I Heard Mel Robbins Describe Procrastination as This..
Mar 10, 2024
Like most mornings, I choose a personal development-type of video or podcast to listen to, and listening to one of many Mel Robbins talks, she described what procrastination truly is.
She wrote the “The 5 Second Rule,” and if you have not yet read it, go get it…now.
I don't know if you've ever read her book, The Five second rule, five second rule. She gives as one of the most well-known ways we can all procrastinate, is how we get out of bed. For the longest time, and still until this day, I hit the snooze button. But I have learned something a long time ago, that I also know myself, that I needed to “schedule” my snooze time as well (that’s another blog I am sure), so I can be warned that the next alarm that goes off is the one I need to get up and go. I think most people use the snooze button to sleep in, and even multiple times, people might hit it.
She basically describes how she discovered the 5 Second Habit in her book, and it is how to get out of bed when you say you’re going to get out of bed, without hesitation.
Anyways, she talks about procrastination in general. Procrastination is basically one of the biggest reasons we tend to not do things. And how she describes it, is that it is really fear.
Here is a great example, budgeting.
We all know that watching where our money goes and where it should go, is important for us to keep most of our money. So why is it cumbersome for some to maintain, or more so, start to do in the first place?
One of the many reasons can be that we are fearful of what budgeting might uncover in the first place. Maybe budgeting will uncover that we spend too much money on things we really like, like, the $6 coffee every morning that we look forward to on the way to work. Or maybe budgeting will uncover that we are in a mountain of debt, and that in itself is overwhelming to even think about, so what do we tend to do? We avoid it altogether. Unseen, unheard, so it does not exist in the first place, right?
And then over time avoiding budgeting just has a compound effect on how we retire in the future. And by then, it might be too late to do anything about it. But what if you just explore why you are fearful first? If you are fearful of what you might uncover, accept it, and conquer it.
The first thing to admit, just like many support groups, is to admit you have a problem in the first place. And the problem, in this case, is not budgeting. The problem is that you are afraid.
You might even disagree with this statement and say that it might be time you are not willing to put into this “task”.
So, let’s spin it a different way. If you had the opportunity to go on the trip of your dreams, and you were told that you needed a specific amount of money to go, you would probably look at what resources you had to be able to “budget” for your dream trip to become a reality. The fear of not being able to go is not there, but in fact, you would probably jump at the chance to find out if it was possible.
Nothing would hold you back from budgeting at that point, would it?
We can apply this thought about procrastination to anything.
Let’s get back to the snooze button. What if I told you that you had to get up at 5 am to catch your plane to the dream trip you were scheduled to take? You would not hesitate to jump out of bed, right? You would not be thinking about the fear of anything. It would be excitement that would launch you out of bed in fact. Procrastination is something you can control with a little thought into why you might in the first place.
We all do it. But we can control it. By accepting that you are a procrastinator, is actually accepting that it will control you.