An obstacle in your path might be part of a bigger pattern. For example, you decide to get more exercise and put the objective up on the horizon. Hop on the self-awareness path and the first obstacle you encounter is a lack of time. When you slow down to figure out your next step, you decide to start with a fifteen-minute morning walk. The following morning you get up late and don’t have time, but you vow you will start your new routine the next day and are excited to get back in shape, even if it takes a while. The following morning you achieve your goal and are super pumped. You let everyone on Facebook know you are making progress.
In the next few weeks, you meet your objective fifty percent. The days you walk, you are proud of yourself, and there are legitimate excuses to call on the days you do not. Finally, it dawns on you you have experienced this pattern before. The obstacle is not really lack of time. There’s something bigger, and it hides beneath procrastination.
You decide to take on procrastination through movement range repetition. The next time you find yourself using excuses to put off your walk, you slow down again to feel what’s happening in your body. There’s a tightness in your chest, and your mind is buzzy, incapable of settling on any one thing. You exaggerate these sensations even though it is uncomfortable. Finally, the buzzy mind becomes a jittery head shake that oddly calms you down and eventually settles into your chest. When you add Sade’s song, Smooth Operator, to the mix, the jittery head slows down and becomes more of a smooth dance. Every time you feel procrastination coming on, you dance for a minimum of three minutes.
But then you come down on yourself for not getting your walk in each morning. You try to defend yourself, to explain that you’ve been doing the Procrastination Dance almost every day. “At least it’s something,” you find yourself muttering, slipping onto a guilty side path. Fortunately, your inner coach is there to remind you to switch to a Catch & Empty focus. ‘“Guilt is another version of jittery mind. Catch & Empty until the thought storm abates.”
When the storm backs off, you bring in your inner writer to help you shape a story reset. Step One: walk every morning. Step Two: When excuses come up, do the Procrastination Dance, even if only in your mind. Visualization, after all, is powerful stuff. Step Three: When guilt crowds in and your inner critic makes fun of you, switch to a Catch & Empty channel until the pressure lets off. Each time you complete this cycle, you receive one point in the shape of a small brick that goes toward building a bridge to your walking objective.
