Fear of not being able to do a task properly, and all of it's real or imagined consequences.This can and does quite often have its roots in perfectionism... not wanting to do anything that you can't do perfectly (because of those consequences).Well, as you know, you can't usually do something perfectly unless you've done it a lot, in most cases. And when you do something a lot, in the beginning, you are going to screw up a lot more than you succeed. Perfectionism has many benefits, but it also can serve to stop you dead in your tracks. Perfectionists often times only get good at a few things because they aren't willing to do the things they are not good at. Horrible little loop, isn't it? But for some it spurs them onto greatness, and we have a lot of examples of that in every field.
In sports, for example, top athletes often practice doing the same things hundreds and even thousands of times in a single day in order to be perfect. Vijay Singh in golf is a good example. And because perfection is often the difference between winning and losing, you can understand the desire for perfection in a number of different settings. On the battle field is another place where the cost of mistakes is magnified intensely. Hence the desire to be perfect. There are thousands of reasons that people are conditioned to not want to settle for anything less than perfection. When it creates greatness, well, that's great. But for the majority, since most people are not going to practice, drill and rehearse the things that they want to be perfectat, inside, it just makes you put the task off. And all it does is look like neurosis to everyone else. As children, we've all heard the line, 'If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all. 'Usually good advice if what you usually say is rude, obnoxious or unnecessarily hurtful in some way, right? But in most other situations, not doing something unless you can do it right the first time is a recipe for becoming less and less, smaller and smaller until you don't do anything where failing is possible. No one can possibly understand all the fears and/or standards that give us each our own brand of procrastination. We all have our own past programming. So the best way, obviously, to get rid of the procrastination habit would be for each of us to take months of a very specific kind of self-analysis, and look at all the possible fears we have that stop us and all the areas where our standards are so impossibly high that we just can't go forward with certain kinds of tasks and create our own individual behavior modification programs...But that would be too expensive and time consuming for 99.999% of the population. So that leaves the second best option.
To create it, we uncovered ALL the possible reasons people put off things. We really got ridiculous. Every stupid fear that anyone could come up with and every legitimate fear, too. We looked at hundreds of situations, some of them pretty bizarre, that could leave a person with impossibly high standards that make it nearly impossible for them to succeed in their own eyes. And when you believe you can't succeed at something or that you can't do something as well as you'd like to do it, my friend, you ain't gonna do it. Simple as that. What End Procrastination Now does to change this is use self-talk statements in Suggest opedic Accelerated Learning format to positively oppose those beliefs. And when you tell yourself enough of anything, good or bad, you WILL begin to believe it. Keep telling it to yourself and nothing in the world will get you to believe otherwise. That is what makes changing old beliefs, attitudes, emotions and ACTIONS so difficult. Right?
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