A NEW MARKETING LEAP OF FAITH

I’ve been in a bit of a personal shift behind the scenes of my business, so this episode feels vulnerable and deeply personal to me because I want to take you there. I want to share with you how my business has shifted over the last few years and what I’m holding onto as things move forward. I want to thank you from the outset for being here.

By way of a bit of background, 2020 and 2021 was a really successful time for my business on paper. And I’ll explain why I say on paper in a minute. In December 2019 I gave up my paid employment to work on the business full time - I was starting to make consistent income that could pretty easily replace my paid employment. Most of my work was online already and then hot on the heels of that came covid and to my surprise and relief, as the pandemic came into full swing, so did my coaching business.

During the height of the pandemic I hit the ground running hard. Just so you can get an insight into the output that was going on: I ran 2 groups of my 6 month Accelerator Programmes (which is a weekly, if not twice a week coaching group), a 3 day clear and courageous challenge, a course creation masterclass, had 90+ women in my monthly membership that had coaching sessions each week, I ran my 12 week movements programme twice with wonderful groups of around 8 women, I wrote, launched and delivered a brand new month long course about creating your own online course for people who were frantically pivoting online (very meta, but very useful), I created and ran an intense 30 days of visibility programme which was super high touch and involved daily emails and 3 weekly calls, I invested thousands of pounds on my own business coaching and on programmes for my own development and had a full roster of one to one clients. I met hundreds of amazing women, all of them in the same boat of having more time to develop their business, more income to invest in coaching and it was amazing. And it was also exhausting. I have just looked over my calendar from that year to write this episode and recall this all accurately and can’t actually believe how much I was actually doing. It was insane. 

So like I said, I had the benefit of having already run a lot of my work online with Zoom, so my business was prepared and set up for that method of connection and I was doing all the traditional online methods of marketing that were working well at the time by hosting free intensive challenges and large workshops that were pretty massively attended (into the hundreds) and generally, those lead plenty of people into my paid programmes. With so much uncertainty swirling around in the social landscape, I got stuck right into supporting everyone with their work and navigating the really tricky changes they were facing. No one was going anywhere, so looking into online coaching was an easier yes for most people, and my business made a lot of money.

But I was absolutely burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. My husband, also working from home, my kids, like everyone elses kids were at home attempting to do some semblance of schooling and Dave and I were literally on shifts with our work; high fiving each other as we passed each other on the stairs up to our attic office when one of our working shifts was over and we switched responsibilities to go and wrangle our kids into some sort of educational activity or snack making duty while the other started their work. We hardly saw each other, we were really tired. I’m sure many of you were in the same positions during this really strange time in the world.

I was writing courses and responding to emails and posts well into the night and getting up and doing it all the next day. Lines were blurred, I was tired but it was also thrilling to be in the first official year of running my business full time and to be seeing so many clients and earning more money than I ever had. But I paid a price for that, and it really took its toll. I finished 2021 really proud of myself for having dug deep to make so much happen but I really badly needed to simplify things and be ruthless about caring for myself.

Now we sit at the end of 2022, and much has changed. I made a concerted effort at the beginning of this year to pace myself well. I have narrowed my programmes down, culling and combining my resources into just two main offers - my Accelerator Programme - which I extended to run for 8 months and now combines the teaching from my Movements Programme. I love running my Accelerator programme and having the guts of a year to build relationships with this group and see the absolute cosmic shifts that happen for these business owners. And my other main offer is my Brand Builder Programme which is my four month coaching programme that takes the confusion out of developing a sustainable business model and helps female business owners get clear on their messaging, marketing, content, pricing and offers. I have a couple of one to one clients and have started to runs some more in-person events and retreats to try and inject some more tangible physical connection into my work - for me as much as everyone else who comes. 

The other thing that I wanted to change this year was how I marketed my business. Having so many programmes running that are open and closed felt intense. I would go through these periods of having to be really visible, promoting, creating buy-in opportunities for people to get a taste of my work and then spending a few weeks heavily promoting them to get people enrolled. I never hassled anyone or felt like I was inauthentic with what I was promoting but it was a lot and it required a lot of showing up for me. With so many programmes on the go in the previous years, it felt like I never had a break to reset my own nervous system from all the launching and promoting. Once one programme was full, I was onto delivering it and promoting the next. My nervous system took a real hit and I felt not only wrecked, but once I started developing a slower way of running things, I found it hard to adjust. The hard worker in me started to wonder if I was being lazy or not giving as much to my work. This is something I regularly have to check myself with - the old narratives around worth being attached to basically running myself ragged. I have the charity sector to thank for that.

I knew that how things were running in those last two years wasn’t sustainable for me, and coupled with the opening up of the world again, things started to slow down even more. 

From the outside, right now I am still very present in my work - sharing on social media, recording this podcast, sending emails, promoting my offers etc. but there has been a noticeable shift in the behind the scenes stuff of how that is all going. To get candid with you - fewer people are signing up for stuff I am offering, there is less uptake. The impact of the huge changes to how social media is working where they are now largely set up for consumption rather than connection has been difficult. I have found this year to be one of having to really hold my nerve in my own business. I have had my fair share of moments where I have wondered if this business has peaked, or had it’s moment and it’s been tempting for me to slip into scarcity, wondering if I’m doing things wrong or if my work is even relevant any more. It is really hard for me to talk about this as a business coach, because I hold myself to really high standards and whilst the standards of my coaching have only gotten more solid and impactful, the ‘on paper’ success of my business has slowed down. And it’s hard because my style of coaching is not a “come work with me and I’ll show you how I did x y and z and you can too” because I feel strongly about dismantling that kind of messaging, and bringing my coaching to you from a much more level playing field where I fully understand the difficulties of business because I’m running one (and I think that makes me an excellent coach), so I don’t want anyone to misunderstand what I’m sharing to be that I’m a business coach whose business isn’t making shitloads of money. 

I guess you could say that there’s been a perfect storm that I feel like I’ve been swirling around in made up of my own decision to create a more sustainable business model and opt out of the full to the brim diary and full on marketing strategy, paired with the shifting of the landscape of the world opening up again, people being fatigued with online learning and many a world crisis to both distract us and cause us all to think more about what we’re spending our money on.

I say all of this to reassure you that if you’ve found this a bit of a disorienting year in business, please know that you’re not alone. And there will be so many variables that will have contributed to this. 

And whilst all of that has had an impact on my business financially, I want to share with you that there have been a few things that I am really intent on remaining faithful to - even in the midst of a slower, smaller business. Firstly, even though the uptake in my business has been less, the quality of the clients I’m working with has been incredible. I am getting to meet and support the most amazing women, who are truly doing life-changing work. They are smart, compassionate, generous and completely aligned. I have had the opportunity to coach women that I admire and look up to and that I have been able to develop a real mutual trust and respect with. Without the panic of the pandemic, I am seeing women come into my business who are not approaching their business from a place of fear, but of love and dedication, wanting to set themselves up with the strategy and tools to support themselves fully. It has been invigorating to get to sit with them and hatch plans, talk through their self-doubt, get clear and see them flourish. To me, this beats the on paper success of running myself into the ground and serving hundreds of clients and being burnt out. I can see that my coaching practice is deepening and expanding in ways that aren’t always visible.

And I can see that the reason these kinds of women are coming to me is because I have dug down deep into my values and allowed them to guide me in how I show up. I have taken a marketing leap of faith this year to allow my business to speak for itself. To decide to lean into trust in myself and most importantly trust in my clients to find me and decide to work with me, without pushing, striving or having to come up with some coded way to bring people in. Again, to me this really feels fulfilling in ways that not too many get to see - that I’ve been able to set aside the franticness of getting clients in and practice having trust in the right people to see my work and my value and decide for themselves what makes sense for them.

I read an article last month that really sums up how I have been shifting things when it comes to my mindset around marketing and I want to share a little snippet with you here to help articulate my approach. 

This article is from Rob Hardy’s Ungated Community Blog and it’s called Non-Coercive Marketing: A Primer. - it’s really worth a read. Here’s what it sums up:

““Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn’t seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that’s already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what’s behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they’re ready. In that way, non-coercive marketing is a leap of faith, rooted in the idea that if you stop trying to control people, and encourage them to be their own authority, you can build positive sum relationships that lead to organic and mutually-enriching transactions. This relational shift is also at the heart of how we begin healing the emotional wounds lying beneath humanity’s many problems.””

— Quote Source

This is how I want to continue to build my business; even if it means it’s slower and less financially booming than it was in 2020/2021. Even if it means I take on other work to keep my income supporting my family. Even if it means my email list doesn’t grow exponentially year on year. Even if it means only a handful of beautifully ready clients decide to work with me on their precious business. Even if it means my instagram posts only get 65 likes. Even if it means I am not sold out every time I offer something out. Even if it means this is a slow and steady burn. 

And ESPECIALLY if it means I have time to live my life and nurture my important relationships and take care of myself.. ESPECIALLY if it means I have clients coming to me that are ready to be supported and known in a holistic way that honours their humanity. ESPECIALLY if it means I can be myself in my business and not resort to hustle culture or filling my time trying to convince people that my work is good and important. ESPECIALLY if it means I get to show up trusting that the right clients will find me when they are good and ready. ESPECIALLY if it means I get to fully trust my own goodness in the business building process and keep my integrity in tact. I trust in the goodness of my work and in my ability to make good, honest decisions for myself.

This is how I want to carry on into 2023. This will remain unchanged and I hope the next year will see me delve into this way of working even more. I don’t ever want to run a business that sees people as means to an end, or that isn’t truthful about the ebbs and flows that are both natural and inevitable. And I hope that there are others out there that feel the same and want to join me in exploring what that means for them too. 

What this looks like in practicality is that some of my programmes will always be open to join - and I’ll be extending the invitation regularly as an opportunity for those that are ready to be part of them to join me when they are ready. My brand builder is already running in that way, and is open for anyone wanting to step into a four month container of coaching and mentoring to help them build their business in this aligned way. 

Thank you for reading this - a bit of a heartfelt one that I really wanted to share because even though it’s vulnerable I know there's connection to come from it and there are a lot more of us out there feeling the shift and wanting to take the leap to do things differently and bet on themselves in a deeper way. Please as always feel free to reach out for a chat, knowing that I’m cheering you on.

Book a 20 minute strategy session with me.

WHY YOUR WORK ISN'T SELLING

It’s likely that you clicked here today because you are a business owner, you create things – products of services that you really want to get out there into the world, into the hands of people who will love them. It’s also likely that you are here because the title of this blog is looking at sales and you would love to be selling more of these wonderful, smart, helpful things that you are creating. Because ultimately, that’s what business is about, right? Making sure that your product or service generates income that can sustain and regenerate profit in your business so you can pay your bills, have fun, keep creating and doing the work you love. So…

In this blog post I want to explore some of the reasons why your work might not be selling the way you want it to. And even though this might feel this question – why is my work not selling more -  has any number of answers to it – I want to focus down into three.

I’ve been working with hundreds of businesses over the last six years and I know how tricky selling is, especially for women, so I have witnessed first hand (in my own business) and in so many others the common stuff that gets in the way of seeing those sales come in. And so in this post I want to offer my top three things that I see business owners often missing that are really worth a deeper consideration…

1)     Positioning

2)     Offering

3)     Visibility Vulnerability

So let’s dive in and talk about some of the practicalities – both the outer and inner stuff - that might be in the way of people lining up to buy your amazing stuff.

First up let’s consider positioning:

When I say positioning, what I’m really talking about it how you are framing your offers. This takes into account the way you are connecting, messaging, marketing and framing what it is you have to offer.

Making sales in your business is not about just getting on Instagram and putting your product or service out there, spewing off reems about what it is and crossing your fingers that someone needs it. It’s not about detailing every aspect of what your product does on your website. It takes some understanding of where people are at that might be interested in or need your product to really make the connection.

For the most part, when it comes to purchasing something, people are really interested in how something is going to make them feel. So our messaging and marketing needs to factor that in. Sure, we like to know details of the product, how much it costs, how it works, but ultimately, people connect to how a product or service is going to change something for them, or bring them a feeling. So instead of selling from a place of details, try talking and sharing more about what kind of transformation your work brings. Now, I know that lots of people out there who offer products sometimes struggle with this part. But believe me when I say that there is transformation to be found in your product. Maybe you’re thinking about how much easier it is for service providing businesses to speak to this, but it isn’t the case. Remember, people buy based on feelings. You only have to go to the grocery store on an empty stomach to see that. Or think about the last thing you bought for yourself and dig into what feeling you were after when you purchased it. For me, I bought a candle the other because I wanted to feel cozy and warm as the nights are getting colder. I want to see the dance of that glowy flicker on my mantle piece to signal that it’s time to wind down when I go to sit down at the end of a long day. I bought into the cozy feeling.

So when it comes to your work, how does what you make or create delight, surprise, bring pleasure or joy to others. How will your food make them feel nourished or like a proper luxury treat they can savour. Speak about how your pottery or your clothes or your art brings a sense of personal or individual style. How it makes people feel satisfied, adds flair to a dining table or wall or gives something a sense of feeling finessed or put together. This goes for product or service testimonials too. Make sure when you get feedback, you ask your customer or clients to talk about this aspect. Where were they before they had your work, how do they feel now? What has shifted?

Positioning means framing the feelings of your work in a way that people recognise themselves in the offer. Don’t skip this bit – it’s how we connect and speak human to human with our customers/clients.

Secondly, let’s talk about offering.

When you’ve got your positioning right, it’s time to offer. It’s time to actually provide solutions to the feelings of your customers or clients. It’s one thing to understand your customer, how they feel, what kind of benefits they are after, what transformation or feeling they are looking for but now it’s your job to step up to that with your solution, how you know your product or service can remedy that and let people have it.

What I see happening a LOT a lot a lot is that we have these offers, we know how to position them and we are excited about people wanting them or needing them and all the beauty that comes in that transaction, and so we show up and post about it on social media and expect the sales cart to go mad, to sell out quickly (this whole selling out thing is lies that we are told by hustle culture is common when it truly is rare) or that people will just find it magically and want it quickly.

It does not work like this. And this is often where a lot of us lose our nerve and start doing the slow tiptoe away from our offerings. Like, just kidding – I didn’t really create this, gotta go! We can’t just post about something once or twice and expect things to sell easily. This requires so much nerve holding, showing up and staying committed to this part of the work.

Chances are, if you have something to offer, you aren’t talking about it enough. And for a whole host of reasons that ill get into in a minute. Either you aren’t talking about it enough or you’re talking about it cryptically instead of being bold about asking people to buy from you or work with you. I want you to realistically count in your head how many times you have actively, boldly asked for the sale this week. What I’m not saying is that you have to be pushy or manipulative or cringe here – asking for the sale isn’t begging or forcing. I’m not asking you to step away from your values of authenticity or connection – I am actually asking you to step into it more. Because to know you have solutions or something of value or something that could inspire or delight or help someone and not showing up and telling people about how they can get it – that is actually not activating your values of authenticity or connection is it? By hiding your offers, using vague language or tiptoeing around your offers isn’t actually providing the authentic connection that you really can provide!

You can offer and sell your stuff clearly, with integrity every single day. You can show up on social media or to your email list every day and make sure that whoever is ready or interested in your work knows how to get it and it doesn’t have to mean anything you might be making it mean about you. Please do not ghost your community when you think no one wants what you have to offer – show up for them and for yourself and keep letting those who may need to know what you have to offer. Do it regularly, do it often and do it with conviction because you believe in your own work.

And this brings me to my final point: Vulnerability

That’s the feelings that come up with this stuff. The vulnerability of the offering and showing up.

It is hard internal work to plug your offers. It requires a lots of risk and vulnerability to create something you care about from a place of genuine love for your work and then hold it out into the world and say – come see this? You like it? Do you want to buy it? It’s really good! Your risk aversion department in your brain is going to be on high alert, hoping that you back down your visibility and retreat to the safety of not being seen.

To show up and sell your work or your product or service is going to require you to acknowledge that protective voice, to recognise it when you start doing the slow tiptoe away, to identify how it is showing up when it comes to sharing about your work and asking people to buy from you. Recognising how your self doubt shows up and what you tend to do when that happens is a huge component of mastering it. When you recognise it – that you tend to go quiet, start comparing, stall because of perfectionism, ghost your audience, look for validation in the wrong places, numb out, people please, shrink back in – then you can start to deploy some settling techniques to bring yourself back to your commitment to the work.

Tend to your nervous system when this happens. Reassure your risk aversion department that you are curious about how this might actually work out for you and that it doesn’t need to be on such high alert. Do the work to bring some calm reassurance back into your body and mind. Journal, get into community with other business owners who are 100% likely to be feeling the same way about this for some solidarity, hire a flipping coach and co-regulate and let them do their job of helping you maintain your loyalty to yourself and your work.

If you are finding selling your stuff isn’t working for you right now and you are stuck, frustrated, doubting yourself and your abilities – lean into these three things and see what might shift for you. And let me know if it does.

What's your Method of Hiding? Part 3: Paralysis

If you’ve missed part 1 on perfectionism and part 2 on procrastination, feel free to head back to the previous two blog posts to read those.

But for now let’s talk about paralysis. Because it has a bit of a different edge to procrastination and perfectionism.

Paralysis may be showing up in your life as real avoidance of decision making and action. It may be showing up in your life as feeling overwhelmed and it may show up in your life by allowing other people to make decisions for you and give you direction.

This form of hiding is super hard because when we are paralysed, we don’t make decisions well and so often it’s a very early hurdle that comes before the faffing and fear of procrastination and the hard work of perfection. Either we run from decision-making altogether, or we have too many options and let people decide for us.

Maybe we feel scared to commit to decisions because we know there are so many unknown factors ahead of our decisions or actions and we really want to know how things are going to work out.

Paralysis in our work or life is often about needing to know the right step and if we don’t we go into freeze mode, bypassing our autonomy and usually letting things fall where they fall.

Of course, with indecision and fear and overwhelming options and opinions from others and society’s expectations, we become anxious. We’re afraid to do something wrong and what that might mean for us.

Paralysis isn’t just freezing though – it manifests into other states - feeling lost, confused, dizzy, tired, frustrated, angry, jealous, disappointed, dissatisfied, sad, lonely, or afraid of the future.

When we are in paralysis we sit back and let things happen, or we refuse to take action out of fear. We often blame other things to rationalise our paralysis.

I believe the underbelly of paralysis and indeed the antecdote to it is actually building healthy self-trust.

If paralysis is about fear of doing the wrong thing or being overwhelmed, it seems like we might need to look at what level of trust we really have in our own capacity to make choices, to try, to experiment and have our own backs. Sometimes paralysis can have us falsely believing that our inaction, our shinking and hiding is us keeping control. And paralysis only offers a false sense of control, because we only try to control what we don’t trust.

Glennon Doyle talks a lot about this in her book Untamed. She says: “We weren’t born distrusting and fearing ourselves. That was part of our taming. We were taught to believe that who we are in our natural state is bad and dangerous. They convinced us to be afraid of ourselves. So we do not honor our own bodies, curiosity, hunger, judgment, experience, or ambition. Instead, we lock away our true selves. Women who are best at this disappearing act earn the highest praise: She is so selfless. Can you imagine? The epitome of womanhood is to lose one’s self completely. That is the end goal of every patriarchal culture. Because a very effective way to control women is to convince women to control themselves.”

So if the cure for paralysis is self-trust, how do we do that, how do we cultivate that in a healthy and meaningful way so it’s not just another one of those words that we’re supposed to know what to do with but is actually a bit ambiguous in tangibility?

I feel like the core of self-trust is not actually about trusting yourself to know all the answers, or believing that you will always do the right things. That’s simply not possible or fair for us to expect of ourselves. That layers on all kinds of other stuff that can lead to shame.

The core of self trust for me is about having the conviction or focus that you will be kind and respectful to yourself regardless of the outcome of your efforts.

Self-trust is about believing in the integrity of yourself. When we look at examples of people who are self-trusting, we find that they are curious learners, willing to build their understanding of self and of opinions and experiences through action and seeing what works and what doesn’t for them. They have healthy interdependent relationships, not hyper in their dependency of others and their feedback. They speak with authority that comes from a deep place within but is not arrogant or dismissive.

Self-trust is about taking the posture of having your own back, being compassionate and not being self-punitive when you make mistakes. Because of course if we punish ourselves for making mistakes, our brains start to wire up to tell us we can’t be trusted.

It seems to me that self-trust starts to erode more quickly as we move into adult life – but it’s been chipped away at long before that. We spend most of our childhood and adolescence learning about ourselves through the lens of other peoples praise or criticism, through school and academics and extra curriculars – creating a dependency on that feedback to help us move forward. You’re good at this, keep going. Youre not good, try harder or stop. So when we reach adulthood, no wonder we begin to freeze up when those built in places of feedback are removed and we have to take action on our own. We haven’t been taught to trust our OWN instincts, our OWN desires our OWN roadmap – it’s all been dependent on other people, hinged on their perceptions of us. So we meander or wander and often end up desperately fixated on approval or some semblance of validation from others in order to take action for ourselves.

We can move away from our people pleasing and paralysis by rebuilding our self-trust and deciding to at the very least to commit to being on our own side. Not to win, not to succeed, not to guarantee results with ourselves, but to have our own backs. To be loyal to our desires and dreams.

Often paralysis stems from being on the arguing side of our needs and desires, trying to convince ourselves that we can’t or don’t deserve them. Self trust requires us to be on our own side, rallying for ourselves like we would a really solid, trusting friend.

We won’t do it perfectly, this self-trust thing. We won’t ever not let ourselves down and shrink and play small, forgetting about ourselves; but we can keep making that commitment to be on our own side.

I hope, if you are stuck in paralysis right now, that you feel some comfort from this, knowing that you can walk yourself back to trust, to being on your own side, even when it’s hard.

What's your Method of Hiding? Part 2: Procrastination

Today I want to get stuck into part 2 of our series on methods of hiding and have a little look at procrastination.

Do you consider yourself a procrastinator. Do you always find something else to do instead of the thing you know you supposed to be doing? Do you find yourself faffing with peripheral stuff more than tackling the real needle moving tasks? Are you currently procrastinating by reading this? If you are – I want you to stay here. Procrastinate a bit longer, because I want to offer an alternative way of thinking about how we see procrastination and why we do it.

 I did a survey early on in 2022 with almost 100 female business owners about some of the ways they feel stuck, what they wish they had a magic wand for and over and over and over again, I read answers about time management and feeling like they were procrastinating.

And I totally get it. We live in a high functioning society where productivity is applauded and rewarded. We are conditioned to feel like we should be human doings instead of human beings and that narrative runs deep. And of COURSE with women being acutely aware of how scrutinised we still are in the workplace we feel compelled to always be on, be task and action oriented lest we let down the side.

There’s a level of shame that also surrounds the idea of procrastination – and that shame locks us into a cycle that can be hard to cycle out of. We shame ourselves for not tackling something, that shame isn’t motivating, we build the tasks up to be something huge because of the shame and continue to avoid.

Dr. Sirois, professor of psychology at the University of Sheffield has said.

“The thoughts we have about procrastination typically exacerbate our distress and stress, which contribute to further procrastination. But the momentary relief we feel when procrastinating is actually what makes the cycle especially vicious. In the immediate present, putting off a task provides relief — you’ve been rewarded for procrastinating.”

And we know from basic psychology that when we’re rewarded for something, we tend to want do it again. This is why procrastination tends to be a cycle, one that easily keeps us locked in shame.

 It occurs to me that when it comes to berating ourselves for what we might be calling ‘procrastinating’ there are actually a few more intricate things to consider and be self-aware about:

1)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overworking?

2)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overwhelmed?

3)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you feeling vulnerable about doing the work that might actually be true to you because it feels exposing and requires you to be visible?

Let’s look at each of these:

1)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overworking?

It is fully possible that you are stalling or avoiding certain tasks because you are overworking. Might it be that you actually ARE tired and find the thought of a particular task really exhausting? Might it be that you have packed your schedule really full so other things that might help support you or that might move the needle are just not possible to get stuck into?

It really is possible that what you are viewing as procrastination might actually be a stress response to your workload. I want you to consider how much space you leave around tasks? How much margin do you give yourself to complete things? Are you asking a lot of yourself considering the other work you have going on? If the thing you are procrastinating on is going to require a lot of emotional or physical energy from you, would it not make sense to leave extra extra space for that instead of holding yourself to impossible standards of productivity? Just a thought you might want to consider before you shame yourself for not being productive. Rest is also productive. Rest is fuel.

2)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you overwhelmed?

Secondly – it’s worth considering - are you actually procrastinating or are you overwhelmed? Usually when we think of procrastinating we assume that there’s a bit of laziness happening but it’s very seldom that our procrastination looks like idleness. Usually we find something else to occupy our time (tidying our offices, clearing our laptop desktop etc) so it’s not that we are not doing things, we are often just choosing to do something else.

Dr. Tim Pychyl, professor of psychology and member of the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University in Ottawa suggests that

“Procrastination is an emotion regulation problem, not a time management problem,”

It’s not a unique character flaw or a curse on your ability to manage time, but a way of coping with emotions and associations with certain tasks — overwhelm, boredom, anxiety, insecurity, frustration, resentment, self-doubt and beyond.

Which leads me to our third question to reflect on:

3)     Are you actually procrastinating? Or are you feeling vulnerable about doing work that might actually be true to you because it feels exposing and requires you to be visible?

When faced with a task that make us feel vulnerable, exposed or insecure, the amygdala — the “threat detector” part of the brain — perceives that task as a genuine threat, in this case it’s a thread to our self-esteem or sense of belonging or ego. Even if we know in our intellect that putting off the task will create more stress for ourselves in the future, our brains are still wired to be more concerned with removing the threat right now. Researchers call this “amygdala hijack.”

So procrastination becomes the thing we distract ourselves with in order to maintain that inner safety.

In all of this, at its core, procrastination is about emotions, not productivity or lack of ability or poor time management. The solution to feeling like you are always procrastinating isn’t in an app that blocks social media or in time-blocking or punishing ourselves. It is ultimately about managing our emotions in a new way.

If we want to look at how to manage our cycles of procrastination, we need to go deeper than the surface and think about self-forgiveness and compassion.

When we treat ourselves with kindness and understanding, particularly recognising that our brain is having a moment of vulnerability or is perceiving a threat to our ego, it allows for a much more self-supportive condition in which to move forward.

In fact, several studies show that self-compassion supports motivation and personal growth. Not only does it decrease psychological distress, which we now know is a primary culprit for procrastination, it also actively boosts motivation, enhances feelings of self-worth and fosters positive emotions like optimism, wisdom, curiosity and personal initiative. Best of all, self-compassion doesn’t require anything external of us — just a commitment to meeting your challenges with greater acceptance and kindness rather than shaming and berating ourselves.

I wonder how you can load more self-compassion and forgiveness into your week so you can truly move towards the things that you know are vulnerable but that might just lead to a fuller sense of personal fulfilment and impact.

Maybe this post is just what you needed to read in order to understand yourself more tenderly and what is behind the ways that you are hiding through procrastination.

As always, I’d love to hear how this topic lands for you. Feel free to reach out to me on email hello@melwiggins.com or in my DM’s on IG @melwiggins.

Ill be back with part 3 of this series on What’s Your Method of Hiding very soon.