Don’t Turn Your Back to the Waves

Let me tell you another true story.  I grew up along the western shore of Lake Michigan in southeast Wisconsin.  When I was a small child, my parents used to take me down to a local beach to swim in Lake Michigan during the summertime.

One summer day, when I was a small child of about five years old, I was playing in waste deep water with my back toward the waves.

A large rouge wave rolled in, hit me and knocked me over.  I swallowed a large mouthful of water was immediately disoriented, turned upside down and pushed under the water.  I was struggling to come back to the surface.

I may have actually drowned if my dad did not reach down into the water and pull me back up to the surface. 

Being knocked down by a rouge as a child was very dangerous.

As an adult, I was on vacation on the Hawaiian island of Maui, swimming in the Pacific Ocean.  I was waste deep in the water with my back turned toward the waves. 

Again, a rouge wave hit me and knocked me over.  I was ground into the sandy bottom and moved around with great force.  Enough force to cause serious injury.  I felt like I was inside a washing machine filled with sand.

As I am a good swimmer and an experienced scuba diver with several certifications, I was not in any real danger of drowning. I eventually popped back up to the surface. 

However, there was no place on my body that escaped being coated with sand, from my head down to my toes. 

Being knocked over by a rouge wave as an adult was very uncomfortable and could have also been dangerous if I did not know how to swim.

Turning your back to waves on a body of water reminded me of the act of procrastination.

Procrastination is defined as “the action of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something, or not doing it at all, despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so.”

Procrastination results in negative consequences like turning your back on the waves in a large body of water and getting wiped out by waves of consquences caused by your inactions.

As I have discussed many times, everything in the world is composed of energy that is vibrating, oscillating and resonating, at various vibrational frequencies. 

Procrastination is a negative, constricting action, based on a low, slow, dense vibrational frequency of lack. Procrastionation is turning your back so you do not have to deal with a person, situation or event in your life.

Why do you procrastinate?

You procrastinate because you feel something you need to actually accomplish is difficult, fearful, stressful, unpleasant, etc.

According to Dr. Tim Pychyl and other physiological researchers, procrastination NOT a time management issue. Procrastination is instead a an emotional management issue.

Procrastination is actually a strategy you use to cope with negative emotions by projecting what interacting with a person, situation or event will actually feel like to you a some instance in time in the future.

Get additional insights on procrastination from the Out There on the Edge of Everything® Podcast.

How do you overcome procrastination in your own life?

1. Identify the emotions you are avoiding with procrastination.   Procrastination is often an indicator of one or more underlying, unresolved emotional issues, with a specific emotional trigger.  Emotions associated with procrastination influence how your feel, which influence how you react, which influence what actions you avoid doing.  Procrastination emotions are negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, fear, guilt, hopelessness, sadness, shame, etc.  Make a list of the exact procrastination emotions you are feeling and their associated emotional triggers. Negative emotional triggers disrupt your normal decision-making and action-taking processes and cause you to procrastinate.
2. Identify the root cause of your procrastination emotions.  After making a list of your procrastination emotions, trace them back to the root, the exact instance in time in which they attached to you.  Are procrastination emotions a result of a prior traumatic event, embarrassing event, a personal limiting belief system, a family, society, religious belief system, etc.  Identifying the root causes of your procrastination emotions and associated emotional triggers brings them out of the darkness and the shadow of your subconscious mind into the light of your conscious mind to allow you to effectively deal with and heal the root causes of your procrastination emotions by creating new behavior patterns.
3. Adopt a new framework to overcome your procrastination behavior. Adopt a new framework with an action plan that focuses on taking small, achievable, focused, empowered steps based on position emotions such as courage, confidence, excitement, happiness, etc. towards the end goal of changing your current procrastination behavior patterns in a positive, solution-oriented manner.  You can adopt a new framework by creating a new personalize framework for yourself or adopt an existing framework to overcome procrastination in your life. One popular existing framework you can adopt to overcome procrastination is a framework based on the “SMART” acronym, created by George Doran and others.  SMART stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.”  There are many other existing frameworks you can use to overcome procrastination in your own life.

Not turning your back to the waves allows you to make a positive impact in your own life and avoid being hit by the rouge waves of procrastination.

Out There on the Edge of Everything® …

Stephen Lesavich, PhD

Copyright © 2021, by Stephen Lesavich, PhD.  All rights reserved.

Certified solution-focused life coach and experienced business coach.