What’s all that Procrastination Really About? By Dr. Steve Taubman

Steve Taubman’s latest book, Buddha in the Trenches, is available now at Amazon.com

Many folks believe they procrastinate because they are “lazy”. As a result, they beat themselves over the head and feel bad about it.

(Maybe you do too.)

It’s not true though.

Procrastination has nothing to do with laziness.

This is just a cop out. It’s a story you tell yourself so that you get to feel bad for a little while “punishing yourself” for not taking action and following through on the commitments you made. Trouble is, it only makes your procrastination worse and reinforces the negative cycle.

You need to break the cycle.

How?

By understanding what really causes procrastination. It’s not what most folks think. There’s something deeper at play, something unconscious, and it’s stopping you from getting into action, staying in action, and following through on the commitments you made to others and yourself.

Ultimately, it’s stopping you from building your dream.

When you don’t follow through on the promises you made, you’ll often have a story that you tell — to yourself and others around you.

This story then becomes the “reason”.

However, you need to see this story for what it really is:

It’s an excuse.

The real reason why you’re not taking action remains hidden from you, repressed under layers of stories just like this one where it can’t come to the surface and force you to face up to it.

Unless you know what to look for.

Here are the eight root causes of procrastination:

— ignorance

— apathy

— momentum

— boredom

— rush addiction

— apprehension

— vagueness

— emptiness

Every time you get side-tracked on a project, every time you put off that important conversation, every time you say you’re finally going to make the big leap of faith and start something incredible but you remain frozen, there’s always one of these eight root causes at play somewhere.

If you know how to look past the story, you can see what’s missing in your life right now and you can fix it. That’s the key to beating procrastination.