Procrastination Help | How to Stay Consistent when You Start to Make Progress | Viewer Q&A

Today's question reads, uh, "Hi, David. I've been putting a lot of a lot more work in lately. Uh, on paper, at least I'm doing more than I used to do. But no matter what I do, there's this constant voice in my head telling me it's still not enough. That I should be doing more, pushing harder, being better. Even when I rest, I feel guilty. And when I work, I never uh it never feels like it counts." How do you work with an inner critic that just keeps moving the goalposts? So, I really like the way you put that there. Keeps moving the goalposts. And that's exactly the way it works. It's predictable that this will happen when you overcome procrastination and you start to be more consistent in your goals. And um the inner critic shows up with, "Is that all you're going to do?" Now, what do you do about this? There's a very useful topic. It sounds a little bit dark, but it can be one of the most uh useful strategies you can take with this and I I've taken it from work in addiction and it's the the approach or the strategy the technique is called the box of pain technique. So in addiction what we'll do is you know if a person is newly sober maybe the addiction will show them all the wonderful memories of the times when they used to be engaged with the addiction right and it's like the the addictive voice they call it is like a salesperson that tried to get you back to engaging with the addiction but it conveniently leaves out the other part of the story which is all the pain and all the guilt and all the negativity around it and the the hurt the damage and the destruction. So, one of the things we do in addiction is we we we create for ourselves metaphorically or even physically sometimes something called a box of pain where you put into that box all the memories of the painful experiences you went through in during the addiction. And what you do is when the the addictive voice starts up, you don't fight with it. You let it do its thing, which is to promote using again. But you occasionally you go back and you refer to the box of pain which is showing you what life used to be like beforehand. Similarly with this question here um on procrastination and that inner critic that comes in it's never enough it's never enough. What we do with it is our box of pain is we refer back to the moments when we were chronically procrastinating. So, it's like we point back to that time six months ago when I wasn't taking any action for two weeks straight and I was beating myself up over it. We point to the periods or the times or the instances, the episodes when I was completely inactive due to being uh stuck in that procrastination cycle. So, we point another term I use is a baseline. We point back to the baseline and the baseline with procrastination is often zero. many days, weeks, months even go by when I don't engage at all. And when you start to work on the techniques that help you come out of that, one of the things I talk about a lot is you only ever commit the small things. Okay? So you the old procrastination strategy that leads to procrastination is taking on the huge tasks. Your nervous system gets overwhelmed by it. So we start to commit to small things. And there are other techniques too, but that's just an example. But what you'll notice is it starts to work. You start to become more consistent and you're engaging regularly with your with your project, your goal or your your uh your work. So it starts to work. But then this part predictably will also come in because that part was always there. The part that says that's not enough. That was actually the thing that caused the procrastination to begin with. But but just because you're actually beginning to engage consistently with it instead of doing nothing, it's still there. So how we deal with that is we refer it back to I used to do zero amount in this right we keep referring back to that. So our reference point, the thing we compare ourselves with moving forward is no longer these internalized standards of perfection that the inner critic compares everything you do with. What you're comparing yourself with when you're using these techniques and you're becoming consistent in in achievable small daily actions, you're comparing yourself to the times when you used to do zero. If you're making that comparison regularly, you will that's how you get through this. But you'll notice that tendency will be to compare everything that you're doing to this internalized standard. And that standard, it comes from that inner critic. It's coming from low self-esteem. And it's sort of a way that the the uh it's in our shadow. It tries to overcome low self-esteem by giving us these massive extreme tasks. It must be perfect. You must be the best. You must do it. Um you must do a huge amount of work. It's always extreme by nature. So when you start comparing yourself not to that anymore, but to the box of pain, the memory that you retain in a very useful way to who I used to be with this, that's what you're comparing yourself to in a day-to-day basis, right? We start to come out of um guilt. We start to come into, wow, anything above zero is a win, right? With consistency over time. And so it sounds a little bit dangerous this idea of the box of pain, but I'm telling you it's one of the best things you can do for yourself, right? Because it's it it it gives you a realistic thing to compare yourself with. And it is realistic because for anything like I was with it, there were days, weeks, months going by when I was stuck in that chronic procrastination pattern. That's who I compare myself with. Right? If I'm going to do any comparison at all, it's with that uh that cycle that I was in compared to my current strategy or or productivity or output, we'll say. So, keep it in mind. Draw up that thing. Now, you don't linger on it. You just use this. You refer to that box of pain every time this inner critic comes in and you start noticing this sort of um never enough, not good enough, you need to do more, you need to do more. And that will encourage you to expand what you've committed to. It'll encourage you to break your boundaries with your goals, right? Because I talk about having boundaries with everything in your life. Every conscious goal you have should be contained within a boundary. It'll say you don't need that. You need to expand it out and that's going to overwhelm you. So keep referring back to that box of pain periodically and it would really help with this uh the comparison that the inner critic uses because again the inner critic is actually the thing that causes you to procrastinate and it was it was like that from day one in this. Hope that's useful concept. If you want to check out my book on this you can do it. It's um procrastination decoded. It's at my website. It's on Amazon as well. And if you want to reach me for one-to-one coaching, you can do do so. Uh there's a link uh underneath this video. So like this video, subscribe to the channel, and share this with anyone you think it might benefit. Thanks for being with me, and I'll see you guys very soon. Take care. Bye-bye.