Sunday, March 22, 2009

And Another Sunday....

Somehow, a week has slipped by.

And what have I done this week? Kind of nothing, amazingly enough. It's spring break here, and as always, I'd had all these plans to get caught up with everything in the world, and mostly that hasn't happened at all. Discouragingly enough.

And so that's what I've been thinking about. Procrastination.

I've been reading this book lately about, basically, fixing what's wrong with your life, I guess. And the premise thus far is that we create our own problems/obstacles by the way we think about them. "The way we frame the problem" is the way I'd put it. Which I pretty much agree with. And that change is hard because we are resistant to change, because most of our difficult behaviors serve us in one way or another. Thus we have to be willing to let go of the... the reasons why we've kept the behaviors, I guess.

I have been thinking specifically about procrastination, which is probably the specific behavior that is annoying me the most these days, because it invades about every facet of my life. I procrastinate about doing work-related things, home-related things, exercise-related things, writing down food... you name it. And it's easy to focus on the behavior and say, obviously what you need to do is stop procrastinating. But I guess that my thought from reading this book, to the extent that I have, is that it's not the procrastination that's the issue, it's the underlying stuff, the ways in which not doing these things allows me to... I don't know. Maybe fail to take responsibility for my own successes or failures, because I'm always going, oh, if I'd done this, it would have turned out better. I kind of can't explain that so that it makes sense, but it does make sort of an internal sense to me. "It's not really my fault since I didn't do everything that I could have." Something like that.

I need to figure out how to get past this and, trite though it sounds, allow myself to succeed.


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

OOOH love this.
and this is what launched my personal year focusing on RESPONSIBILITY. Personal responsibility as I, too, can procrastinate and as you so eloquently said it is NOT a surface as (my words) blowing off a task.

Anonymous said...

Well said !