Concluding Thoughts On the Road of Self-Change
[Self-change is a journey I take daily, and I will persevere patiently as I take two steps forward and one step back. ]
MARIANNA IS DISCOURAGED. Yesterday went so well. She started her work exactly when she intended to and she stayed on task. It felt great. She made significant progress on her thesis. Today she feels like her old self. She doesn't want to do anything. She's already wasted the morning filing email (most of which she knows she'll never look at again) and texting friends. Feeling low on energy, she's thinking of having a nap after lunch. Deep down she knows she's just avoiding her work, again.
Issue
Even though the purpose of the digest format of this book is to make it a quick read, there are no quick fixes. Our old bad habits, like procrastination, are hard to change and new habits are difficult to establish. We have to put in a great deal of conscious effort before our new behaviors become routine, unconscious patterns in our lives. Sometimes we never completely establish a new habit, and we have to put in conscious efort daily to maintain our focus where we choose.
The key thing is to be strategic. By being strategic, by making predecisions as much as possible, we can keep from following the same old worn path, the path that we know best as procrastination.
As you have learned, there are many aspects of being human that contribute to our self-regulation failure. For example, we:
·like to feel good now, ·are prone to discount future rewards, ·are overly optimistic and biased in our planning, ·dislike dissonance and will resolve it by making excuses, ·have a limited amount of willpower, ·can be disorganized, undisciplined, and overly self-conscious, ·can be prone to distractions, and·can have irrational beliefs about our expectations of ourselves.
Each of these things can create problems for us in our goal pursuit and contribute to our procrastination. And even this partial list of factors contributing to procrastination reveals some important truths worth remembering when you feel like Marianna does in the scenario above.
First, each of us will have a different constellation of factors that is our recipe for procrastination. As you read this book, I am sure that some topics and issues spoke more directly to you than other. These are the issues that you need to address in your eforts for self-change. These are the
Issues you can address beginning right now.
Second, we cannot change everything at once. My emphasis has been on being strategic. You need to be strategic in your approach to self-change as well. Pick one or two issues that you recognize are problems for you. Review the chapter on these issues, if necessary, and focus on those strategies first. You can build from there.
Third, this self-change process is uneven. We truly do feel like one day we leap ahead and the next day we fall back. Although we have to be committed to change and firm in our efforts to be strategic, we also have to be kind to ourselves during this challenging process. We all face setbacks, disappointing moments, and frustrations with our apparent lack of progress. Your attitude towards these setbacks and yourself will be extremely important to your continued progress. Be kind but firm with yourself, and be willing to forgive yourself when you do not live up to your own expectations.
One of our recent studies was about this issue of self-forgiveness and procrastination. It has important implications for each of us as we take the self-change journey. What we found was that self-forgiveness for procrastination was related to less procrastination in the future. Specifically, when students in our study had procrastinated quite a bit on their preparation for an exam, if they self-forgave for this procrastination, they were less likely to procrastinate on their preparation for the subsequent exam.
This finding reflects the power of forgiveness to move us from an avoidance motivation to an approach motivation. If, for example, you had a transgression (e. g., fight or broken promise) with a friend, and you or your friend had not offered forgiveness, you would likely avoid that friend. In the case of procrastination, the transgression is against the self, and we end up avoiding the task associated with that transgression. What forgiveness does in both cases is to remove the avoidance motivation so that friendship can be reestablished or engagement with the task can happen again, respectively.
On our self-change journey, we have to be prepared to forgive ourselves for our transgressions so that we are willing to try again. We will certainly have to try again many times. As I said before, even my simple strategy of just get started may have to be invoked many times throughout the day. Start and re-start.
Success will be found in this effort. It is worth the effort, as was your time in considering why it is we that procrastinate. I hope reading this book is your first step in this journey of self-change.
I would love to hear about your own journey. What worked? What didn't? What else would you like to know?
Although I cannot promise to answer every email, your input will make a diference to future writing. I invite you to write to me at tpychl@procrastination. ca Finally, you may want to learn more about procrastination. This digest-format book, while accurate and firmly based on research in the area, is by necessity short on details. If you want to learn more, you can find lots more through our research group Web site: procrastination. ca.
This Web site provides access to many relevant resources, not just our own scholarly publications. Perhaps some of the most accessible information is available through my"Don't Delay"blog for Psychology Today and through my iProcrastinate Podcasts. The blog entries and podcast episodes summarize a wide variety of information about procrastination in much greater detail. In fact, you can search through the blog entries or the podcast titles on iTunes to find information specific to the issues with which you may be struggling.
I must say that I make this reference to further reading with some reservation. There is no end to reading about a topic, and the problem with procrastination, as you have learned, is that we can always find an excuse not to do our work. In this case, it is really quite possible to use your further reading and research about procrastination to procrastinate more!Ironically, this is something that readers of my blog and listeners of my podcast have told me that they do.
So, instead of reading more, I would have you return to where I began the book to remind you that reducing procrastination in our lives is a practical thing-sensible, realistic, no-nonsense. In addition, I want to add that change is about doing, not just reading. If you put these both together, you will see that the practical (and no-nonsense)
thing is to start doing, not to read more.
You probably took an interest in this book because you want to reduce procrastination in your life. You now know a great deal more about the topic. You are prepared to bolster what feels like a depleted willpower. You are aware that it is tempting to give in to feel good, so you won't right now. And you know that every journey begins with that important first step.
It is time to just get started. I know that this will make a diference in your life.
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