Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of "I’ll Start When…"
Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. These are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. Today I want to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm.
Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology
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Procrastination And Overwhelm
I think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily, and as a result, the world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that diagnostic label and then think that writes them off from being able to ever achieve success in business. Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're going to have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses.
Some of the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. I think it's really important that, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given. I want to share today, how we can move through the blocking belief that we might have about ourselves, often by accepting a bit of support where we might need it.
Something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. They've usually done loads of work, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just run away from it. If we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they decided they weren't going to pursue.
We know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. An excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety because we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. That can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. This often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're expecting themselves to become a lawyer, because it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. This can be because they look at the legal templates and think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. We do provide training with our legal documents because I want you to understand the principles behind them, but the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not going to understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. We can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be overwhelming.
A Need To Do Everything At Once
The other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once, like getting their practice up and running and fully competent tomorrow. That's not possible. I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress, my core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days, because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible, not to do it to the standard that you're going to want. I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're going to be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming.
Overconsuming Advice
The other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. Sometimes people do this with this podcast or with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag, because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the action. When I coach people, I give very short, 10 or 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. The reason I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if I give people a template of the business plan that they're going to have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're going to cover and how everything fits together, but then I encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do,...
