Scott Free Thinking

Today we’re going to talk about one way to achieve your goals, and what can stop you in your tracks as an obstacle. The first obstacle that everyone in this ADD nation is experiencing, is procrastination. Procrastination is a strange thing, and it has taken the creation of that word to truly describe what has formed. Procrastination is not laziness, or at least, it is not laziness in its primary essence. Rather, procrastination is a strange piece of behavior that prevents us from carrying out the completion of our goals.

Often when one procrastinates, there is a strange feeling associated, a feeling of sometimes what we might consider fear, though I have heard a number of other people call the feeling something different. I’ve heard many people say that procrastinating might come from a fear of success, or possibly more commonly - a fear of failure.

Other times there is an actual pain associated with the acitivity given to do. The painfulness of some things is sometimes the reason we put it off for so long. Of course, what is pain? What is fear? What are any of these feelings? They are associations, perceptions, subjective experiences, the same as anything else.

When we come to understand this, we can begin to shift our perspective to something a lot more productive. Lately, I’ve been following the personal development work of Steve Pavlina. Steve Pavlina recorded a mini-seminar he did in one of his podcasts, in which he began to described the concept of learned helplessness.

But before we go into learned helplessness, and also Steve Pavlina’s claim that learned helplessness “can actually be a blessing for you,” I would first like to point out a few points of interest from standard textbook psychology - defense mechanisms. It would be said by some that to say learned helplessness, or anything within its nature, could actually be something of a blessing in disguise, would actually be to rationalize the behavior. Other defense mechanisms, as they’re called, include sublimation, displacement, repression, and so on.

Sublimation is taking a negative energy associated with a particular behavior or activity and redirecting that energy into something positive. Examples of this might be the suicidal who write songs or keep journals to keep from killing themselves, or even ranging to the not-so-drastic people who simply outlet their emotions and feelings via some creative medium.

Displacement is taking negativity and delaying your response to it until it reappears somewhere else. Much of the time when we find ourselves taking our anger or frustration out on someone who was not at the root of it, we might call this ‘displacement.’

Repression is probably one of the most important concepts, in that repression is the term most commonly discussed by psychologists everywhere, and has been the most common term since its creation back in the days of early psychology. Repression is taking negative emotion and shoving it deep down into the unconscious, where it then sits and waits to either eventually resurface, or sometimes - never return again.

There is a problem with both the view that negativity can be shifted into positivity, that bad behavior can be switched into a view of good behavior, that a lack of talent can be seen another way as a fulfillment of talent. There is contradiction here, the problem that these shifting views can be seen as “defense mechanisms,” but then on the other hand, most perplexingly there is an issue with defense mechanisms as well.

The problem with defense mechanisms, is that like everything else, defense and offensive gestures of the mind are also…subjective. Oh no, there’s that word again. Subjective. As human beings, we have a tendency to prefer the idea of opposing forces. That is why in literature, we like to think of heroes and villains, good and evil, the beginning and the end, etc. Early psychologists, and of course even modern psychologists, have a school of thought that would suggest our motivation in carrying out an action is by some means objectively created, or deductive in nature. This is not so. Just as some rationalization can be beneficial and create something contrary to the definition of defense, any other emotion or mental action can be seen as positive or negative, all depending on context and viewpoint.

So you might begin asking yourself a few questions when you think about either your own procrastination or the procrastination of others. You might ask yourself, Is my procrastination beneficial? Or perhaps more specifically, try to put purpose at the beginning of whatever it is you do, no matter what the goal. Is my procrastination beneficial to my goal? And similarly, always remember the old saying. “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” Or in other words, if your behavior stays the same, your results will stay the same.

If procrastination stops you dead in your tracks, and you know that it is stopping you from achieving your obstacle, you might ask How necessary is it that I procrastinate? Where is the need for it? How does it fit into my desired actions and desired results? And if it is unnecessary then ask, Can I let go of procrastinating? Ultimately, there is no reason you cannot. And if there is no reason to hold onto it, then what is to stop you from letting go of that behavior? Again, there is nothing stopping you.

If there is painfulness involved, debate to yourself Is the pain worth the gain? Most of the time when you are procrastinating, you often have a genuine belief that the pain IS worth the gain, but if you rationalize telling yourself, it IS worth the gain, but I can always do it later…then what you are really doing is finding a way to escape the moment. If it is worth the gain, why not step into getting that goal accomplished right now?

There is nothing stopping you.

If there is fear behind it, consider what have I got to lose? Again, nothing is stopping you.