When there is a conflict between logic and emotion, emotions usually win.

I talked about this last time in my post about procrastination taking the path of least resistance and you added lots of depth to the post through your comments.

So if emotional resistance creates the kind of thinking that leads to psychological delaying tactics, then changing the emotional response to the task becomes an effective way to overcome procrastination.

Today, I’d like to share the steps I use when I help my clients to get out of the kind of thinking that created the problem and establish stronger thinking patterns.

Changing Your Emotional Response

1) Define clearly what you want.

Feel it, see, hear it, smell it, embrace it, internalise it.

Many people want a result but the result is out of their reach or quite blurry to define. They cannot imagine themselves ever getting there and therefore they cannot achieve an emotional state that energises them to achieve it.

2) Define your objections

If you didn’t have objections, you wouldn’t be procrastinating. Objections are your hidden beliefs and ideas that contribute to the procrastinating self-sabotage and keep you stuck in complaining about your present state without doing anything about it.

Think about what you want and then feel your resistance to it. Put this resistance into words – these are your objections and can include things like:

• “Skinny people are miserable, fat people are jolly”
• “He’ll leave me if I become a successful writer”
• “My friends will think I am stuck up”

3) Define what each objection really means to you

There is a valid reason that you are holding on to the unhelpful thoughts and ideas. Your mission in this step is to uncover the core values that keep you attached to the idea.

Your valid reason is in your subconscious so you will need to root around a bit to bring it up to your conscious awareness.

They might include things like:

• “I want to be loved”
• “I have good morals”
• “I want to be respected”

These values will almost always be positive. Although it’s normal for us to sabotage ourselves, we do it for a good reason.

It’s important to uncover these meanings because these are at the root of your inability to move forward.

4) Act on the insight

Reframe, redefine and change the meanings you uncover as they relate to your goal.

Some of the associations will disappear by themselves when you make the conscious link. There are psychotherapy methods and techniques that will help you with the others.

Once you have taken the limiting emotional charge out of the assosiations, you feel freer and lighter in your mind and the outcome you wanted starts to feel within your reach.

More importantly, you become energised and able to take the necessary steps to get there.

Which areas of your life would benefit from you having stronger thinking patterns?