And then he said the word ‘change’ - and his heart sank

I had the most beautiful conversation with a client this week. It was actually someone who came across the understanding I’m working from for the very first time. He is a visual artist and musician who simply blew me away with his way of describing the joy of creation, the act of making something from nothing. He described the excitement and curiosity that comes from messing around, from putting one tune to the next, adding one stroke of colour to the one before. He told me about the freedom he feels, the surprise and the joy of just doing it for the fun of it. No expectation, no judgement, no limits. Beautiful! He even said something, most of us only slowly learn to appreciate. He talked about the magic of the unknown, how everything is unknown before we know and how exciting that is when he creates. We were both in awe of the miraculous process he was describing, smiling at one another through our computer screens…

But then his face dropped and he told me that actually this hasn’t happened in quite a while. He fell into bad habits, which he needs to sort out. His problem is procrastination. He’s now wasted almost a year on not being productive. The worst time of his life and he needs to do something about it, and that really quickly. The glow we had shared just a minute before simply melted away in only a split second. Change is so hard, he said, but he was determined to battle this through, and to get his life back on track. Wow, I thought, no pressure here then!

The crux is, we often think change needs to happen to the behaviour we do but don’t like. If I drink too much - my problem is alcohol or my addictive personality, if I spend too much time/money shopping - I have to manage my spending/hide my credit card, if I can’t get through the day without running for an hour and a half - I could try cycling instead to give my knees a break, if I’m addicted to social media - I could delete my accounts and watch telly instead… But very often, no matter how much willpower and discipline we activate, we either make it worse or simply swap one bad habit for another. The way we deal with procrastination is a great example for this misunderstanding. There are endless tips on how to organise our days but do you actually know someone who found them helpful beyond the first week? Apart from the ones, of course, who don’t suffer from the affliction. We may even manage to change the behaviour and get really busy, but productive and in flow?? This is not because we haven't tried enough. It's because we try to put out the alarm instead of the fire. The actual problem is never the behaviour, it’s the fact that we are not aware of what is causing us to do what we do.

The big misunderstanding here is that we think, being productive makes us feel better, while actually we would be naturally much more productive, if we felt better. So we look at the problem the wrong way round, can you see?

When my client was talking about ‘creation’, he actually talked about wellbeing. And that is something we all have in equal measures. It never goes anywhere. We just get busy in our heads from time to time about whatever we find worrisome and lose sight of our version of calm and wise, connected, creative and free. He described his productive state with being curious, excited, intrigued, unattached to the outcome, free, limitless. Beautiful, right? But what he talked about was his default, our default. I’m not an artist and I would probably have used different words for it. But when you think about it, you know exactly what I mean. It’s that feeling when anything is possible just because. You may have had it when you first fell in love or when your children were born. We all experience it at some point, we were born like this.

Procrastination on the other hand is more a symptom than a problem. He described it with words like paralysed, heavy, tired, dark, unproductive, restricted, full of judgement, full of self loathing, self pity, self harm, even. Now, I would call that ‘having moved away from wellbeing’. So the cure is not in changing the behaviour, the cure is in understanding the nature of the problem. And in realising that wellbeing can never be found outside of us.

In fact, change of behaviour takes no effort at all, when the reason why we do something stops being reasonable.

Wellbeing is our natural state, we only think ourselves out of it. Symptoms like procrastination are actually massively helpful in telling us that we have taken the wrong turn. Coming back to ourselves doesn’t always happen straight away. But it is a lot easier when we know when and where to turn around. It also helps when we stop making ourselves feel even worse with our endless judging and useless pushing.

Is that inner compass of yours something you are curious about? Come and talk to me. I can help you make better use of it.