What does the life of a procrastinator look or feel like?
Well, we all do it every now and then, which means most of us embody a procrastinator.
- Did you promise yourself to start walking/working out from tomorrow?
- Did you decide to plan a holiday around a health retreat but never ended up doing it?
- Did you just say you want to add to your skills by enrolling for an add-on professional course?
- Or simply that you will go to bed an hour early or wake up 30 minutes earlier to make time for meditation?
I could go on and on because just like you, I am your co-traveller on this planet and human tendencies and frailties affect us all.
“Procrastination makes easy things hard, hard things harder.” – Mason Cooley
What does procrastination truly mean?
The act, of delaying or postponing something.
Why would you delay/postpone something which YOU in the first place wanted to do, out of your own free will? Weird, right?
Let me tell you why. It may be, that my interpretation, might just hit home.
“We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.”
I’ll use my own story to use as an example here…
I have always been passionate about dance. I’ve been trained in multiple classical and contemporary styles and at one point wanted to pursue it professionally. So, when I quit my job way back in 2009, my brain went rogue with what I could/could not do in my professional life that lay ahead. A thought popped up. I could teach dance. I could be a support staff at a dance academy and immediately it resonated with something that is a warm fuzzy feeling. But as I reached home that day from work and saw the beautiful face of my daughter running towards me, the mother in me immediately dropped the crazy professional ideas and leaped to spending more time with her. As time passed, I began doubting my thoughts of how I will start/continue with such a profession.
I am about short of a decade from that day. I never followed up on that. The ‘why’s and the ‘what’s are endless. But to put it simply, I let life take over. I stopped myself from being in charge.
Everyday struggles found more prominence in my schedule than what I had set out a desire for. Honestly, in hindsight, my husband took up a new and extremely demanding role and he needed all the support and acumen I could provide, which did take up a lot of focus in those years. So technically I never really felt as if I didn’t have a job or was out of work.
“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” – Don Marquis
But the point is that life happens and everyday is a basket of surprises. So then how does one avoid procrastination? Whether it’s a new diet, fitness regimen, sleep, family time, work, how does one extract the best of it all and not fall short of achieving, what one wants to achieve?
The simplest answer is to improve your ‘gut health’. Surprised? What does gut health have anything to do with this? Everything I say! The better your gut health more profound are your gut instincts, the better are your life choices. The better life choices you make, the more motivated you are. The more motivated you are, the focus and effort you put in, are in alignment with your purpose. It creates a train of successes, which in turn becomes your resource for your inspiration in life. And then you learn to tide over seasons, struggles and everyday stressors to leave the procrastination-laden life behind.
“The greatest amount of time wasted is the time not getting started.” – Dawson Trotman
How do you learn to improve your gut health?
Now, that’s a story to be discussed with CtrlAltZen! 🙂
