What Are You Waiting For? by John McGrail, C.Ht.

Beating procrastination can literally pave the way to a whole new life— all it takes is a desire to change, a decision to act, and a little help from your subconscious mind.

Ask any random group of people what if anything they’d like to change in their life and chances are you will hear a great list of worthy goals: Find a new job, have better relationships, make more money, stop smoking, lose weight, clean up the clutter in my life, etc. Chances are just as likely that along with the list will come a million reasons and excuses as to why the person hasn’t started doing them yet.

If you were to ask why you would very likely hear something like, “Oh, I’ll get to it— tomorrow... next week… sometime.” Famous last words. The truth, of course, is that most all of us at some time experience the pain of procrastinating— and it is painful because procrastinating prevents us from doing or becoming better; from living a richer, fuller life; from attaining the goals we know would make us happier and more fulfilled.

Why do we do this to ourselves? Because regardless of the final benefit, for most of us, incorporating change into our lives, any change, brings with it the unknown, and the unknown generates fear and resistance at the deepest levels of our subconscious from whence most of our behaviors and emotions arise. Procrastination is a highly effective method of keeping the status quo.

Procrastination, whether chronic or acute, is most often caused by some combination of: a fear of failure, a fear of success— sometimes both at once— a lack of personal validation in life, low self esteem, and/or an accompanying limiting belief that “I don’t deserve, I’m not good enough, I’m not worthy.” Any and all of these procrastination generators are severely inhibiting to personal peace and growth.

For some procrastinators, “non-doing” represents not having to deal with success or failure and the personal issues (new expectations) either success of failure (change) would bring;

"If I wait until the last minute and fail, I have an excuse for my failure that wasn’t caused by my own inability or shortcoming, but instead by a lack of time.”

For others, the thought pattern might go something like,

"If I wait until the last minute I might fail, and then I won't have to deal with any new expectations of me that might accompany my success."

Or,

“If I don’t do anything, I cannot fail, nothing can happen to me.”

For those who procrastinate for extra validation and an ego boost, waiting until the last minute and then "pulling it off" (whatever "it" is) brings extra validation;

"I must be pretty good after all, look what I just did."

And if they don’t pull “it” off, once again there is a handy excuse— not enough time— that places the focus (fault) away from the individual.

For the occasional procrastinator who can generally overcome the inertia of resistance to change, her procrastination may be nothing more than a minor nuisance, a little mosquito in the tent of life that she can track down and swat away. For the chronic procrastinator though, the behavior generates an endless pattern of suffering the disappointment and guilt of having let himself and sometimes his friends and loved ones down… again.

Chronic procrastination can become a crippling, vicious cycle; leading to a spiraling crash of self esteem and a feeling of abject failure. Thankfully, it is also a cycle that can be broken, though most people need assistance. Hypnotherapy is a wonderfully powerful tool for providing that assistance.

Getting rid of your procrastination involves, identifying and dealing directly with the cause(s). And it’s important to understand that regardless of the cause or combination of causes that result in your procrastinating, you had to learn how to behave that way. That’s right! We all learn our fears, our lack of self esteem, our need for extra validation, our limiting beliefs through the chain of our experiences and how we associate and identify those experiences into our subconscious mind to become behaviors and emotions that hold us back.

What we do through the power of hypnotherapy is help the subconscious mind, the engine of behavior, to unlearn the old patterns and re-learn new responses to the old models and triggers. For example we can desensitize a client to his fear of failure, eradicating the link between failure and self esteem, then re-teach new positive responses, for instance that failure need not be a negative concept, but instead an acceptable part of the process of learning and growing. With reinforcement, this new learning soon becomes a new belief and behavior pattern every bit as automatic as the old negative pattern of procrastination was.

The combination of desensitization, unlearning and re-teaching a person's response to the old triggers works to eliminate the behavior (procrastination)— and often very quickly— as it no longer serves the individual's model of herself and how she relates to the world. Take away the fear(s), create a new self image, and there is no need for the old negative behavior.

We all deserve a happy, productive and fulfilling life and procrastination does not have to stand in the way. Rid of procrastination, a person can engage in the excitement and adventure that creating and attaining goals can be! I work with a lot of procrastinators and every day I see these clients literally transform themselves into the achievers they wish to be through harnessing the power of their inner resources in the subconscious mind. The process is as natural as learning to watch a movie. So, once again, what are you waiting for?

Copyright 2007 John McGrail, C.Ht. John earned his certification in hypnotherapy at the Hypnosis Motivation Institute, the nation’s first federally-accredited college of hypnotherapy. He is also certified in NLP (Neuro-Linguistic-Programming), Timeline Therapy, and Therapeutic Imagery. He enjoys a thriving private practice focusing on personal growth and change, as well as performance improvement in the workplace, sports, and academics. His clients have included celebrities, artists, writers, athletes, airline pilots, tradesmen, homemakers, corporate executives and sales teams, students; people from virtually all social and professional backgrounds. www.hypnotherapylosangeles.com