Kirsty Knight is a certified life coach for female entrepreneurs in areas of business, money, time & productivity. She teaches ambitious entrepreneurs her system that covers productivity tactics, mindset work and business strategy.
Maybe there are things in your business that are not getting done. You're finding yourself on a roundabout of analysis paralysis. The bottom line is, it's not the task that's a problem, it's your mindset towards it. You might be scared of change, of the risk of failing or maybe even being too successful if things go to plan. So why do we procrastinate and set unrealistic goals for ourselves and, essentially, set ourselves up for failure?
What is Procrastination
Kirsty, coming from her expertise and experience as a business and time coach, explains what procrastination is and how it manifests in three ways.
“The way that I define it is knowing what you should be doing in your business to grow it or to achieve your goals, and you’re not doing it, avoiding it, postponing it at the time that you said you were going to do it.”
“We procrastinate in three different ways,” she continues. “We can procrastinate by not making a decision. We can procrastinate by scheduling something in our calendars, and when the time comes to it, we just move it in the calendar because we don't want to do that right now. Or we can make a decision to do something and then just not take action at all on it.”
Growing Business In Your Own Way
When it comes to growing a surveying business, Kirsty agrees that you should not be doing it for anyone else. Just because someone else is doing it doesn’t mean that you need to grow your business in exactly the same way.
“It's not that we have to build our business in a particular way,” Kirsty explains. “It's not that we have to grow to a certain level if we don't want to. It's us making a conscious decision that this is what we want, this is how we're going to get there. You can keep it as small as you want, or grow as big as you want. It's your business, your life. But when you've made that decision to do something, and then you are the one who's sabotaging yourself and not following through, you break that self-trust with yourself.”
Barriers to Taking Action towards Your Goals
Kirsty identifies the barriers that people put in their way of taking action and how they enable self-sabotage.
“In evolutionary history, our brains were wired to survive,” she explains. “We evolved something called the motivational triad. Our brain is motivated to take action towards pleasure and away from pain and discomfort. It's motivated to conserve energy. The second reason is that we're avoiding fear or discomfort or some negative emotion. And then the third is, our brains perceive the task that we've set ourselves to be big and vague and hard. It goes against the brain's desire to conserve energy because, again, food was once scarce. Those three things sabotage our success now because we have access to plenty of food. The things that we're afraid of won't kill us, but we still perceive them as threats. Sometimes we haven't broken down the tasks, so it does require energy. There are lots more pleasurable distractions that we'll go seek out.”
Moving Forward with a Clear Vision
Kirsty says that having a clear vision for your business and lifestyle is the key to finding your way forward in both personal and business growth. She suggests doing a ‘thought download’ to help you determine the right direction for you.
“The first thing to do is a thought download, that's what I always start with,” she suggests. “Just get a piece of paper and write down everything that's going on in your head right now. Then you want to recognise that, actually, they are just thoughts. If you were to go through that list and circle the facts, the rest will be fears and judgments and worries. Ask yourself the exploratory questions to really dig in to find where you're stuck. That's such a powerful thing to do.”
“I have another business that I started before I got into coaching, and it was a camping business,” she recalls. “I just didn’t have a real clear vision for what I wanted my business and life to look like, and it got very close to burnout. You get to decide exactly how you want to run it. There are no external rules and that's the beauty of it. It is scary deciding for yourself, but you have to do that in order to set yourself up to build a sustainable business that you enjoy,” Kristy concludes.