Here’s a lesson that has got me through so many days in the past few years. It has been my go-to whenever I’ve needed to tackle something difficult to do or those things that have me worried or nervous. If I’m dreading something, it’s the kick in the pants I need. It has got me to the finish-line on critical deadlines. It has propelled me into scary moments and helped me to break through my comfort zone. It’s nothing particularly fancy. In fact, it’s so simple it seems almost stupid to call it a lesson, but it is worth sharing. It’s not always easy to do, rarely easy actually, but it almost always works, and it definitely works for me.

When I’m stuck, I start.

I told you it was simple.

As I have grown up, although this is still a work in progress, I have learned more and more about myself. I have come to understand myself incrementally better (also still a work in progress) with each year, each life chapter. One of the things I came to notice and had to put under the microscope was my mastery of procrastination. Something tells me that this will resonate with you, darling niece (zero judgment here). It wasn’t really something that I particularly wanted to own, and it certainly wasn’t something I was keen to add to my resume, ha! But I had to admit, it was a part of me. Still is.

The more I looked at this little gem of mine, this mastery of procrastination, I discovered a lot of not so flattering reasons I excelled at it. I would often prioritise the things I wanted to do more, instead of facing what was urgent or most needed. I was quite often missing the will-power factor to push me to do what was required. At times it was laziness, that dirty awful word (*gasp). At times, fear. And quite often I would just be letting my over analytical and critical brain take over.

However, amongst the not so flattering choices, behaviours, and traits I was unpicking with this discovery, were some parts of me that didn’t feel so bad. One example of this, the most important in fact, was that I cared a lot about what I put out into the world. I cared deeply. In some respects, I know myself to be a perfectionist, especially when it comes to things that represent me, no matter how small. It could be a paper, a board report, a letter to a friend, or it could be a cake I’ve said I’ll bake, a piece of art I’m making for someone’s birthday … it could be a blog. At times, it has been this blog.

I came to realise that sometimes it was something ‘good’ about me that lead to the ‘bad’ in me – the person who cared deeply about what she produced could be the person who sat on her buttski and failed to do the work.

Procrastination is a sneaky bugger because it’s not an absolute, it’s not something that happens all the time. Quite often it hides in a day, week, month, even year, of busyness. You can be so productive and your schedule can be jam-packed to the point you feel the steam billowing off the top of your head, but if you look closely, honestly, you will see it there. You will see the things you are putting off, the things that are just not being done. And you might even catch yourself talking yourself out of doing it, yet again, despite the nagging feeling that it’s undone.

I still remember clearly a paper I needed to write for work a few years ago, it was the thing that would spark discussion on some really positive, possible changes that we could make to our organisation. It was exciting, it was something I had spent considerable hours investigating, thinking and talking about. It would improve what we did, and our team was not just on-board, but eagerly anticipating it. I needed to write a paper to present to the Board, a group of people who would be interested to read and discuss it, a group with an eye on the future and who was always looking at how we could do what we did better. But do you think I could sit my buttski down to write the darn thing? Nope.

Finally, I stopped myself in my tracks. I was just 24 short hours away from needing to send out the meeting agenda and papers, it was now or never (or at least another 3-4 months before the next board meeting). What was I waiting for? I sat and confronted myself (aren’t those the best arguments), and I got a little bit fed-up. ‘Why are you one of those people that can put off the important?’ ‘What are the people getting the important shit done doing that you’re not?’

Then it hit me. ‘They are starting’ That was the only difference. They were probably just as nervous to get their thing perfectly ‘right’ as I was, and just as scared that it wouldn’t work out. They probably didn’t know the perfect way to start, let alone pull it together, but they knew that unless they started the darn thing, any old way they could, they were not going to get it done at all – they just got started.

So that’s what I did. I was stuck, but I started anyway. The first hour was torture, I’ll be honest – lots of writing, deleting, editing, changing back to the first structure, stopping mid-section to start a new one. But somewhere in the starting of it, I started to find my way. After another hour, and a coffee, I found the sweet spot – I found flow.

Long story short, I busted a gut on the last day (it may or may not have been an all-day’er/all-night’er *wink) and finished the paper, included it for discussion on the agenda and put it in the meeting papers. I wrote it, they read it, we discussed it, and it led to the organisational development and changes we had hoped for, with a few improvements thrown in. Yay!

What wasn’t so ‘yay’, was the realisation that it took me weeks and weeks to get to a job done that I could have spread out over weeks and weeks. That no matter when I made the push to get started, the journey from there was going to be roughly the same, the workload the same, the time taken would be the same. Hours, or days, or weeks? I’d had a choice, and wouldn’t it have been nice to not rush something so important, cramming it into 24 hours, giving myself a headache to go with the lack of sleep? It didn’t have to be that way, it really didn’t. I will say that I was feeling somewhat good, however, that it wasn’t like so many other times when I let an opportunity pass me by completely, those times when I missed that magic window to bring my certain something to the table. So there is that.

Ever since then, whenever I find myself playing a fervent game of hide-and-seek with something important on my to-do list, I remember that it doesn’t have to be that way and that there’s only one way to stop being stuck – I need to start.

Sometimes you just need to put on your big-girl-pants and brave the initial pain of actually doing the thing you are putting off. There is almost always reward at the end of it, even if it is just the feeling of getting that particular monkey off your back, but it’s usually much greater than that. Starting, in a way, is being kind to yourself too – the earlier you do it, the easier it will be.

So take it from me, from someone who has been solidly stuck on more than her fair share of occasions, from the master procrastinator, from the chick also known as Aunty – if you ever get stuck, there’s only one way out, my sweetness. Start!

Love always,

Aunty xo