Overcome Procrastination By Balancing Your Emotional Needs

Guys, in this video what we're going to talk about is how to overcome procrastination in your life simply by restoring balance to it. So stick with me here and I'll explain what I mean. So to start off with, okay, there's a part of you that probably, if you were anything like I was, there's a part of you that probably doesn't want to hear what I'm going to say here. Maybe I should have called this video something more exciting, I don't know, just to attract more people in because sometimes I feel like it's this stuff about, you know, push yourself, you're not working hard enough, that resonates with people. And from my experience, it has very little to do with overcoming this issue. This issue is about balance. It's about boundaries. It's about self-respect, self-esteem, but we're just going to talk about the concept of balance here in this video. We can overcome procrastination by realizing we just need to restore some balance. But, you know, I just want you to accept that a part of you may be resistant to hearing this. And that is because the issue with procrastination is that it comes from a dominant need within you. It's a need that's out of balance. It's what need is it? It's one of your very important emotional needs and it's the need to take responsibility for life. It's about the things in life that we don't want to do quite often. So when we're talking about overcoming this issue, we realize, okay, we're going to try and restore balance. What does that mean? Well, a part of me is out of balance and that's because this dominant need for responsibility is within us. Now it's a very valid need to do the things we don't want to do. That's a part of life, absolutely. But when we're suffering with procrastination, this need has become dominant or it's become almost tyrannical to an extent. So to start off here, it's like a part of you won't want to hear this stuff, this boring stuff about balance. But I think maybe if we put it that way in terms of yeah, balance comes from a need that has actually become dominant and we're simply trying to restore it, that may be more helpful. So it's this dominant need for responsibility. So another way to think about that is we have all these emotional needs within us. I have a book on my website about emotional needs. You can get it for free. It tells you what your emotional needs are really, but this need for responsibility, if we have procrastination in our life, that's an issue. This need for responsibility, in my model life, there's five basic emotional needs that we all have. And this need for responsibility is seen as the kind of the golden child. It gets a lot of our time and attention, at least psychologically and emotionally, even if not behaviorally. We're not actually acting on it, but it's with us emotionally and psychologically all the time. So in that sense, it's the child that gets all the attention. Maybe it gets all the worry. And there's a whole host of other emotional needs in there that because of this dominant emotional need are ignored, they're repressed, they're put away. So if this is the golden child of all these other emotional needs, you can learn about those in the book, but there's one need especially that is the opposite of the golden child and it is the black sheep of the family. And that is especially really what you could call that is relaxation or spontaneity. That's one of the other emotional needs. This need is looked on as a liability. In fact, all our emotional needs other than responsibility are seen as a liability. If that need for responsibility becomes a dominant one, okay, so we really have to start to realize that balance is not this kind of lame, boring thing. It's very important because when a need like doing things I don't want to do, it's taken all my psychological energy. When it becomes dominant, we think that we can continue like this without nothing changing. The only issue is these other emotional needs have a way to stop you ignoring them. We can repress those needs for a long, long time. And if we ignore them, if we repress them, if we deny them, if we don't validate them, they will send emotions into the body to get your attention. And those emotions, if those emotional needs are ignored for long enough, will debilitate us and they'll actually sabotage your attempts to move forward with your productivity. So this is kind of what I'm saying here about restoring balance to all your emotional needs. To see them all as valid. It's not really optional if we want to overcome procrastination, certainly in the long run. We kind of have to see all these emotional needs as part of the same one self and validate and meet them all. Now, if that need for responsibility is causing you a lot of worry and it's causing you to, you know, all your time and psychological energy is going into thinking about that. Really what we need to do is validate these emotional needs and continue to validate that need. Sometimes people make the mistake of saying, oh, that need is getting me in trouble. It's become dominant in my life. I just need to get, you know, kind of, there's a backlash against it. That need is a very valid need. Okay. So when we were talking about restoring balance to your emotional needs, we validate that need as well as the other ones and at a practical level, it involves actually meeting all of these different emotional needs. As I said, you can learn more about those in the book. It's a very simple model that I use. It's basically, I have responsibility is one emotional need. There is meaning, purpose, creativity, your physical health. There is a little bit of reflection that we need and also spontaneity or relaxation. If we can find balance with all those needs, you will find that now everything is working on the same page. They're all on the same team. They're all kind of supporting each other. There's less inner conflict and less competition amongst all our internal emotional needs. If one of them becomes dominant, all our time and energy gets driven into this need. These needs start to feel resentful. They start to feel neglected and they will then undermine our attempts to further meet this need. This is what I'm talking about by balance. Okay. Yeah. Balance. People will sometimes talk about balance in terms of self care and things, and that's really what I'm kind of talking about here too. Is actually doing things outside of productivity or responsibility that not to see those additional things as liabilities that take you away from this, but actually to see them now as ways to support your efforts to meet your responsibilities. Okay. So balance is about looking at all, first of all, knowing what your emotional needs are. You can learn about that in the free book on my site and then finding a way to, to meet them all and balance them all so that there's less inner conflict that we'll experience. That's what balance is. Practically speaking, it's like, how am I, how am I, how can I do that on a practical level in my day to day life? So I give some tips in the book about that also, but again, this is just another one of those videos I'm making here to tell you that if you're struggling with procrastination, it's almost certainly not because you're lazy or you're not working hard enough. You may be driving too much energy, at least psychological energy, emotional energy into this dominant need, all our worries going into it. Okay. So it's, it's kind of like the nervous system. When this is the issue, we're anxious about it. It's telling us really to divert all more and more energy into this. Okay. And then that overwhelms the nervous system even more. And we feel like we were paralyzed and we can't move forward. So what I'm really asking you to try here is to pause that impulse to keep driving more energy into it. Keep, you know, over planning and keep making big intentions and big, big goals and everything else and sit back and kind of take a counterintuitive approach here, which is to, okay, I'm going to reverse things a little bit. I'm going to try and meet some of my other emotional needs while still meeting this one. And that involves, you know, carving out a little bit of time in your life away from responsibility, away from productivity. So if we can do that, we're starting to get on the right page and we will restore some balance. Guys, a short video today, but thanks for watching and I will see you again very soon. Take care. Bye for now.