Why this blog took two weeks to write

I didn’t send out our weekly email last week.

I’d written it, edited it and scheduled it in.

Then 10 minutes before it was due to go out, I canceled it.

This week I’ve spent hours drafting new emails and editing existing drafts.

I hadn't finished a single one.

Two weeks of procrastination.

Zero emails ready to go.

Yes, even coaches who coach on procrastination procrastinate!

We all have human brains after all -  procrastinating is totally normal.

Finally, today, I stopped avoiding it and got coached on it.

And here’s what I discovered:

I’d been believing that any email I wrote had to be “new”.

OK so why does this matter?

Well, thinking the email “has to be new” made me feeI pressured. 

Which led to me chopping and changing what I was writing and not trusting myself to know what to write. 

So it makes total sense why I didn’t send any email out.

By thinking the email “has to be new” I created the opposite - no new email.

But what I hadn’t done was dive into what “new” actually meant. 

And when I explored it with my coach, I realised that even when I’m writing about the same theme, the way I write about it will always be new.

Everything I write is new.

Like this email, for example. 

I’m writing about procrastination, which isn’t new, but the examples I give are new. 

And often our brains need to hear things in different ways before it clicks for us.

So after procrastinating for two weeks, I’ve now scheduled this email and finished several more in only a few minutes.

Just because I got coached.

This is the power of mindset coaching.

It stops you wasting so much time.

This one simple mindset shift - from “it has to be new” to “everything I write is new” - has shifted me from feeling pressured and not creating emails - to feeling certain and writing efficiently.

And because of this coaching, it means I can finish up early with everything done. And go hang out with baby Flynn.

So if you find yourself procrastinating, just know it's normal. You're a human.

And also know that it’s always down to something you're thinking.

Once you become aware of your thoughts, that’s when you have the power to question them and change them.