Procrastination, when you know you should do something but you don’t do it, is the greatest robber of self-confidence. It eats away at you. You feel bad about you. One important enhancer of self-confidence is self-discipline.

I am not talking about running a marathon. It is knowing what needs to be done and doing it. There is no guilt, just the pleasure that comes from making progress, implementing an idea or taking action on something that matters to you. It is the real and pure source of achievement.

Self-discipline sounds like such a tough, no-fun type of word, but it is really about making one decision — do I do it, or do I not do it? If you decide not to do it, then wear the consequences. If it is no big deal, then stop beating yourself up about it and move on!

If you decide to do it, then first of all take the smallest and easiest step possible. It’s not about completing it; it’s about starting, about gaining some momentum.

Too often we become too focused on completing the task. If you want to beat procrastination forever, then stop thinking about finishing the task and just focus on starting it. The challenge most people have with thinking about finishing the task or project at hand is that there is so much to do, so many steps, so much time needed to make it all come true. Turning it around and just focusing on starting takes all of this thinking out of the picture.

THE GREATEST ROBBER OF
SELF-CONFIDENCE IS PROCRASTINATION
THE GREATEST ENHANCER OF SELF-CONFIDENCE
IS ACHIEVEMENT.

A recent participant in one of my Passionate People Programs shared that she had been procrastinating about finishing her master’s degree. She had one assignment to complete and the degree was hers. I asked the question: ‘What is the first step you need to take?’ Her reply was simple: ‘Complete the research.’ But I disagreed.

Now I have never completed a master’s degree, so I could not offer her authoritative advice, but it seemed to me that was too big a task or chunk to start off with. The key is picking something you can do in just five minutes. So my suggestion was first to create a list of the items she needed to research, not to actually do the research.

For her, getting started meant compiling a list of the topics she needed to research, setting herself a deadline for writing the outline of the assignment and booking library time.

When it comes to beating procrastination it is never about finishing; it is only about starting! Don’t wait until everything is perfect, START NOW!

Think about it like this …

‘A good plan started today is better than a perfect plan started tomorrow. your goal is to get it going, then you can get it right!’

I was giving a presentation in Far North Queensland in a tiered auditorium with over 150 people attending. I did an activity with the group in which they wrote down one task they had been procrastinating over and then noted how long they
had been doing so.

I then asked them to put up their hand if they had been procrastinating over that task for more than a week, a month, a year or two years. The longer the time period the fewer hands remained raised, until just one person still had his hand up. So I asked him how long he had been procrastinating over this one task. His answer: 27 years!

I had to ask him if he would mind sharing the task with the group. Sure! Building a barbecue in his backyard, which by the way he had half built already!

People procrastinate over tasks for far longer than it would have taken them to complete the task in the first place. He walked past that half-finished barbecue all those years, constantly reminded of his failure to finish the job.

Maybe you suffer from a similar tendency to defer decisions or actions. This is called perendinating. If procrastination is putting off the task until tomorrow, perendinating is putting it off until the day after tomorrow. If procrastination steals self-confidence, then perendinating steals hope. Ultimately it could be an accurate definition for giving up.

When you have no hope, your capacity to dream of what is possible is destroyed. So replace procrastinating and perendinating with being proactive.

Write down one task you are procrastinating over and then write down the smallest step you can take in the next five minutes. Just pick any one action you can do in five minutes to start, whether it’s making a call, confirming an appointment, scheduling some planning time or sending an email to reconnect with someone.

By removing items you are procrastinating over you start to remove the crap, clutter and confusion from your life. These three things make us busy rather than productive, producing movement rather than momentum. Procrastination is also the enemy of focus. It’s hard to focus on what’s important when you are bogged down in the trivial. Sometimes we need to get our base camp in order before we can climb to the summit.

What crap do you need to remove from your life?

What clutter do you need to clean up?

What confusion do you need to gain clarity about?

THE ONLY THING HOLDING YOU BACK FROM
FINDING GREATNESS IN YOUR LIFE IS YOU!