Procrastination, Overwhelm and the Illusion of "I’ll Start When…"

Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. These are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. Today I want to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm.

Full show notes for this episode available at The Business of Psychology

Links:

Episode 179: Why every therapist needs to use social media to improve their SEO

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@drrosiegilderthorp

The Magnetic Profile

In my new mini course, The Magnetic Profile, I walk you through one specific business task. Over five short lessons, we use my Values, Voice, Impact framework to help you choose who your profile is for, say what they most need to hear, and plug it all into a simple template that you can use on directory sites, your website, and as a business asset that I'm going to show you how to repurpose in 100 different ways to help the right clients to find you. Most importantly, you'll come out of the course with a finished profile and proof that you can do this business thing in a way that feels ethical and manageable. You can find all the details here: https://psychologybusinessschool.mykajabi.com/the-magnetic-profile

Procrastination And Overwhelm

I think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily, and as a result, the world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that diagnostic label and then think that writes them off from being able to ever achieve success in business. Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're going to have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses.

Some of the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. I think it's really important that, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given. I want to share today, how we can move through the blocking belief that we might have about ourselves, often by accepting a bit of support where we might need it.

Something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. They've usually done loads of work, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just run away from it. If we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they decided they weren't going to pursue.

We know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. An excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety because we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. That can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. This often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're expecting themselves to become a lawyer, because it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. This can be because they look at the legal templates and think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. We do provide training with our legal documents because I want you to understand the principles behind them, but the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not going to understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. We can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be overwhelming.

A Need To Do Everything At Once

The other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once, like getting their practice up and running and fully competent tomorrow. That's not possible. I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress, my core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days, because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible, not to do it to the standard that you're going to want. I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're going to be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming.

Overconsuming Advice

The other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. Sometimes people do this with this podcast or with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag, because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the action. When I coach people, I give very short, 10 or 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. The reason I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if I give people a template of the business plan that they're going to have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're going to cover and how everything fits together, but then I encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do, then it is much easier to get started.

Unrealistic Comparisons

The other thing which contributes to the sense of overwhelm is comparing yourself to people who are years ahead of you and thinking that you can reverse engineer from what you see on the outside. Very often people will scroll Instagram and see somebody with a successful practice and instantly start criticizing themselves for not doing it like them yet. So then they'll try to do too much. They'll try to make everything happen overnight to be just like that person. But what they haven't seen is the years that it took for that person to get to where they are now, for the support structures and foundations that they put in place to enable them to be able to do the thing that you can see. For example, if I'm doing a launch for something, you're going to see me in lots of places. You're going to see that I've got Substack, I'm posting on Instagram, on LinkedIn. You're going to see that I've got Facebook ads. You might see my Google ads. You might hear me guesting on podcasts and all of that stuff. I can only do all of that because I have a team who run the admin of my practice for me, and I've got really good support in all the other operational parts of my business as well. So I'm showing up for the stuff where you see me showing up, but I'm not having to do all of the stuff that you're probably doing right now behind the scenes. In the early days, I could not have been as visible as I am now around a launch because I didn't have all that support, so I was having to do all of the backend stuff. That is not possible for you to see from the outside, and a lot of business owners don't talk about the support they have behind the scenes because it's not relevant to the thing that they're launching, but that doesn't mean it's not there. You also don't know how other people's circumstances might be different from yours. I only actually work about 16 hours a week, probably less some weeks, because my children have additional needs. They don't do full days at school. I have to take lots of time off to go and support them for various things that they need from me. So that means that I can't get done in a week what my amazing colleague that does 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday can get done. So if I was comparing myself to her, I'm going to feel really bad and probably really overwhelmed all the time because I'm going to give myself an impossible to-do list.

One of the reasons I love working with people in coaching is working out what is realistic and what success looks like for you in your real life. And when you do that, instantly, it tends to become a little bit less overwhelming because you're no longer striving for some idea of perfection that doesn't exist for you. You're working towards a life which actually works for you and your family. I think that kind of comparisonitis that we talk about so often is a really big contributor to procrastination and overwhelm, so getting stuck in procrastination or overwhelm does have a cost to it. People often come to me saying that they got burnt out in their NHS job because they were procrastinating making the decision to change. It was so difficult to get through the procrastination or the overwhelm that they stayed stuck, and stayed somewhere that was harming their mental health, for longer than they needed to. I also think people can miss out on the learning that comes from taking imperfect action when they get trapped in procrastination or overwhelm. It's another thing I love to help people out of, because there is only so much that we can learn before we hit publish. Most of the most valuable stuff I've learned about running my practice, I've learned from making mistakes, from putting something out there and then being like, "Oh, that was terrible, that didn't work, but this is why." And then taking different action as a result of that. If you aren't able to go through that process because you're so trapped by this horrible feeling of overwhelm and the need to avoid that, then it can be really difficult to get that learning. As a result of that, people that are trapped by this often, if they do have a private practice, they'll stay reliant on a referral stream that might be a bit patchy or a bit low paid, and they end up feeling bad about themselves because the business never really flourishes in the way that they want it to. Their lives are hard because they're not making enough money to get the support to build the business that works for their lifestyle. It can be really damaging.

Focus On One Thing You Can Do For Your Business

As I've mentioned already, there are lots of psychological approaches that we might take in coaching to help somebody to get out of this trap. We might use compassion, I might get people to think from different perspectives, how this would look if it was happening to a friend, and what they might suggest to a friend or a colleague in a similar situation. I'll try and help people activate their compassionate self, and take that perspective that a compassionate person would have on their business, rather than the very self-critical one that they're often stuck in. Alongside that, and the thing which you can do for yourself too, is getting stuck into just one practical task. Rather than thinking about all the things that need to be done in order to make a business successful, I'll often encourage somebody that's prone to procrastination or overwhelm to laser focus on just one thing that they can do for their business that will have a tangible result. Because if you can get that dopamine of completing something, and then you get continued positive feedback because this asset that you've created is working for you in your business, that can really help unstick that procrastination and reduce that overwhelm. Because you start to see, "I am capable of breaking something big down into a small task, completing it, getting somewhere positive, and moving on to the next thing."

If you're feeling really stuck in procrastination, or you're frequently falling into these feelings of overwhelm, I hope I've made it really clear that this isn't a motivation problem. You're not lazy, you're very motivated, and that's exactly why this is coming up for you. I'm sure you're aware already that this is about avoidance, and it's a very understandable and very common mechanism for dealing with the discomfort that comes from the vulnerability of setting up a business. You're not alone, but one of the kindest things that you can do for yourself right now is to narrow your focus to one meaningful thing that you do for your business, an asset you can create, and make everything else wait for now.

For a lot of people I work with, the thing that I recommend is creating a really good directory site profile. Because once that exists, every other bit of marketing has somewhere useful to direct people to, and a really strong basis. You've probably heard me talk on the podcast recently about creating that digital footprint that lets AI and search engines really understand who you are and who they should be recommending to come to you. A really strong directory profile can be reused in so many different places that it can really turbocharge that digital footprint and make sure that your digital presence is doing the heavy lifting and bringing those referrals to you. It's a small task that has a big ripple effect across your business.

The Magnetic Profile

I have a mini course at the moment to support you through this, called The Magnetic Profile. Over five days, I walk you through step by step creating or refreshing your directory profile using my Values, Voice, Impact framework, so you don't have to look at the finished product and get overwhelmed. I am going to give you something short and actionable that you can do in 10, 15 minutes a day over five days. At the end, you will have that dopamine hit of having something finished that will start bringing the right people into your practice. I think this is hopefully a bit of an antidote to that summer feeling of procrastination or getting stuck and overwhelmed that you might be feeling if you know that you want to start your business in September or you want to make a change in your business in September. I really hope if this episode resonated with you today, that you're going to find that useful. You can find the link to sign up in the show notes, and I would love to see you in there.

Welcome to The Business of Psychology podcast and our special miniseries on the beliefs that keep people stuck in either a private practice that doesn't really work for them or that stop them getting started in private practice at all. So these are mini episodes where I'm sharing the things that I've learned really, from coaching hundreds of other psychologists and therapists and also going through my own mental struggles with the rollercoaster that is business. And today I wanted to talk about procrastination and overwhelm, and specifically how frequently I hear people saying that they're just not the kind of person that can overcome their procrastination or overwhelm. Because I think most psychologists and therapists acknowledge that all human beings use procrastination as a technique sometimes, and that it is part of a normal human experience to get overwhelmed sometimes. But I think a lot of people do have this story about themselves that they are a procrastinator, or they are someone who becomes overwhelmed easily. And as a result, the, you know, world of successful business is not available to them. And this really troubles me, and I have to say that something I think is unhelpful about the way that some people's late diagnosis of neurodivergence is framed, is that some people will receive that kind of diagnostic label and then think that that writes them off from being able to, you know, ever achieve success in business. You know? Or they'll heavily criticize themselves because their assessment has illuminated perhaps their things that they're not so brilliant at and they will feel like they're gonna have to push a boulder up a hill to be successful in business. When actually, if we think psychologically about what procrastination and overwhelm actually are, then there are so many ways that we can use the strengths that lie behind those tendencies to supercharge our businesses. And some of the best clients, the most successful clients that I have worked with would identify themselves as procrastinators and people who struggle with overwhelm, because those come from places of, you know, deep care and passion for the people that they want to support with their businesses. So I think it's really important that, you know, while it's helpful to identify in yourself if you do have tendencies towards procrastination or becoming overwhelmed, we shouldn't allow that kind of story to become a way that we define ourselves that then blocks us from looking for the ways that we can play to our strengths to implement good business advice that we might be given, for example. And I want to share today, you know, how we can move through the kind of blocking belief that we might have about ourselves. And often it, it is by accepting a bit of support where you might need it. and I'll kind of talk through my advice to how we might do that over the summer if this is something which you're worried is gonna hold you back from making a change you wanna make in your practice in September, or from starting up your practice in the first place.

So something I hear all the time from clients that come to me for coaching is that they've signed up for coaching because they're really annoyed with themselves. You know, they've done loads of work usually, but they feel like they've got about 20 tabs open on their browser and nothing is actually getting completed. They can never tick anything off their list because it's never good enough. Some people will talk about this as procrastination. They'll say like, "Oh, I spend hours researching this," or, "I've, you know, spent ages doing the easy stuff, but I never do the difficult stuff because I'm a procrastinator." Other people will talk about the emotional experience. They'll talk about feeling completely overwhelmed. So they kind of open all the tabs, but then they never feel like they engage properly with anything that they start because they become overwhelmed, and they just kind of run away from it. Now, if we think about where this comes from psychologically, you would not feel that way if you didn't care about your potential clients, if you didn't really want this business to be successful. So although this is, you know, classic avoidance behavior, there's motivation behind it, and where there's motivation, we can work with that. So I never feel despondent if I have a client who is a procrastinator, who's becoming overwhelmed, because it actually tells me that they want to do this, that deep down, this is important to them, or this wouldn't be procrastination, it would just be something that they, you know, decided they weren't gonna pursue.

So, we know the brain likes to procrastinate because it allows us to avoid the potential for shame, rejection, or failure. You know, perfect. Excellent short-term strategy. It gives us the illusion of safety 'cause we get to stay safe in our research mode, which a lot of us really enjoy. But the trouble is procrastination and perfectionism go hand in hand. It is so likely that the reason that you feel like you need to avoid these tasks is that the bar you've set for yourself is super, super high, that you want this to be the best, the most perfect independent practice that your community has ever seen. And that can make every task feel too big to start. It's also true that, you know, if you set the bar for yourself that you need to have a complete understanding of something, it can become overwhelming really quickly. I think this often happens when people talk to me about overwhelm rather than procrastination. Often it's because they're kind of expecting themselves to become a lawyer, and, you know, I pick a lawyer, it could be an accountant or, you know, any other role within the business, but it tends to be that people get really stuck in the overwhelm around the legal aspects of setting up their practice. And this can be because they look at the legal templates and they think that they need to be able to understand why every comma is in the place that it is. And we do provide training always with our legal documents 'cause I want you to understand the principles behind them. But the fact is, unless you're going to train in commercial law like Clare Veal from Aubergine Legal, our lovely lawyer, has done, then you're not gonna understand every minute detail of your contracts and policies. You know, we can understand the broad brush principles, but we're not lawyers and we don't need to become lawyers. We have our own expertise and that's why we pay Clare Veal to draft those templates for us, because you don't need to become a lawyer. And if you think that you do because you believe everything needs to be perfect and you need to be in full control of every minute detail of your practice, then of course that's going to be mega, mega overwhelming.

You know, the other thing that I think contributes to overwhelm and procrastination is a sense that people need to do everything at once. Like, this practice needs to be up and running and fully competent tomorrow, and that's not possible. You know, I am a big believer that we can make a lot of progress. My core coaching program is called Start Up in 90 Days because you absolutely can, over 90 days, get a practice up and running and clients coming in. That is possible. One week is not possible. It's not possible. Not to do it to the standard that you're going to want it. And I think often people have a really unrealistic expectation of themselves, that they're gonna be able to learn everything they need to learn and implement it all in a very short period of time. And of course, that is massively overwhelming.

The other thing I see is people over-consuming advice. So sometimes people do this with this podcast or they do it even with my coaching programs. I'll see in the backend of my coaching website that they've watched every single one of my lessons, and that's a red flag to me. Because if you watch them all in the first week that you're in the coaching platform, that tells me you're taking on board a lot of information, but you're not taking the, the action. When I coach people, I give very short, like 10 minutes, 15 minutes of information, and then I give something practical for you to do to move it forward in your business. And the reason that I do that is that we are really prone to overwhelming ourselves by thinking about the whole picture. And actually, we tend to get much more success if, yes, we know, you know, I give people a template of the business plan that they're gonna have fully created by the end of the program, because I do want people to know what we're gonna cover and, and how everything fits together. But then I really encourage you to go step by step. Because if you think about the whole big thing, of course that's overwhelming. But if you just take the next step, the next thing we need to do, then it is much easier to, to get started.

The other thing which really contributes to the sense of overwhelm is comparing yourself to people who are years ahead of you and thinking that you can reverse engineer from what you see on the outside. So very often people will scroll Instagram and see somebody with a successful practice and instantly start criticizing themselves for not doing it like them yet. And so then they'll try to do too much. So they'll try to make everything happen overnight to be just like that person. But what they haven't seen is the years that it took for that person to get to where they are now, for the support structures and foundations that they put in place to enable them to be able to do the thing that you can see. So for example, if I'm, you know, doing a launch for something, you're gonna see me in lots of places. You're gonna see that I've got Substack, that I'm posting on Instagram, that I'm posting on LinkedIn. You're gonna see that I've got Facebook ads. You might see my Google ads. You might hear me guesting on podcasts and all of that stuff. I can only do all of that because I have a team who run the kind of admin and stuff of my practice for me, basically. And I've got really good support in all the other operational parts of my business as well. So I'm showing up for the stuff where you see me showing up, but I'm not having to do all of the stuff that you're probably doing right now behind the scenes. In the early days, I could not have been as visible as I am now around a launch because I didn't have all that support, so I was having to do all of the backend stuff. That is not possible for you to see from the outside, and a lot of business owners don't talk about that support that they have behind the scenes because it's not relevant to the thing that they're launching, so they won't be talking about it, but that doesn't mean it's not there. You also don't know how other people's circumstances might be different from yours. Like, I only actually work about 16 hours a week, probably less some weeks, because my children have additional needs. They don't do full days at school. I have to take lots of time off to, to go and support them for various things that they need from me. And so that means that I can't get done in a week what my amazing colleague that does 9:00 till 5:00, Monday to Friday can get done. I just can't. And so if I was comparing myself to her, I'm gonna feel really bad and probably really overwhelmed all the time because I'm gonna give myself an impossible to-do list.

So one of the joys, one of the reasons I love working with people in coaching is working out what is realistic and what success looks like for you in your real life. And when you do that, instantly, it tends to become a little bit less overwhelming because you're no longer striving for some idea of perfection that doesn't exist for you. You're working towards a life which actually works for you and your family. And so yeah, I think that kind of  comparisonitis that we talk about so often is a really big contributor to procrastination and overwhelm. So getting stuck in procrastination or overwhelm, it does have a cost to it. You know, people often come to me saying that they got really burnt out in their NHS job because they were procrastinating making the decision to change it. It was so difficult to get through the procrastination or the overwhelm that they stayed stuck and maybe stayed somewhere that was harming their mental health, for longer than they needed to. I also think people can miss out on the learning that comes from taking imperfect action when they get trapped in procrastination or overwhelm. It's another thing I really love to help people out of, because, you know, there is only so much that we can learn before we hit publish. Most of, as you'll hear me talk about on this podcast, most of the most valuable stuff I've learned about running my practice, I've learned from making mistakes, from putting something out there and then being like, "Oh, that was terrible, that didn't work, but this is why." And then taking different action as a result of that. And if you aren't able to go through that process because you're so trapped by, you know, this horrible feeling of overwhelm and the need to avoid that, then it can be really, really difficult to get that learning. And as a result of that, people that are trapped by this often, if they do have a private practice, they'll stay, you know, reliant on a referral stream that might be a bit patchy or a bit low paid, and so they end up feeling quite bad about themselves because the business never really flourishes in the way that they want it to. And so their lives are hard because they, they're not making enough money to get the support to sort of build the business that works for their, their lifestyle. So it can be really damaging.

And as I've mentioned already in this episode, there are lots of psychological approaches that we might take in coaching to help somebody to, to get out of this trap. You know, we might use compassion, I might get people to think from different perspectives. You know, how this would look if it was happening to a friend, and what they might suggest to a friend or a colleague in a similar situation. You know, I'll try and help people activate their compassionate self, and take that perspective that, you know, a compassionate person would have on their business, rather than the very self-critical one that they're often stuck in. But alongside that, and the thing which, if you're listening to this podcast, you can do for yourself too, is getting stuck into just one practical task. So rather than thinking about all the things that need to be done in order to make a business successful, I'll often encourage somebody that's really prone to procrastination or overwhelm to laser focus on just one thing that they can do for their business that will have a tangible result. Because if you can get that kind of dopamine of completing something, and then you get continued positive feedback because this asset that you've created is working for you in your business, that can really help unstick that procrastination and reduce that overwhelm down. Because you start to see, "I am capable of breaking something big down into a small task, completing it, getting somewhere positive, and moving on to the next thing."

So if you're listening to this, and maybe, you know, you're feeling really stuck in procrastination, or you're frequently falling into these feelings of overwhelm, like, I hope I've made it really clear that this isn't a motivation problem. You're not lazy, you're very motivated, and that's exactly why this is coming up for you. I'm sure you're aware already that this is about avoidance, and it's a very understandable and very common mechanism for, for dealing with the massive discomfort that comes from the vulnerability of setting up a business. So you're not alone, but one of the kindest things that you can do for yourself right now is to narrow your focus to one meaningful thing that you do for your business, an asset you can create, and make everything else wait for now. And so for a lot of people I work with, the thing that I recommend is creating a really good directory site profile. Because once that exists, every other bit of marketing has somewhere useful to direct people to, and a really strong basis. So you've probably heard me talk on the podcast recently about creating that digital footprint that lets AI and search engines really understand who you are and who they should be recommending to come to you. A really strong directory profile can be reused in so many different places that it can really turbocharge that digital footprint and make sure that, you know, your digital presence is doing the heavy lifting and bringing those referrals to you. So it's a small task that has really big ripple effect across your business.

So I have a mini course at the moment to support you through this, and it's called The Magnetic Profile, and it's built around that idea. So over five days, I walk you through step by step creating or refreshing your directory profile using my Values, Voice, Impact framework. So you don't have to look at the finished product and get overwhelmed. I am going to give you something short and actionable that you can do in 10, 15 minutes a day over five days. And at the end, you will have that dopamine hit of having something finished that will start bringing the right people into your practice. So I think this is hopefully a bit of an antidote to that kind of summer feeling of procrastination or getting stuck and overwhelmed that you might be feeling if you know that you wanna start your business in September or you want to make a change in your business in September. So I really hope if this episode resonated with you today, that you're gonna find that useful. You can find the link to sign up in the show notes of this episode, and I would love to see you in there. Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate, and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance, and we'll see you next week for another episode of Practical Strategy and Inspiration to move your independent practice forwards.