Fake It, Till You Make It

I was talking to a lady that had contacted me abut coaching through the website the other day when she brought up the problem of procrastination. I said to her that this was a common problem that I encounter and if her procrastination was that bad she probably wouldn’t have e-mailed me in the first place. Afterwards I was thinking about this and started flicking back through some clients notes. I now reckon that is the single biggest issue that people come to me with. I think if I’d have guessed prior to that I would have said dissatisfaction with their job or maybe stress management but they weren’t even close.

So why is it that we procrastinate? Firstly, I would like to say that we pretty much all do it from time to time and it is nothing to beat ourselves up about. (see last paragraph)

My personal opinion is that it comes from a human desire to keep the status quo and shy away from change. Procrastination often leaves things exactly as they are right up until the very moment that proceeding to procrastinate causes us problems. Not exercising until we become ill, not cutting down on eating fatty foods until we become overweight, not writing that report until the boss is hallowing in our ear etc This is all part of the pain and pleasure NLP Meta program, the belief that our actions are either designed to move us away from pain or towards pleasure at any one point in time. I don’t really want to go any further into Meta programs as I think I will cover that in depth in my newsletter at some stage www.adaringadventure.com

What I would like to suggest though is a simple strategy for stopping procrastination. It is simply the fake it until you make it strategy. This can be used in many areas of your life and can be incredibly successful if implemented correctly and with a sense of fun.

So what if next time you couldn’t make a decision, you just guessed? That you picked one route, one decision, or one outcome and stuck to it? Forget whether it was the correct decision in the long run, that’s not important, just celebrate that you made on at all.

So how does this help with the bigger stuff that you know what to do but don’t want to do it you may ask? Well again, just fake it. Decide to pretend that you never procrastinate and stick with it for 3 or 4 weeks. It will feel weird but that’s ok, because it’s only a game after all and you can go back to how you were at the end of the experiment.

Decision-making is like anything else in life, the more we do it, the better we get at it. So by faking decisions you are sending a signal to your unconscious that you are good at this decision making stuff because it doesn’t really know the difference between faking something and just doing it. So in time you actually do become proficient at getting stuff done and it’s no longer necessary to fake it.

By the way. I started to write this blog on Sunday and half way though got distracted and put it off. The irony was completely lost on me until this morning when I returned to it!

 

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