 So I have a question here. It's from someone who says they're a chronic procrastinator. I'm going to read down this question and I hope it will be useful for other people watching this video as well as the person who sent me the question. I certainly was for many, many years and that's why I work in this area. That's why I'm so focused on helping people move past this because it's so possible. So if you're interested in that, visit my website, all the resources you need are right there. And also if you want to send me a question, you can do so on my website. If it's a question I think can help other people and you'd like me to make a video, I can do that. So this question is very familiar to me, quite a few of these emails. This one is, it starts off by saying I'm a chronic procrastinator, someone who's very, very entrenched in the pattern of putting off important work. And the person's story says I graduated from med school, so obviously a lot of study involved in 2018. And my goal is to practice medicine in the US. For that I have to take three exams and I was supposed to be studying for the first and hardest one in September, which is approximately seven months ago. But I started procrastinating after two months. So in November this pattern of procrastination set in. And so for the last five months I have done nothing. And every day I wake up and automatically sit at my desk and open my books. I then start surfing social media or reading about procrastination and jumping from one article to another. Very, very common. So many people say that they're trying to figure out why this behavior is there and spend a lot of their time from video to video, maybe even motivational videos. And yet it doesn't really seem to help that much. So that either tells me that either the person is intellectualizing the advice or the advice that they're getting is not particularly useful. And I think the advice that they're getting is oftentimes not very, very helpful. But I'm hoping that the advice that I give to people is a little bit more what's going on underneath the surface. Not about just changing certain behaviors because that's superficial and it won't change things. For instance, somebody might just tell you stop browsing social media. There's plenty of that type of advice online. Doesn't cut the mustard. That's not what's causing this issue at all. So just to finish this message it says, So I start, I stay in this pattern until I go to sleep. So that's what happens for the day. Putting off is a cycle. It's a cycle. From November till now I have studied only 10 pages. So not making a lot of progress. I can't control myself and I feel so desperate. And that sense of desperation is exactly why I'm so interested in this topic. So I'm going to give you some advice and it's not going to be the typical advice that you might hear. But the root cause of this is low self-esteem. Now obviously I don't know this person, at least not yet. But from my advice, speaking generally from my experience, this is caused by low self-esteem. And what happens with that low self-esteem is, you know, it's that feeling of unworthiness. I'm not good enough. Maybe I don't have what it takes, etc. etc. That turns into, okay, because I have this feeling of low self-esteem, I start to use this thing in my life as a form of self-punishment. Now it's all unconscious. It wakes up in the morning and says, wouldn't it be great if I could find something today to use to punish myself? So that's one of the primary reasons for this. What we need to start to do is to go to work on your self-esteem to make you feel good about yourself again. Two ways to do that, of course, one of them that I'll talk about now in a while is how you talk to yourself. And another one is, well, I stop hurting myself. I stop undermining myself and that's where the procrastination stuff comes in. Once you get a handle on that, you stop to reinforce these negative feelings about yourself. And a happy byproduct of that is that you get a lot more work done and you feel more creative, more alive, and you also have a way healthier work-life balance. So you'll certainly get a lot more done than 10 pages in five months, okay? But you can look at that and say, oh my God, but that's what it's like. That's what it was like for me, that is what it's like for so many people who have this issue. It's the sense that the work is so important and yet I'm not making any progress with it, even though I have this huge, important label on it. Okay, so what I would also say, and this is, the biggest fear we have, if you can understand what the big fear is behind all of this, it'll be a big, big help in terms of breaking the pattern because we tend to think that the big fear is, well, I'll fail in my exams, the three difficult exams. And there's actually, okay, maybe that's a belief that's there, maybe that is a fear, but from my experience again, the big fear we have is that it's not that we'll fail, it's that we will fail to take action, that we'll fail to follow through and do what is required. And because that insecurity is there, that lack of self-trust, well, anxiety builds and we deal with that feeling of anxiety through procrastination. Procrastination is actually a defence mechanism to deal with anxiety. Okay, so in terms of practical things you can do, what I would say is start to, there's a whole process of this, I have a four hour video course on my website for this and a book also on this and it describes the exact route you can take to stop undermining yourself through procrastination and start to build self-esteem again. A few tips I would say, because I want this advice to be there for lots of people, not just people who take the course, although I do strongly advise you to take it, especially if procrastination has been a pattern for you over a period of time. The first thing is to start to pick when am I going to do work and pick it mindfully. Okay, so identify when does work begin for me, have that as the intention. Give yourself plenty of rest time before it happens and what I call that is to be kind to yourself but conscious. So know, you should always kind of know when am I going to engage with the work and that could be in four hours time, that means I have four hours to relax. It's not all about I need to do it now, I need to do it now, it's about setting consciously, it doesn't really necessarily matter when you say you're going to start, it's just to identify okay, give myself some time, then I'll begin. Okay, that's kind of one of the first steps that are involved in this. That's going to make your nervous system a little bit more relaxed and it's going to not feel so hurried and overwhelmed. Overwhelmed, that emotion of feeling overwhelmed and hurried and rushed and under pressure all the time. Your nervous system does not respond very well to that at all, so it's going to shut down. So we have to first of all start to deal with these feelings of anxiety in the nervous system and start to soothe it, work with it rather than against it. Now, when you're doing that and you're setting your start times mindfully, now you're just beginning to notice whether or not you show up and do some work, engage with it, or whether or not you fail to. You become an observer, almost like a scientist of your own behavior. Now, as long as you're observing it, this is very, very helpful because you can start to realize, what am I doing? If I fail to show up and follow through, okay, that's interesting. Well, why did that happen? Also, how did I feel when that happened? And if you get still with that and you start to notice over time what happens is I start to feel guilt. There's feelings of unworthiness and shame that are there for me. So many people tell me and experience this obviously myself because I'm no different than anyone else. There's nothing special about me. Anybody can get over this issue. You start to notice every time I do this, I feel guilty. I keep perpetuating this cycle of guilt. That's your first clue that will tell you that this is a self-esteem issue. I'm undermining myself because of these feelings of unworthiness. So, start to notice whether or not you procrastinate. Now, if you do procrastinate, what I tell people is to implement a consequence and the consequence is that there is no work done for the rest of the day. That is a huge, huge help for procrastination because it sends a signal to your unconscious that I am not going to rely on procrastination as a coping mechanism for my anxiety anymore. I'm going to have to find other ways of dealing with that anxiety. And also, it gets you out of a headspace of being indecisive about things. No longer will you have this cycle where it's okay, the person in the question mentions that they wake up and they're sitting at the desk and it's just this indecisive thing all day long. It's really indecision that's causing those feelings of uneasiness. With this approach, what I'm telling you to do is to set the time and either notice if you do it or not and if you don't do it, implement a consequence. With that consequence of taking work off the table entirely for that day, indecision has gone out of it. There's no more indecisiveness. The book goes into why that's helpful in a lot more detail in the course as well. But basically, you're just training your mind to realise I can work or I can relax but I can't procrastinate. I have to make up my mind. It's training you into being decisive with this. Now, more fundamentally, and I'll finish on this, is the whole thing about self-esteem. And how we talk to ourselves in this is a huge, huge part of building greater self-confidence, self-acceptance, self-trust, self-love really, self-compassion. And I think it's even in the email there the term have to and need to. We need to... See, I even said it, but I think it's actually okay in this sense. We do need to get rid of the negative self-talk and that talk about needing to and have to do certain things because it instills within us a sense of coercion, of being forced. Forced to do something I don't necessarily want to do. Makes us feel small, it makes us feel controlled, it makes us feel like slaves almost. So to start to change our language, and I usually tell people to start working on a story and to start journaling with different types of language. And when you gradually start to use terms like I want to or I choose to or that would be fun for me, that's a preference I have, those types of terms. It changes your psychology in terms of engaging with work. You're doing it for very different reasons now. Because if you do sit with it, you will find, well, I actually do want to do this. Really, I genuinely want to do it. Sounds like you're on a great adventure here. And it sounds like you've got huge potential and just so many opportunities waiting for you in life. So it's, yeah, I do want to do it. I want to do this rather than using that old conditioned language of I need to, I have to, must do, all those things. When your self-confidence comes, there's less of a need, an unconscious need to feed into that negative self-image we have for ourselves to reinforce it through acting out our behavior in terms of procrastination. Just reinforces that belief that's always there. So I hope that advice is helpful. Again, it's so great to see people talking about this issue because so many people have this issue and it causes so much uneasiness, so much negative emotion, and it's easily solved. That's one of the goals I have for this channel, for my work as a therapist, is to help people with this. Because I know it's so possible to change it. You will find out that when you start to address this, you'll be engaging what you're working so effortlessly, you'll be excited about it, you'll start to see momentum build in your life, but more importantly, you'll start to feel good about yourself as a person again. And when that happens, it's just, life is so different. Life is so, so different when that happens. You'll realize there's nothing you can't do, and you'll be engaging effortlessly with your work. So again, just, if you want to learn more about that visit my website, the resources are there, and I hope it was helpful. And reach out if you have a question as well. Take care of yourself folks, and I'll talk to you next time. Bye for now.