How often do we put off doing difficult or new things?

Most of us are guilty of this at least some of the time. While delaying doing things that are hard or boring might seem like a quick fix way to helping our wellbeing, it’s probably not going to be effective. You see, many of the things we put off will come back to bite us eventually even if it’s only in the form of internal nagging - that voice internally suggesting we should really do something.

STARTING: STEP ONE

Why not start by sorting through those internal nags and work out which ones we need to pay attention to and which ones we can disregard all together.

Some of what we carry around on our ‘to do later’ are things we might not need to do at all; maybe it’s an obligation we don’t need to take on, someone else’s nag they’ve passed on to us or a deeper internal belief that we ought or should be doing more or less of that in reality isn’t helpful, healthy or realistic. Once you’ve sorted that one out, we can move on to consider how we ‘just getting started’ with those things that really are important and valuable to us. 

STARTING: STEP TWO

Procrastination can be self- fulfilling. The more we delay, the more we can want to delay, catching us in the trap of feeling more and more unable, unwilling and even unskilled to do whatever it is we need to do.

Just getting started, breaks this.

Just getting started is about doing anything, something rather than nothing. It’s about ‘starting the engine’, even if we’re not completely sure where we’re driving to.  It’s opening the laptop, the cupboard door or the curtains. It’s picking up the phone, that sock up off the floor or the supplies from the shop that we’ll need to do ‘that’ job. It’s doing the VERY next thing rather than the thing itself.

Once we’ve done the VERY next thing, we create what we call ‘efficacy’ – a feeling of being able, a feeling of being able to ‘effect’ or dint in the task at hand. Once we see that ‘efficacy’, we start to see ourselves differently; as people who DO and CAN rather that DON’T and CAN’T. 

I can sometimes suffer from procrastination first thing in a morning when I have to work out what I should focus myself on that day. To prevent this, I have found that ending my day with writing down a (realistic) to-do list for the following day can be helpful. With larger tasks, I give myself 5 or 10 minutes brainstorming time the day before I have to do the task itself. This short amount of time the day before allows me to ‘brain dump’ ideas when I don’t have the pressure to produce the final product and means the following day that I’m not starting the task with a blank sheet of paper.

try this…

I wonder what wellbeing practices you wanted to get started with at the beginning of this new year?

I wonder what you’ve got around to so far?

I wonder what remains on the ‘to-do’ list?

Take some time to consider what the VERY next thing is you need to in order to get going? What needs picking up, opening or fetching to get yourself being someone who DOES and CAN do ‘that’ thing? What can you do EVEN today in preparation for tomorrow? 

Ben Harper is Space to Breathe’s Education Lead.

You can carry on the conversation with him on Twitter @wellbeingteach