The Venture Incubation Arc was meeting (and early indications are that it is going to be AWESOME) and discussing a bit about resistance and procrastination.
I think just about everyone experiences resistance to certain things. And maybe it’s because it’s the wrong thing or the wrong time for the thing, but a lot of times it’s because it butts up against something that makes us uncomfortable. And so we procrastinate. I’ve talked about this before here on the blog, but I my thinking has gotten more nuanced. Because sometimes procrastination doesn’t look like procrastination.
Let’s say that you are resisting some action you feel like you actually should take (not a “4nos” – as I called it in my other post). This resistance has three parts: the reason, the action, and the result.
The reason is WHY you procrastinate. Maybe it’s fear of failure or fear of success or feeling unworthy or emotional stress or trauma-informed thinking or any of the 31 flavors I talked about in that other post. It’s your why — and understanding your why can be useful so that you can start doing the work to heal those things while you come up with hacks and workarounds to short circuit them until you do.
The action is HOW you procrastinate. It might be avoidance (not gonna look!) but it might also be overcomplication, scope creep, dependency manufacture, spiraling, negativity, distraction (the day I’m scrubbing the toilet? that’s me avoiding something I’m massively resistant to) and so on. Recognizing how you procrastinate is almost more important than why. Because outright avoidance is obvious, but some of the others can look productive. They can trick you into thinking that you are doing things and therefore not in a state of resistance… always so busy doing these 1200 things that we don’t have time for the ONE THING that’s really important, that will really make a difference, that will really change things.
And the result is WHAT you get from that. If you are avoiding action, sometimes the result is outright bad – more of the thing or situation you are desperately trying to get away from. But maybe it’s just a soft failure, the slow death of your dreams and smothering of your heart’s fire. Again, understanding the result can really help you move through the resistance toward action. Because if we can clearly see and weight that result to our life, we can do the hard and scary work of prioritizing.
Understanding how you personally engage with your resistance is really useful for identifying ways of mitigating it so you can continue to take action on the things most important to you.
