Aaah procrastination… we all fall victim to it every once in a while. If you’re like me, perhaps more often than you care to admit to. For me, procrastination falls into two categories… laziness and fear. Let’s take about the fear one.
Since finalizing the deal with a printer to outsource my product production – and please don’t slam me for this – my work on this project has come to a screeching halt. Admittedly, once all the negotiating was over, I was exhausted and needed to step away for a few days to decompress and not think. My printer was also on vacation so things were on hold, but of course, there was/is still work to do. Anyways, enough of the rationalization.
Over the last week or so, this overwhelming fear has set in. From the outside it looks like procrastination, but I know it’s fear. It’s fear of entering a whole new printing world I don’t know much about. It’s fear that there’s a design error within my files and I won’t see it until I have 100s of products printed. It’s fear I’ll simply forget something important. It’s fear of a myriad of things.
Of course, I have no choice but to break through this fear and I am. Like most things we fear, once we face it head on, we often realize we’ve amplified the fear to silly proportions and we go on to wonder what we were so worried about. Reminding yourself of that when you’re “in the moment” isn’t always easy though. So my suggestion to you (and myself!) is to feel that fear and be aware of it. Make those you turn to for support aware so that they can help you face them rather than berate you for procrastination.
By internalizing your fears, you just continue to feed them and then they become greedy buggers. Starve the fear my friends, starve it!
Does fear throw you into procrastination mode? How do you deal with it?
Image Credit: She Believed She Could So She Did Print by Valentina Design
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I am the Queen of “what ifs” and “but maybe” so I can relate completely. However, if we did always gave in to the fear we would never leave the house.
I applaud you for being so honest and forth coming re your fear. Moving towards the unknown is always scary.
When I feel that dreaded feeling, I usually ask myself what is the worst that can happen??? That helps w perspective. Am I going to end up in the hospital? LOL! No. (I tend to be a bit dramatic) Will I make such a big mistake that I can’t recover?? No. After a few more of those questions I realize that I can do “it” and if I do screw up…well, I have screwed up many times before and I just keep moving on. Somehow I always bounce back.
For me the fear part is a loss of control. I like to know what is going to happen and have a plan to deal with it. I have to once again remind myself that I can’t control everything that does or doesn’t happen.
After a long inner dialogue and a few deep breathes…I am usually OK>
Until the next thing comes along ;)
I love this…so so true.
The artwork is gorgeous!
I used to have “Face The Fear Fridays” – where I did something that scared me every Friday. After a few months I ran out of fear!