The Art of Procrastination meets Fear of Success/ Failure.
Why is it so difficult to start on that passion project? Or take the leap, and leave our day jobs, relationships, cities, or anything that we clearly feel we have outgrown?
Writing this blog article, I had to go up against many of my own internal voices that wanted me to try another day, or convince me that there was something much more pressing than this. After all, our days are packed with thousands of micro decisions that shape our today, tomorrow, and far future to come.
We may not consciously choose every time, as when we are eating, or brushing our teeth, or more significantly, when we think or feel a certain way. Those are choices, too, we are never beholden to our thoughts and feelings, or the way we speak about them, and act upon them. Our thoughts, feelings, words, and actions shape everything we call reality. They also shape our present and future. These micro decisions we may unconsciously every day are at the core of our desire to create change in our lives, while also being the enemy to the desire to create change.
Our reptilian brains try to protect us from change that we so desperately seek in an attempt to keep us safe from what may be out there for us, while our souls, inner beings, God, or Goddess, seeks a greater existence for us. This tug-of-war is the indecisiveness we feel on a daily basis. We tend to feel it more in our macro decisions that affect the outcomes of the day or a future day, less so in the micro decisions we make when we decide to give credence to a certain feeling or thought pattern.
So if we are in charge, and we get to choose what we desire, why can’t we get started or continue on our passion projects? Not starting and not continuing can breed similar feelings of failure and disappointment with ourselves.
One theory in social psychology termed Construal Level Theory seeks to explain this phenomenon on the basis of the psychological distance to the object or subject at hand. In this vein, when we perceive a project or goal to be in the distant-mode, we are able to keep it in our world of imagination, which keeps our thinking broad, abstract, distant, and therefore safe. As soon as we attempt to move our passion projects to the near -mode, it becomes tangible and concrete.
This theory can help shed light on the our shared predicament of keeping our goals, projects, and passions in a distant imaginary world. After all, that is where we get to create safely without the judgment of ourselves and others, without consequences, without the grind, and the Emotional Journey of Creating Anything Great.
I, for one, have come to understand that our choices matter, and that I choose to be intentional in creating in the near mode. Don’t we want the world to look a little more like in our imagination? Maybe this shift can get us a step closer to that reality. And perhaps, we can liberate ourselves from the loop of judgment when we are able to comprehend the great courage that lies in moving from the distant to the near.