Have you ever tried to push yourself to do business tasks, but ended up spending hours procrastinating? The days turn into months, and you beat yourself endlessly.

Procrastination is a perfect response to a system that is overdoing and needs to rest and slow down.

Procrastination is actually a freeze trauma response. It protects us from burnout, yet we end up feeling disappointed when we don’t do things that are important to us.

I have noticed that if we are procrastinating, there might be a few inner changes we need to make before taking action from a grounded place.

1) Changing Our Environment:

Sometimes we need to change our environment and how we do something. Do we need to work alone, or do we need to be in a stimulating environment with other people? My older son is currently working an online marketing job as a university intern. He has been working in our home office in the basement for 8 hours a day. He feels tired at the end of the day. He just told me that he is going to take his laptop and work from the backyard. What a great way to change his environment.

2) What Time Works Best:

Is there a time of the day we work better and we need to do certain tasks at that time of the day? For me, being on social media first thing in the morning or reading other people’s newsletters triggers the response of ‘I am not doing enough,’ and shuts my system down. Going for a walk puts me in my body.

3) Protecting our Energy:

Reading stuff that exaggerates successes or instant results is another thing that triggers me and I need to protect myself from those kinds of posts. If they are ads, I simply choose to hide ads and then choose irrelevantly.

This is my way to protect my energy from the hype.

4) Prioritizing Pleasure

Do we need to be in our body more, move our body, have a bath, or do something inspiring and pleasurable to shift our energy before taking action? Patriarchy tells us to prioritize productivity over rest and women are overworked, being in our body through pleasure makes us more productive than pushing ourselves to do more.

5) What Tasks Are Energizing:

Do we like the tasks we are doing or do we need to ask for help and delegate to others so we can focus on the productive work also known as money-making tasks? The human body can only do so much. As business owners, we do need to be creative and delegate to others. It doesn’t have to be expensive. We can hire a student, or we can outsource.

6) Grieving Our Failures

Do we have previous disappointments we need to grieve? We may have signed up for something and didn’t get the results we wanted. As a result, we don’t want to disappoint ourselves again and protect ourselves from experiencing failure. Instead, we procrastinate.

7) Healing our Disappointments

Did we sign up for something that was beyond our capacity, and we didn’t have time to learn and implement everything? Now we are afraid of repeating the same mistake, so we procrastinate instead.

8) Fear of Failure

Are we in our freeze trauma because of fear of failure from the past or do we have a fear of success because it hasn’t felt safe to shine?

Befriending and going towards parts of ourselves that are shut down and in freeze trauma, investigating what procrastination is protecting us from will give us more compassion and we will be able to take action.

9) Prioritizing Rest and Nourishment

Honoring our need for rest and nourishment, dismantling patriarchy, being a rebel against capitalism, and not overworking is the only way to heal and grieve our traumas, and take action from a well-grounded place.

Let me know if any of these resonate with you. I would suggest not to overwhelm your system by implementing all of these. Just pick the one you resonate with strongly and start working towards it gradually.