Is it really procrastination?

I never intended for so much of my life’s work to be focused on how fucking hard it can be to do your life’s work.

But, as things have turned out, I’m pretty much an expert on persistent avoidance and its cause, internal resistance. Which means I know exactly how profoundly shitty it is to fight yourself and lose every day of your life, how much escaping that existence can feel like crawling out of your own grave, and how to go about helping people go from the former to the latter.

So everything in me bristles when people ask me what I do, I explain it, and they respond with something like, Oh, right, so you help smart people with procrastination.

Because I am not rude, I don’t respond with, Bitch, when did you hear me say the word ‘procrastination’?

But I’m definitely thinking it.

Some of the people who respond this way are marketing and sales types, who understandably think I should use the language that is the most recognisable to the most people. Some of them are friends who wonder if I could make things a lot easier on myself if I just called a spade a spade.

But I don’t really think this is a spade/spade issue. I think there are important reasons not to collapse internal resistance and its symptoms under the concept of ‘procrastination’—and not just in terms of helping the right people find my work.

It’s also a crucial distinction because the terminology we use affects how we, the sufferers of the problem, understand it for ourselves.

To see what I mean, consider:

Why don’t we just call writer’s block procrastination?

Why not just say ‘the writer is procrastinating’?

Think about it for just a second and the answer is clear.

We have a name for writer’s block because we know there’s a specific issue involved beyond the generic delaying of a task. Something else is causing the delay, something significant, something that is going to have to shift before the delay disappears. The delay itself is not the origin or the focal point of the problem.

Most people will never have writer’s block, but they still understand that the term to refer to some kind of internal push/pull of desire and resistance. That understanding is robust enough that if you extend the terminology to ‘talent block’, they easily grasp that I mean the same push/pull is operative in these other cases too.

This sense of internal conflict or ambivalent inertia is what disappears if we sub out ‘writer’s block’ for ‘procrastination’.

The latter term evokes an entirely different, must less sophisticated model of the problem, where cause and effect seem obvious or even redundant. As in: the writer is procrastinating. They are not writing because they are putting it off. The solution is to stop putting it off. Problem solved.

But one of the identifying features of internal resistance is that it has none of this self-evident clarity. It has the polar opposite. When we’re experiencing internal resistance, we aren’t doing the thing despite knowing we want to do it, and we have no idea why. We are trapped in a struggle in which we are both of the antagonists. Worse, we are also the referee, trying in vain to mediate an extremely high-stakes conflict without being told the rules of the game being played.

When we wind up describing this problem as one of procrastination, we do not get an increase in clarity or ability to act. What we get is the specious belief that we already know everything we need to about the problem and that it is easy to solve.

As in: Why aren’t we doing it? We’re procrastinating. How do we do it? We just stop procrastinating.

This is the equivalent of telling someone who is throwing up because they keep getting poisoned that if they would just stop throwing up then they wouldn’t be suffering from poisoning. When really, they need to figure out where all this fucking poison is coming from.

Using the term ‘blocked’ instead of ‘procrastinating’ doesn’t tell us the answer to that question, but at least it keeps the question on the table.

I could go on about this, get into more detail about how solving for procrastination can wind up digging people deeper into internal resistance, but I want to end with a more global objection, which has to do with trivialisation.

A friend once questioned whether I avoided the term ‘procrastination’ because I wanted the problem I solve to be somehow more complex or less mundane than word implied.

On the one hand, I think she’s right. I don’t want the problem I solve to sound mundane or trivial. But it’s not because I want to make myself or my coaching sound important. It’s because the problem isn’t fucking trivial.

It is not a minor thing to feel like there is something you are supposed to do during your own and only life and you want to do it more than anything and you just cannot get yourself to do it. It’s not a minor thing to feel like you are letting yourself down where it matters to you most, day after day after day. Or to lie awake at night terrified that time is running out and you’ll never figure out how to get out of your own way.

And I think if you can use the word ‘procrastination’ while still holding the texture of the experience I just described in your mind, you are in a very small minority.

The issue isn’t just one of accuracy, though. As I suggested earlier, it’s also about the way different terminology makes the problem harder or easier to solve.

In my experience, the last thing anyone dealing with internal resistance needs is a sense that they should have been able to solve this problem easily a million years ago. Trust me, we already think that. We already blame ourselves. We already think we should just be able to do it. Trivialisation of the problem is where we start.

What’s required is the opposite. Call it epic-isation. Or, as I’ve called it elsewhere, the quest-cam.

No one keeps going in the face of persistent defeat like someone with internal resistance. And no one is less likely to notice their own determination and drive.

This lack of noticing makes it harder to end the resistance. Imagine trying to solve a really tough problem while falsely believing that it is incredibly straightforward, the solution is obvious and easy, and that you’re the only one encountering any difficulty.

Now imagine trying to solve the same really tough problem when you know it’s knotty, you know people you admire have wrestled with it as well, and you know that you are incredibly focused and resourceful. That you never, ever, ever give up.

I’d bet on the second person to reach the solution every single time.

This is one reason why I lobby for those dealing with internal resistance to recognise the heroic nature of their own efforts, to switch on their quest-cam.

Most of the time, we’re so fixated on the part of us that is still blocked that we have almost no room to leverage the part of us that refuses to stay that way. And making contact with that second part is crucial, because they’re the ones driving our attempt to get free.

Talent blocks can be twisty, excruciating and mysterious. They are also logical, comprehensible and resolvable. But we can only see the latter qualities if we come at the problem at the level of complexity it requires. It does take work to get there, but it is work that you can see moving the needle. And there is nothing trivial about being able to trust yourself to do that things that matter to you most.

Image credit Jim West via Alamy