kind of decoding what you're actually saying, if you feel like you're stuck, if you feel like you're spinning out, if you feel like you're carrying more than you can manage,

My I'm Fine Decoder, it's a free tool and it will help you figure out what's really driving the overwhelm, what's really underneath that procrastination. So that again, then when we can name it, we can shift it. When we name it, we can deal with it. When we know what's actually happening, then we can say, that's what's actually happening. Now, what could I do to offset that? This decoder is super small, it's super short, it's super actionable and it's powerful.

And it really is for a lot of women, kind of the cork in the bottle that kind of allows the unraveling of really just starting to get curious about themselves, really just starting to look at themselves. So I've got a link down in the show notes where you can grab that tool for free. So make sure you check that out. So if you find yourself in a season where you're

kind of regularly asking, why can't I just do it? Why can't I just get it done? Why can't I just push through? Why can't I just do the thing? I hope that this episode has reminded you that you don't need to push harder. You need to listen deeper. You're not broken. You're just avoiding doing the thing for a reason that you've not yet uncovered. And it's in this uncovering that you're finally going to be able to get unstuck.

So take one small step today. You don't have to figure it all out today. You don't have to do it all today. You just have to be willing to move forward. You have to open yourself up to taking imperfect action. You have to be open to the idea that failure is a possibility. But failure is an amazing way to gather data.

Failure is a great way to figure out, what's working and what isn't. When we get underneath what's actually going and what's actually happening, and when we allow ourselves to move forward in an imperfect way, we're still moving forward. And it's better than staying stuck any day. So that's what I had for you today. If this episode resonated with you and you know of someone else who needs to hear this episode, will you please share it with them? That's how.

That's how we get the word out. That's how the amazing realities that we uncover and the mindset shifts that we make here on this podcast can become such a powerful tool for so many women who feel stuck and who feel like they're broken and who feel like they're the problem. And in reality, they just need to understand what the problem actually is so that then they can solve for that problem. So we would love for you to share this episode.

Leave a comment wherever it is that you're listening to this podcast. Again, that's what helps get this podcast out so that other women can hear these amazing messages as well. So until we talk again, make it a great day, everyone.