You’ll see that I’ve put up a two-minute video of me talking about what coaching is and how it can help people on my home page. Thanks to my ability to procrastinate, and more importantly all the fears I had to work through around this project, it took months to complete. But it’s finally out there!

I never had any intention of making a video. So how did it happen? Well, back in December my friend Cheryl had a contest in which she gave away sound branding packages (she’s an amazing musician, and she knows a thing or two about marketing – check out her work here: www.cbemusic.com). I entered, and won! After talking about my coaching and what I wanted to share with people about Coaching Heights, she came up with not only a sonic logo (think along the lines of a jingle) but also a visual logo for me. The visual logo I knew how to use, but what the heck was I going to use the sonic logo for? She suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea to have a personal video on my site so that people could get to know me. I told her, “No way! I can’t make a video!” I couldn’t imagine doing that.

The idea kept running through my head, though. It wouldn’t go away. But I had plenty of reasons why I shouldn’t make a video: 1) It’d be corny, 2) I wouldn’t know what to say, 3) I’d look silly, 4) I wouldn’t know how to make one, 5) It wouldn’t be professional, 6) I wouldn’t know how to put the video on my website, 7) I’d look stupid. Actually, I probably came up with even more reasons, but I realized they were mostly all related to the same fear: whatever I create won’t be good enough.

Anyone out there with perfectionist tendencies relate to that? I have learned that when I come up with a lot of reasons not to do something, it’s usually because I’m worried that if I try it, I’ll fail. And if I never attempt it, I can’t fail, right? Sure, if I don’t make a video for my website, no one will ever get the opportunity to judge it. But I wondered if I’d won the sound branding package for a reason – so Cheryl and I could have that conversation about making a video – so I could realize all the things I was afraid of – so I could see that my fears were stopping me from doing something that was probably a really good idea. After I had that conversation with myself, I decided I would just have to do it and see what happened. I knew that even if all my fears came true, I would still learn a lot about myself by pushing through to the other side.

So in February, I wrote up some ideas about what I wanted to say, and sent it to my dear friend Ute to see what she thought. Why Ute? Because she knows me really well, and wants nothing but the best for me, yet she’ll always be honest with me. So if it sucked, she’d tell me. But she didn’t think it sucked – in fact, she wrote back that she felt like I was speaking just to her, from my heart, about things we’ve all dealt with at some point in our lives.

Great! Now I knew what I wanted to say. By the end of March I actually got around to asking my partner Suna to film it for me. We got set up in the living room with the projector screen pulled down to provide a good background. At first, we tried filming it with me standing up. That didn’t work! I couldn’t stand still…kept shifting my weight back and forth. So we found a stool at the right height. But Suna couldn’t hold the iPhone still long enough, so then we had to find a tripod. We started filming again, but then we realized that when Suna was behind the phone, I wanted to make eye contact with her, and not the camera. Suna started the recording and moved out of the way (you can see her shadow at the beginning of the video if you look closely), and I tried to speak directly to the camera. The first time we did that I made it all the way through, and we called it good. I didn’t want to keep doing it, because I knew it would just start sounding more and more forced, and I’m no actress.

The video was done, and you would think I’d cleared the highest hurdle. Nope, because then I didn’t do anything with it again for months! Of course, all that time I could tell myself that I had made the video. Never mind that no one had seen it, other than a few folks who I knew would be supportive. But I knew I hadn’t really seen this process through until I actually wrote and sent this post.

Fast forward to July, when I finally got myself to sit down and write a rough draft of this post, and got the final version of the sonic logo from Cheryl. But then I got busy and didn’t pick it up again until almost the end of August, when I finally figured out how to put the video on my home page. You’ll notice that the sonic logo plays twice at the beginning. Maybe I’ll fix that someday. But I decided that for now, no more excuses. It’s time to put this baby out there!

After all, will it ever be perfect? No! The point is to give people the opportunity to get to know me a little, and to help them decide if I’d be a good coach for them. If they’re not going to work with me because I don’t have a slick, professional video, then they’re probably not a good match for me anyway. And sometimes, you just have to go for it. In the end, I just had to decide it was worth the risk to try something new even if it wasn’t going to be anywhere close to perfect, ask for help when I needed it, and lean on those who I knew would support me as I moved through my fears.

I hope you enjoy it, and that it gives you a better sense of how coaching works and how it can help all of us accomplish our goals.

P.S. – Apparently, I also procrastinate on sharing the good stuff! Back in April, my friend Val wrote up a little article about me for Sacramento CBS local news. Check it out!

So I finally got around to listening to a recording of an interview with Dr. Tim Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University, about his research on procrastination. It only took me two months! And now, about two months later, I’m finally writing about it!

Growing up, I was the queen of procrastination. I generally waited until the last minute to do schoolwork and other tasks, figuring that they would take less of my time that way. And if I didn’t feel like doing something, I told myself it would be better to wait until I did so that I would be “more efficient.”

This philosophy worked more or less just fine for me all the way through college and up until I attained ABD (All But Dissertation) status in grad school. Obviously, waiting until the last minute doesn’t fly very well with a dissertation. And because I rarely spent enough time on it to get excited, I didn’t feel like working on it very often. It was clear I was never going to finish if I went on like this. And I have to say, although I was getting a lot of other things done as I avoided the hard work of writing, the weight of that huge, unfinished project was getting heavier and heavier. Not to mention my self-esteem demons were whispering louder and louder: “Maybe you can’t do it. Maybe you’re not ever going to finish it.”

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending – I did finally finish my dissertation! But how? In listening to Tim’s interview, I realized that I made two critical changes that are borne out in the procrastination research. I stopped waiting until I felt like it, and I made a connection between my present and future self.

Stop Waiting Until You Feel Like It

One of the main points that Dr. Pychyl stressed in his interview was that it is really important to stop waiting until you feel like doing something. This is a surefire recipe to put a task off indefinitely. And the reality is, whether or not you feel like doing something has nothing to do with whether or not you need to do it. Good writers often report that they have to force themselves to sit down everyday and write, whether they are in the mood or not. And as Anne Lamott says, it’s “bird by bird” – one step at a time. But if you never get started, you’ll never get past that first step. For me, this meant sitting down to work on the dissertation even if I had a very long list of other things I would rather be doing! What made me decide it was worthwhile to sit down and do something I didn’t want to do? I think it had a lot to do with the connection I finally made to my future self.

Connect to Your Future Self

A second finding from Dr. Pychyl’s research is that we have to make a connection between what our present self does or doesn’t do, and what the consequences will be for our future self. In my case, after many years I realized (or maybe admitted is a better word) that if I didn’t do my dissertation now, in the future I would be very disappointed in myself, not to mention stressed. Making a connection to one’s future self is actually harder than it would seem, because we use completely different parts of our brain. When we think about our present self, we use certain areas of our prefrontal cortex, but when we think about our future self, we use completely different areas. The same areas, as a matter of fact, that we use when thinking about strangers. So literally, our brain views our future self as a stranger!

This means that we have to do some very conscious visualization, or “time travel,” to realize that someday, our future self will no longer be a stranger, but our present self. And if we don’t want our future self to feel the pain or stress that goes along with our procrastination, our present self needs to take action now! If you saw the most recent X-Men movie, “Days of Future Past,” you’ll recognize this concept in how difficult it was for Charles (the Patrick Stewart character) to convince his younger self to take action now to save his future self (and in his case, the world). Fortunately, most of us don’t have quite that level of pressure riding on our ability to befriend our future self.

So, the next time you have a task that you’re avoiding, maybe you can convince yourself to take that first step by viewing it as a gift you are giving to your future self!