I have had several posts about procrastination and the stress of having to manage it. No one deserves to deal with this and many more challenges. You deserve better if you’ve taken several steps to overcome this challenge. In this post, we will be looking at the issue of procrastination from another perspective.
- What if we have been fighting the wrong problem?
- What if it’s something else that we’ve let linger on while we tackle procrastination?
- What if it is FEAR
When Procrastination Has A Lot To Do With Fear
Fear contributes to our struggle with procrastination. I’ve listed some of the instances where you’d find yourself drawing back because of fear;
- You need to talk to a crowd
- Meet new people
- Market a product
- Offer a proposal
- Kick start your mind-blowing business
- So so so.
Now, in as much as the aforementioned activities look like the things people do effortlessly, it’s different for some of us and here’s why;
- You fear that you’ll do badly in your speech.
- Meeting people could be tasking expecially if you’re shy.
- You fear that you’ll fail in your marketing strategy.
- You are scared your client may not like your proposal
- What if the business doesn’t bloom as you imagined? FEAR!
I know that the bulk of inactions have more to do with fear than the interest to do something tasking. You probably feel you are pushing important tasks aside when you actually aren’t, but shying away due to the fear of failure.
Imagine having to convince a crowd to buy a beautiful product you have to offer?
You will worry about flopping and get worried that you aren’t strong enough.
How Do People Overcome Fear?
Fear is inevitable but manageable. You can stop fear from controling and overwhelming you. Sometimes you wonder how people do things fearlessly while you stay back nurturing losses caused by your approach to situation masked by fear.
The truth is, you don’t have to question why you can’t be like miss A who stepped up her game and overcame the fear of failure. Now, A’s business/career is booming.
Nobody ready really stops fearing situations, we all have different approach to life and situations. In the situations like this, the WHYs can’t help of we only want to attempt A’s strategy to fighting fear. There are a lot of people whose success we question out of curiosity.
Do they really overcome fear or learn to live with it?
- How did he/she do it?
- Were there no setbacks?
- Why do I have to keep hitting the failure rock, unlike other people?
People learn to fight off fear in different ways.
- They learn to live with fear
- When you identify the kind of fear you’re dealing with, you’ll have a chance to put it in check
- Some people only mask their fear and fight slowly until they are in charge
- Some people are ultimately stronger than their fears
On Realizing It Is Fear Not Just Procrastination
I have always had a thing to say about procrastination. After all, it is the primary agent in my inactivity. Like you know, a procrastinator would rather have fun than do what’s more important. It got dawned on me that I may have been fighting the wrong battle. My real problem was fear of not being enough, self-sabotage.
We all have our fears, as we all procrastinate. But the ability to step on this fear makes us different. I have a lot to deal with, and it’s only reasonable because I’m human.
We fight the same battle if you have attempted to take a step but given up almost immediately because you feel it won’t make much difference. You are scared of failure and cannot bear to see yourself experience it. Rather than try, you give up and move to the next plan.
We grew up with our parents instilling in us the need to be fearless, sometimes in the wrong ways. Now, adulthood has us fighting for ourselves; only our desire to overcome this battle can help us.
We are now being controlled by what we’ve known and fought all our lives. What if we become something close to fearless?
Introversion By Fear
What you are about to read is not a generalisation, but you may have a lot of struggles if you are highly introverted, and this includes the fear of failing.
There is nothing wrong with being Introverted, but then, you may have noticed that you overlook a lot of things, some, you genuinely want to do. Because we often believe we can not, we let them go, classified as “not worth it.”
- I don’t want to be in the spotlight.
- I can’t even handle public speaking.
A lot of introverts have been able to rule this fear of failure off their dictionary. I know it takes more work than complaints to achieve this level of sanity. Nick Breu in his post “Fear, not introversion, holds us back from what we want in life” gave some excellent reasons why introversion may have nothing to do with fear and everything it’s associated with. But then, it is evident that hard work, self-realisation and training has a lot to do with overcoming this fear. We can not rule out introversion due to fear.
You Know Your Shortcomings, What Next?
Accepting the fact that fear has been striving in your life is a bold step to overcoming it. Once you tackle the major problem, you’ll be able to reduce procrastination to its bare minimum. Like fear, you can only learn to control Procrastination and not totally eradicate because it’s part of us. The excesses becomes the problem.
Hmm, There are times when there is a problem behind a problem. The former has to be figured out to solve the latter. There is a saying that “a problem well stated is half solved” Being able to identify the former go a long way in getting rid of our problems. Most times it might turn out to be a difficult thing to figure out cos you’d never even know it exists.
I’m introverted too and I agree with the fact we are afraid of failure. I don’t want people to see me as a failure. This fear of failure has affected me in alotta ways. At a point in time I was challenged to try out something in which I thought to myself “I can’t do this” but I didn’t have much of a choice. In the end it was something I did perfectly well. This made me realized that there’s a lot I could do if I summon the courage to try them. And if I begin to start challenging the “I can’t do it” thought that always linger in my head.
I’ve always been blaming it all on introversion but this post has made me realized that, it is the fear that exists in us. But the question is “why is this fear of a thing more pronounced among introverts?”
This is an awesome write-up Miss Blogtrovert. ?
Well Badmus, I wish I can give you deserving answers. But I can’t. It’s good that you found a way around your fears. Introversion can be such a pain sometimes.