Procrastinating Due To Fear

Procrastination is a mightful beast, and sometimes it is a sneaky one too.

I wrote about it before. It is only a symptom. And to overcome it, you need to fix the causes of your particular situation.

But it is not always obvious like I’ll show you today.

I was recently chatting with a fellow business owner, and he was pushing a task in front of him for days. Creating a video for his new application.

Using all sorts of ways out so he just not had to create the video. But he wasn’t happy with that either.

So, I guided him to the 5-Why’s method and guess what. We found the issue. And by pushing him a bit, he also started with it immediately.

The reason?

Fear.

Fear of losing an escape route, to be precise.

Although not an obvious one. He wasn’t afraid that the video fails but more that it makes his new app look bad if it is not top-notch.

Yet, that still wasn’t the true cause. That one lays deeper.

It was essentially the fear that a bad video makes his new application look bad, users will hate it, it will fail, and with that, his options to get out of another business will crumble.

See, his true desire was to get out of the old business. His new app was the desired escape route. Yet, now he was sabotaging his escape route by procrastinating.

That’s some power fear has. One, we should not underestimate.

Remember that.

It’s something that can happen to all of us.

Fortunately, we can overcome it too.

Sounds familiar? Feel free to reply. I’ll help you to get unstuck.

-–

Jens

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