Today I go and get my breasts individually squeezed between two, cold metal, vise-style clamps. I typically walk away pink and tender. Yet, this is the best devised machine for early detection of breast cancer – go figure. Okay, I’m grateful for a procedure that can alert me to a possible health problem.  So suffice it to say this is a necessary evil.

Sometimes you have to face less pleasant experiences, where avoiding them might lead to more serious problems.  You could face a whole host of problems you could have more quickly dealt with if you hadn’t procrastinated.  It’s also commmon to find after something you dreaded doing, that your effort output and the experience itself wasn’t as big of a deal as you thought it would be.

I also find that if I don’t use regular health maintenance and get sick, not only do I suffer, but those around me who have to pick up my work load and responsibilties do too.  It’s typically caused by my not taking precautionary steps to care for myself.  Now when I get a cold, I look at how I didn’t slow down when I felt beat and didn’t say no to things that overspent my energy and ran down my immune system. 

The trick is to not only be aware of your behaviors, but change them before sickness occurs.  Men tend to be less present to their need for regular self care and push through, while women are generally better at this, yet still caretake others first, even when they’re aware they are tapped out. 

Rest is a necessary evil,  because it can re-energize you, though you have to give up something in your busy schedule to make room for it.  Or, in my case, stop to go have a mammogram which displaces other things I’d rather do with my time.  I’ve decided it’s important to take this action and go through this minor inconvenience for its beneficial results.  And when it’s not immediately apparent that taking actions will result in a positive benefit, it is character building and strengthens your muscle to self motivate.

What actions are you not taking, but are a “necessary evil?”

Most often in our busy business lives there are so many things to attend to that we invariably feel if we’re not on top of everything, we’re procrastinating, or worse – we consider ourselves unmotivated or lazy.

The truth is we’ve got alot going on and it’s more a matter of honoring our truer interests, setting priorities, being time efficient, or even letting go of things completely.

I recently had a deadline on a project I was moderately interested in completing, but I was still committed to do it. It wasn’t causing me stress when the deadline arrived, because it was actually the deadline before the real deadline.  That is, I’d set a date earlier to complete the project than when it was due.  So rather than feel as if I was procrastinating for skipping a day or two, I had given myself one extra day before I needed to begin work on it.  I used this to finish a project I was already on and enjoy some down time. 

No guilt needed for my so-called “procrastination.”

What is the true reason you put something off rather than do it now?

Sometimes prospective clients investigate coaching with me because they are simply looking for open windows.  That is, they aren’t sure about the change or changes they want to make and they take steps towards an open window to see if there is anything there that will help make them clearer.  They are in the discovery phase and they want to run their ideas by someone who can understand where they are and hear themselves talk about it. 

It’s a healthy approach to consider your options with an expert who knows how to listen and feedback what they hear from you, so you can hear it with a fresh ear.  However, you may be someone who does too much window shopping, dragging out decisions or never even going in the store, letting time pass and waiting till frustration or forced circumstances cause you to act.

Someone once said to me when I was being indecisive about signing up for a program I wanted to do, ”you can certainly wait, but what will happen is more time will pass and the cost of this program will go up.”  That didn’t seem horrible, but it also put the delaying my goals in perspective for me.  I’d already been waiting to get started and make some changes.  I didn’t want to keep waiting – and I didn’t want to have to pay more.

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