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Procrastination
We all procrastinate, but is your Procrastometer sliding into the red and stopping you moving forward? Break through the block and get into the black.
Every year for years, I would stick our photos into an album. As a family we would pour over the good times, re-celebrate the highlights and neatly forget the duff stuff. Who wants to remember that anyway?
But with digital we started taking tons more photos than we used to and random e-folders of holiday pics, birthdays, parties, selfies, mad stuff, beautiful stuff and Special Stuff now jostled for space on the hard-drive. Of course the intention was still there: at the end of the year, make an e-book. What’s not to like? Our own hard-backed glossy coffee table book of all the good stuff of family life. Once I’d organised those folders it would be a piece of cake, upload the pics and Bob’s your uncle.
But could I get round to it? A year went by, then two and all of a sudden it was coming up for five years! Now, I’m normally pretty good at knuckling down to something, but here I’d hit a massive wall. On my Procrastometer I’d gone so far into the red the needle was bending. I told myself, how wonderful it would be to look back on all those years, how important it was for my children to have it, how when I’m old and forgetful I’d be able to reminisce on how wonderful life was back then.
But could I get myself to do it. Nope. I absolutely could not get my butt into gear. Fortunately I was training Coaching Students with Carole Ann and her Pure Coaching Academy and we were focusing on Procrastination one week. The students were going to coach us for practice and they asked me if I had something I was procrastinating on. Didn’t I just! Such is the power of coaching that after 15 minutes they’d broken the doomed project down into manageable chunks and helped me create a vision for moving forward. Having someone hold up a mirror to my dilly-dallying did the trick.
That weekend I made a start. Little by little sorting through the folders, selecting pictures. Over the following weeks I moved them into the book creation software and gradually it began to take shape. 440 12 inch square pages crammed with all my favourite images. It took four months doing it in any bit of spare time, and this week the massive tome arrived in the post.
It’s glorious in it’s completion! Pages and pages of fabulous and colourful images. I compared it to my Vision Scrapbook I started 8 years ago, made from torn out magazines images and phrases of my dreams, goals, wishes and desires. Looking in my family album I see how many of those dreams became a reality- travel, film awards, happy family time, special moments with my grannie in her final year, the allotment we have created from scratch.
As a coach I know that procrastination does us no good but here was proof of all the good reasons to get on with stuff. It’s never too late to get started, just make that first step. It’ll be worth it for how good it makes you feel and we can all do with feeling good.
If you are procrastinating or stalling on making those dreams a reality, why not get a coach. www.createlabcoaching.com It makes the difference between doing and dreaming. Lou Hamilton is a filmmaker, artist and coach. She founded the Create Lab Studio as a Hub for Creativity that Matters.
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