The fact is that the random action produced by punishment or fear is not directed toward a goal, but rather, like procrastination, toward escape from the fear. These punishing tactics often create a paralyzing rather than a motivating effect. Too often this harsh method is used more to exercise authority and control than to achieve positive results. The use of threats by those in authority is an example of how the attempted solution, rather than generating positive motivation for the goal, is counterproductive and contributes to procrastination by creating resistance to authority, fear of failure, and fear of success.
The promise of future rewards for hard work has little control over what we choose to do now. Instead, the more immediate and definite rewards of life, such as leisure, seeing friends, and eating ice cream, are immediately and definitely followed by tangible pleasures and have, therefore, a higher probability of occurring. It also indicates that the chances of choosing this kind of work over leisure activities are even slimmer.
After all, fun, goofing off, and overeating are rewarded immediately, and any punishment is in the distant future. In other words, to control your work habits you must make the periods of work shorter less painful and the rewards more frequent and immediate more pleasurable —interlacing short periods of work with breaks and rewards.
If, therefore, you are interested in tackling a large task and minimizing procrastination, you must structure the rewards so as to increase the probability that you will start on the task each day. For those of us raised to believe in the Puritan work ethic, it is hard to grasp that humans are motivated more by pleasure than by pain. In fact, even the original Puritans had to stop work on the Sabbath.
Our modern word recreation comes from this early workaholic principle. But in the last three years, he had failed at countless attempts to complete a single scholarly paper, and he began to think of himself as lazy and as a procrastinator.
Initially, he was a good example of how ineffective the push method of motivation can be. Jeff was stuck. He felt guilty about not making a contribution to his field and was feeling pressure from his colleagues to publish.
But he was unwilling to make the commitment to the long hours of solitary work that were required to read professional journals and to write.
After talking with Jeff for a short time it became clear that he had tried, with almost no success, to overcome his procrastination by using every method he could think of for pressuring and scaring himself into writing. I had learned the hard way not to compete with such resistance. We needed a whole new strategy, not more of the same pressure and pushing.
So I decided to say something that I knew would shock and yet intrigue a bright guy like Jeff. I counseled him to stop all this self-torture that only leads to frustration and depression. He auditioned for a play and was assigned a minor but substantial part. Jeff quickly found himself with a commitment of twenty to thirty hours a week for rehearsals.
This meant he had no time to consider, much less feel guilty about, his professional writing for the entire next two months of rehearsal and production. Jeff enjoyed the entire process of acting so much that he miraculously managed to find over twenty hours a week—and the energy that that required—to work hard and meet his commitment to the director and the rest of the cast.
The play was a success, but more importantly for Jeff, it was fun. Getting thoroughly involved in doing that play was like going on a long-dreamed-of vacation. By some definitions he had worked hard; after all, he had put in enough time each week to constitute a part-time job. But Jeff felt rested and satisfied because it was a labor of love that he looked forward to eagerly each day. In addition, life during those two months had become more than trying to work and feeling guilty about failing to reach his goals.
Jeff had learned in a very concrete way that he could commit himself to something and find the time to meet that commitment. At the conclusion of all that work on the play, however, Jeff was mildly depressed. Jeff learned that it took a lot of commitment, focus, and time to be in a play. That meant sacrificing some of the other activities he enjoyed.
He felt an emptiness now that those twenty-plus hours of intense activity and satisfaction were no longer in his week.
Jeff began to realize that, having cleared twenty to thirty hours a week from his schedule for two months, he could find plenty of time to write an article.
But first he would need to change his thinking about this large, imposing task. Jeff now knew how important it was to have something in his week that he really loved to do to lessen the sense of burden and deprivation from working on his research project. He changed the task in his mind from being an all-consuming one—requiring all his spare time—to being one that he could do part-time, ten to twenty hours a week. Jeff reorganized his schedule to include firm commitments to exercise and friends.
This made it clear to him that his periods of work in isolation would have to be short and focused. Equipped with a greater sense of his ability to enjoy life, Jeff returned to the task of starting on his article.
Finding ten hours a week for writing was relatively easy after having cleared twenty hours for rehearsals. Getting started was still rough, but by maintaining a certain momentum through daily periods of work, Jeff quickly saw the article take shape.
From there it was simply a matter of persistence as his natural interest in the topic carried him through to completion—pulling him toward a goal he could now see was achievable.
Jeff found a way to reintegrate writing into his life without making it a burden and without the use of force or threats. He had his first article ready for submission to a journal in a few months. After an initial rejection and some rewriting, the article was accepted for publication by a prestigious journal. The cycle follows a pattern that usually begins with guilt-free play, or at least the scheduling of it.
That gives you a sense of freedom about your life that enables you to more easily settle into a short period of focused, quality work. In turn, your capacity to enjoy quality, guilt-free play grows. Your deep sense of having earned time away from work enhances your ability to have focused, quality time with friends, which really begins to pay off as you engage in creative work while playing.
At this stage in the cycle, the seeds of earlier quality work flourish subconsciously into new ideas and breakthroughs. And you feel motivated to return to the task interested in applying your new solutions. You are now well rested, inspired, and ready for greater quality work. Guilt-free, creative play excites you with motivation to return to work. When seated in front of your computer or making calls to clients, you are primed to work in a way that synthesizes the best of your conscious and subconscious processes because you have learned the secret of guilt-free play.
As you include guilt-free play among your tools for overcoming procrastination, you will find that insights come to you throughout your day. Suddenly you find that playing golf, jogging, reading a novel, or talking to a friend provides rich metaphors for your sales program, for negotiating a contract, for your presentation to the board of directors, or for achieving your goal of quitting smoking.
This can happen when you are relaxed because while your conscious mind is focused somewhere else for two hours of guilt-free play, your creative, subconscious mind can provide clear, almost effortless solutions. Thus guilt-free play leads to greater quality work and creative, rapid solutions. Well, Carlos was the guy you gave things to if you wanted them done quickly. He had always held at least two jobs from the time he was in high school.
He had a part-time job for at least fifteen hours a week all the way through college, while finding time to be active in extracurricular activities and to maintain an active social life.
Carlos came from a working-class family where work was accepted as a fact of life. He did not waste time holding any grudges against work, whether it was schoolwork, his part-time job, or the work of putting together a weekend trip. He was as committed to his play as he was to his work. Clearly, he had earned it. And when it was time to return to work, Carlos did so without the slightest hesitation because he felt recharged, revitalized, recommitted. Carlos was a classic example of someone committed to guilt-free play and optimal performance at work.
The vitality of his play carried over into his work and he thoroughly enjoyed challenges in both spheres of his life. When he had something to think over, he knew his leisure time would provide an alternative perspective from which to consider his options.
Not only was his recreation enjoyable, it was a source of some of his best ideas and most creative solutions. This emphasis on the importance of play is not meant to deny the need for work and perseverance. The type of work and commitment that is more compatible with the Now Habit is a commitment to a mission that focuses your energies and brings about inner harmony, a commitment that comes from a pull toward a goal and an excitement about the process of getting there.
They had a mission. I saw men and women of average capabilities tapping resources of personal energy and creativity that resulted in extraordinary human accomplishments. I saw their excitement and pride come alive, affecting everyone around them, kindling imaginations with the possibilities that arose from what we were trying to accomplish.
One thing became very clear to me—it is not the goal, but the ultimate mission that kindles the imagination, motivating us toward ever higher levels of human achievement.
In this positive work atmosphere, you are more likely to demonstrate extraordinary capabilities and motivation. Regularly scheduled periods of guilt-free play will give you a fresh outlook on work. Your play time will let you experience your own native curiosity and willingness to do good, quality work. Guilt-free play provides the link between work and play, in which each improves the quality of the other.
But most of all, grant me a contempt for my own human imperfection and the limits of human control. Until you can find tools to cope directly and positively with that response, your fear or phobia will block your ability to take action.
Procrastination, by enabling you to avoid what you fear, is a phobic response to work that is associated with worry, struggle, failure, and anxiety. When it is your sole defense against something you fear, procrastination becomes a difficult habit to unlearn. While both phobias and procrastination also tend to be addictive because they reward you by lowering tension, they can be unlearned.
Armed with Now Habit tools, you can unlearn the phobic response of procrastination and learn alternative ways of coping with your fears. In addition, each time you apply a constructive alternative to help you approach a difficult task, you will be unlearning the old pattern and breaking your addiction. These three blocks usually interact with each other and escalate any initial fears and stresses. Overcoming any one of the three quickens the destruction of the remaining blocks because you build confidence as you face and live through any fear.
Studies have confirmed that as little as thirty seconds of staying with a feared situation—a barking dog, a crowded party, giving a speech—while using positive self-talk is enough to start the process of replacing a phobic response with positive alternatives.
Learning to stay with any fear will be much easier when you have weapons and tools that give your brain alternatives to running away. When you survey the task before you, you will commonly experience a surge of energy stress or anxiety as your body tries to be in several places at once along the imagined course of your project. This picture collapses the steps involved so that your body responds with energy to work on all the parts—beginning, middle, and finish—simultaneously.
Being overwhelmed by a large or important task is a form of psychological and physical terror. As an eager and productive new lawyer, Joel found great satisfaction in working on depositions and briefs that he could complete quickly. However, he shied away from more complicated cases. His fear and procrastination began to get in the way of his advancement in the firm. Whenever he was faced with an important or risky case, his physical and emotional reactions were so strong that he felt stuck, unable to do anything.
His worrying resulted in insomnia, indecisiveness about small issues, and increased use of coffee and alcohol. As Joel put it: I become so intense about the possibility of losing the case that I stop myself from ever starting the necessary preparation.
Eventually, my nervousness and procrastination leave me less time to take depositions and meet court dates. Conquering the feeling of being overwhelmed starts with anticipating that it is natural to experience a certain amount of anxiety as you picture all the work involved in completing a large project. This normal level of anxiety will not become overwhelming unless you: 1. Insist on knowing the one right place to start. Have not permitted yourself time along the course of your project for learning, building confidence with each step, and asking for help.
Your two-dimensional view pressures you to be competent now at the beginning. Instead of allowing yourself to learn along the way, you expect that you should feel confident at the start. The starting point and the path of trial and error have little legitimacy in comparison to your goal. You have little tolerance or compassion for your current level of imperfection and your current level of struggle.
This critical comparison keeps you jumping back and forth between your negative image of yourself at the start and your ideal of yourself at the finish point. The Reverse Calendar When Joel applied three-dimensional thinking to his assignments, he was able to see the entire process, directing his energy toward dividing the project into small, manageable parts.
This view lets you mentally spread the work out over the days and weeks ahead, creating your own deadlines for the subdivisions of the project. When you learn to look at projects this way, you rapidly diffuse the condensed effort of two- dimensional thinking into a three-dimensional and four-dimensional view spread over distance and time.
I call this the reverse calendar. As you picture several smaller deadlines—all within your control —the paralysis caused by trying to complete a large project with dire consequences if you fail disappears.
This revised image of your project enables you to use your other tools to focus in the present, where you can start on the first step. But with your mind focused on the here and now, where work can be started, your body provides the right level of energy to start and you experience it as excitement and effectiveness.
The reverse calendar starts with the ultimate deadline for your project and then moves back, step by step, to the present where you can focus your energy on starting. You will find the reverse calendar extremely useful whenever you face tasks that require work over a long period—painting the house, mounting an advertising campaign, or perservering through a weight-loss program. And the reverse calendar should be used immediately if you feel overwhelmed.
Ultimate deadline: June 1. That means May Make corrections. May Review materials. May 1: Start on final portion of project. April Make changes from meeting with boss. April Meet with boss on direction and progress. Today, April Make rough sketches; start outline; decide on most relevant market research and consult with experts. Ultimate deadline: January 1 next year. Complete negotiations for the contract with XYZ, Inc.
November 1: Deliver last segment of draft contract to Jones. Continue to schedule each month until you come back into the present July 1: Meet with our lawyers. This approach can be applied to each step of the project. Putting together a large company report, for example, can contain steps which in themselves may be overwhelming.
But when the work is divided into its various parts and tackled piecemeal, the first section can be started today. Creating a reverse calendar for the project will give you a time line for each step, letting you know how much time you must allocate in each week—for example, twenty hours a week for five weeks.
Regardless of the size of your report or campaign, the reverse calendar will give you a realistic perspective on how much time it takes to complete each step.
Along with a greater sense of control over your project comes a relief from external pressure and a greater sense of accomplishment as you complete the many subgoals along the way. When Joel used the reverse calendar and three-dimensional thinking he could see the individual tasks required in preparing his case: doing the legal research, taking depositions, delegating to a law clerk and legal assistant, checking with senior partners.
Joel could now see himself diving into one task he could handle and getting excited about how the process would unfold. The larger the case, the more it became a dynamic, interactive task requiring a variety of skills over a period of transformation, rather than a mountain he needed to scale in one impossible leap.
Since he had been so concerned about making a mistake, Joel used his reverse calendar to alert himself to those points where he might get anxious and head in the wrong direction. He could then use feelings of insecurity and being overwhelmed to remind himself to pause and think or consult with a colleague. In addition to gaining control over his terror of feeling overwhelmed, Joel achieved more realistic time management by applying three-dimensional thinking.
With the steps of his cases clearly spelled out, Joel was able to anticipate some previously unforeseen difficulties in scheduling and to avoid costly errors. So, if you cannot bring about that little, why be anxious about the rest?
Respect your ability to worry as a means to alert you to potential danger. I have to do well or else. In effect, your scream has caused a lot of disturbance in people but has not told them what they can do to escape the danger.
By alerting yourself to a potential danger without establishing a plan for how you will cope, you have done only half of the job of worrying. Until you reach a solution or cancel the threat, worrying can operate like a recurrent nightmare that repeats a puzzle or problem. Plans, action, and solutions are required to direct the energy and complete the work of worrying.
Procrastination is an ineffective way to cope with worrying because it stalls action and simply piles up more worries. The worry that accompanies procrastination is usually learned very early in life. Parents, bosses, and teachers often use threats and images of disaster to motivate us to achieve goals they have chosen.
This belief that vinegar can motivate better than honey is so prevalent among those in charge of our schools, factories, and offices that most of us suffer from some form of fear of failure and worry about being unacceptable because of our imperfection.
Feeling ineffectual regardless of how hard you try is very depressing and damaging to your sense of worth. Eventually the risks seem too great to take and the threats lose their ability to motivate you.
This syndrome is particularly sad when people with talent will not risk trying for fear of being less than number one. A more common solution for individuals raised on threats is to use their own threatening self-talk in an effort to win approval by mimicking their critical mentors. Rather than helping them to face their fears, such threats will only contribute to the procrastination cycle: threatening self-talk leads to anxiety, then to resistance, resulting in procrastination.
Procrastination may temporarily lessen the tension of facing a challenging project and the risk of failing, but it cannot help you escape worry. Breaking through this block to action requires that you go beyond just scaring yourself with images of potential catastrophes. You need to do the work of worrying to direct the energy of worry and panic into plans to remove the threat.
This will help you to productively use stress, your healthy survival response, the way it was intended—to protect you and prepare you to take positive action. For ten years Judith, a bright young accountant, suffered from worries about losing her job because of her continual procrastination. Judith continued to push herself to work in an insurance firm that others had left years before because of the cold and pressured atmosphere. After all, she had learned at an early age that she was lazy and inadequate, that there was always more that could be done, and that she needed constant reminding and pressure from those who said they cared about her.
This pressure to be the best was constant whether the arena was school, sports, or musical talent. So it did not surprise Judith when her boss turned out to be someone who provided a similar scarcity of praise and an abundance of pressure.
But for Judith, her working conditions only verified insecurities learned much earlier. I feel that people are constantly judging me and that I keep coming up short. But it was her procrastination and her fear of doing increasingly poor work that motivated her to seek help. Like most procrastinators, Judith was a good worker. It was the pressure and the fear of failure that began to block her ability to work.
And when Judith recognized that her family environment had taught her low self- esteem, victimhood, resistance, and then destructive coping strategies such as procrastination, she was eager to change her current environment. In fact, given her timidity and low self- esteem, it was hard to imagine how she would ever be motivated to look for a better job unless she was fired.
But Judith had decided she wanted more. She wanted to be freely acknowledged for her work and her talents. Judith was determined to find people who could appreciate her for who she was and what she could do, rather than seeking out those who always demanded that she be something different. She no longer wanted to work under conditions that lowered her self-esteem. Having faced the worst that could happen—being fired—Judith had prepared herself with safety nets of compassionate self-talk and concrete alternatives that would help her cope while looking for a new job.
Judith had started the first step of a six-step process for facing fears and creating safety. When you are continually worried about failing on a project or losing a job, ask yourself these six questions as part of your work of worrying: 1. What is the worst that could happen?
I need to acknowledge the most dreaded scenario that could occur and consider how probable it is. What would I do if the worst really happened? Instead of just saying that it would be awful, I must consider: Where would I get help?
What would I do to cope with getting upset and losing control? Then what would I do? And what would I do after that? How would I lessen the pain and get on with as much happiness as possible if the worst did occur? If all else has failed and I find myself confronted with my most dreaded situation, am I prepared to shorten the depression and self-criticism by forgiving myself for being human, vulnerable, and imperfect?
How would I return to the task of improving my life regardless of how bad things get? I must remember those strengths I can build on, strengths that have gotten me through situations in the past that seemed impossible at first. What can I learn from my past achievements about coping with adversity, about my hidden talents, about the strengths that reveal themselves just when I need them?
What alternatives would I have? Have I limited my options by insisting on only one perfect job and by being dictatorial about how I think my life should be? What will I have to do to increase the alternatives that are acceptable to me? Which ones would I permit myself to consider? I must get beyond this idea that I will only tolerate life on my terms.
I must remember that I have many ways to be happy and successful. What can I do now to lessen the probability of this dreaded event occurring? Having considered the worst that could happen and having prepared myself to cope with even that, I am now ready to tackle the tasks at hand that may increase my chances for success.
Is there anything I can do now to increase my chances of achieving my goal? By using the work of worrying, creating safety, and using the language of the producer, you are establishing skills for maintaining genuine self-confidence. Many procrastinators can get started, but through a number of negative self-statements and attitudes they trip themselves up and create blocks to finishing. Difficulties with finishing, like fear of success, can involve certain disincentives for completing a project.
Procrastinating on finishing takes more effort than is required to stay with a project all the way through. It is also less rewarding than the satisfaction in completing a project and making room for more fun and new beginnings.
The main characters of this self help, non fiction story are ,. The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator. We do not guarantee that these techniques will work for you. Some of the techniques listed in The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play may require a sound knowledge of Hypnosis, users are advised to either leave those sections or must have a basic understanding of the subject before practicing them.
DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. Dr Rae, Congratulations on your perseverance. Adriano September 16, at am. Julie Brennan May 24, at am. Teddy X June 19, at am. Jennifer Rae July 18, at am. Click here to cancel reply. Name required. Neil Fiore is a well-known author, motivator, and psychology superstar. Over the years he became a productivity expert and master in all elements linked to performance. Your email address will not be published.
Home how read and book life for pdf about with your love you quotes what movie free the. Fiore Learn how to overcome procrastination and enjoy guilt-free play! File Name: the now habit pdf free download. The now habit : a strategic program for overcoming procrastination and enjoying guilt-free play. What is Kobo Super Points? Quotes about being sad at christmas. Great quotes about success in life. Cat in the hat movie
0コメント