My view and judgements on procrastination has shifted over the last year and I’m becoming more increasingly aware of my tendency to delay or postpone certain tasks until pressure builds up.
My observation is that sometimes for certain projects or tasks I put it off until (more or less) the very last minute.
One example might be: it’s Monday morning and I have some report I need to send out by end of week and I wait until Friday morning to even begin. Then all at once, I complete the task — mind you, the task itself requires about 15-20 minutes of concentrated effort — often feeling totally drained and exhausted afterwards and above all else, guilty. Whenever I find myself procrastinating, I still try to stay self-compassionate “who doesn’t sometimes procrastinate sometimes?”. And though I want to minimize the negative consequences of procrastination, procrastination in itself is not something I want to completely eliminate.
Here’s why.
I do not believe that procrastination is the problem. It’s not something that needs to be extinguished.
In fact, I believe procrastination has utility and functional in certain circumstances. The act of procrastination allows me to avoid or delay some anticipatory, potential (often yet unaware of) negative emotions. In that way, procrastination serves as a protective mechanism.
Yes — procrastination can become maladaptive. I get that.
But what I’m leaning towards now is to increase my awareness around procrastination and treat the behavior as a signal. A clue. A reminder to check in myself, a moment to pause and breathe, and question: “What’s going on?”
Am I procrastinating because of some perfectionism tendencies? Sometimes I fall into the trap that whatever is I do “needs” to be stellar so that I minimize perceived social rejection. Acceptance.
Am I procrastinating because of the potential boredom accompanying the task? Is it because the task at hand doesn’t provide sufficient stimulus. Boredom is useful and I believe a necessary ingredient to creativity. And more often than not, certain tasks that I believe are boring end up providing stillness and calm.
Am I procrastinating out of fear or anxiety? Sometimes I avoid a task because reality is that there is a negative consequence that follows the task. And at the same time, I realize now (as I’m typing this out) that if there’s going to be a consequence, how about facing it? I don’t always HAVE to front load the negative emotions and immediately pay the price. Because sometimes it is best to defer negative experiences, like if I am lacking sleep and tired and some undesirable behavior would follow as a result of experiencing negative emotions.
In sum, procrastination and I are becoming friends and ultimately I want to increase my awareness of when I’m delaying or deferring something and then, try to leverage one of the skills or toolboxes I’ve either come up on my own or ones that I’ve picked up from others (like from The Waves of Focus online course)
To me, I like to think I’m somewhat self-aware (who doesn’t think that about themselves but according to one study, only 10-15% are actually self-aware). But from my own perspective, it does not seem abnormal — to me — to remember little details of conversations. That being said, about at least 3 times in the past week, people have commented on my ability to remember certain conversations.
But what motivates me to remember? It it acceptance, the desire for social approval? What is it, exactly?
Honestly, I don’t think my ability to remember conversations is innate and rather a skill that I have developed over the years. I recall in my early 20s, reading Dale Carnegie’s “How to win friends and influence people” and though the details are now fuzzy, I recall that book having a profound impact on me and the way I interact with others, a mindful approach to developing relationships. Dale Carnegie emphasized the importance of listening with one’s full attention. As such, when I am engaged in a conversation with others, I really make an effort: I make eye contact, I validate (when appropriate), and ask questions (driven from my high need for curiosity).
Last night, I was at a dance event in Shoreditch and was having a 1:1 conversation with Francesa; I had asked her about her upcoming trip to New York to celebrate her 30th birthday. She was a bit surprised and said something along the lines of, “wow — you have good memory”. Now, as mentioned earlier, I get that type of comment pretty often. In this specific instance, here’s why I think I remember her sharing that with me:
the first time I had met her and
as a house dancer, New York is considered the mecca of the dance style and
Turning 30 is a big milestone that’s worthy of celebrating
Normally, I conduct my weekly reviews on Sunday, on a weekend where I am less pressed for time, a period of time that I can sit down and reflect. However, I had Elliott this past weekend — at the moment, alternating weekends — and by the end of Sunday evening, at 5:00pm, when her mother picks her up, I’m drained with energy. Long story short: better now than never.
I remember experiencing joy this past Tuesday, sitting in an office located in central London, my client’s office where I’m currently working as a consultant for the next 3 months. Though my social contact needs are low, I enjoyed not only the technical banter, but discussions on stretching and calisthenics.
From Friday afternoon to Sunday evening, I had Elliott (video clip below). When I’m with my daughter, there are so many tiny moments where I feel both love and joy. In the little moments, like when I am washing the dishes and cleaning up the kitchen and she’s sitting in the same area, the two of us talking while she’s coloring in. And I also experience so many micro proud moments, proud of both her and proud of myself. For instance, I taught her how to use the laptop and how to press down “command + P” followed by the “RETURN” key, enabling her to print out her own connect the dot worksheets.
Another moment I really enjoyed was having lunch with her in Chinatown. Drawing inspiration from another parent, I bought a memory game from Amazon and carry it along with me in my backpack, busting it out when her and I have a moment to ourselves. What was so sweet was that when we got to the restaurant, because we go there about every weekend when I have her, the employees already know our order (i.e. chicken chow mein, dim sum platter, pork bao). What’s more is that another employee stopped by our table and played the memory game with us, despite Elliott being unsure with what they were doing since the older woman spoke with broken English.
On Sunday evening, after Elliott left, I danced and trained (video clip below). One primary intention that I had set prior to performing the dance specific exercises was holding certain positions longer. There’s this tendency I have to move to the next beat before the current beat fully finishes, and as such, people have told me (numerous of times, number of people) that I am “rushing”. They’re not wrong. So during this instance of the exercise, particularly on the “third” rhythm, I held the final foot positioning for a fraction of second longer and looking back at the footage, just that extra moment in time makes the movement and transition much more clear.
Developing confidence is an area that I naturally find myself gravitating towards. I find the whole topic fascinating and ironic because I feel confident in some areas in my life while feeling insecure in others.
What’s up with that?
Confidence: A non transferable skill and domain specific
I recently finished a book titled “Mastery: The first rule of mastery: Stop worrying about what other people think” and currently working through (a library rented copy of) “How Confidence Works” by Ian Robertson. In “How Confidence Works”, Ian Robertson states that confidence is domain specific and that confidence itself is NOT transferable.
In other words, just because you are confident in area A (e.g. dance) does not mean you are inherently confident in area B (e.g. public speaking). While it can be a trait, self-confidence has more to do with competence within a specific domain.
For instance, you can be the most confident dancer, able to effortless dance in front of a large audience, and then feel absolutely unsure and insecure and terrified when it comes to dating! It follows that building confidence is a skill that is transferable across domains (more on this below — see Gold Nuggets below)
All all that brings me to “paradox of rising expectations.”
In a nutshell, when it comes to setting goals, an individual’s goal post continues to move. That is, what often happen is that once we reach out goal(s), here’s a natural tendency to set another (typically more ambitious) goal. It’s a recursive, infinite loop: set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal.
Gold nuggets extracted from conversation with Jo-L
I followed up with Jo-L over Instagram, sending him a few voice messages, asking him a few follow up questions. Here are some pearls of wisdom I extracted from the conversation:
“Confidence is a product of the effort ….”
“I’m not talking about the outcome…the outcome is a completely different story … I am putting myself in this position and I am trying. And that means no matter the outcome, I can try again. And I can go again. I am gaining confidence in the fact that I am putting myself in this position. And this is something that is transferable.”
“If I’m capable of putting myself here — of trying this out — I am capable of trying something new out. If I am capable of mastering this … then I have the capacity to master something else.”
“You’re not mastering the craft. You’re mastering yourself WITHIN the craft”
“Every single time you master yourself within the craft, you’re also learning a lot about yourself that’s going to be useful in the pursuit of mastering yourself within another craft.”
I’ve been listening — on repeat – to the song “Xinobi – Searching for”, one that was suggested by Spotify. It’s not only the melody and harmony but it’s the lyrics, the lyrics cause me to turn inwards, to introspect. Just so many beautiful lines including:
“It is about the mind. How it grows progressively. What do you feed it?”
“It is about choices much it is about decisions. But it is about having bravery and the strength to make those things come to fruition”
“… the past repeats itself. So how will you choose to repeat yourself…”
Another reason I love this song is that this past weekend, Elliott out of the blue said, “What are you feeding your mind?”
I was confused as to why she had said this and she responded with, “Dad, remember? The song?”
I was blown away at her ability to recall the lyrics! So when I hear this song, I often think about Elliott and that little passing moment.
Lyrics
It is about what you feel, what you do How you choose to present yourself when the situation requires you It is about what you’re looking for, what you search for It is not about fulfillment, but it is about what is missing How do you improve? How do you progress? Are you searching?
It is about the mind How it grows progressively What do you feed it? How do you cultivate the mind?
It is about the galaxies and the stars But not so much about the moon as much as it is about you
It is about choices much is it about decisions But it is about having the bravery and the strength To make those things come to fruition What is it you’re searching for?
It is about a pause, a break A interruption in the transmission A stop in the space-time continuum A choice that you will always make A moment in being when you realize That you are what you are searching for So, I will ask: what is it you are searching for?
It is about infinite tomorrows But is also about yesterdays and how the past repeats itself So how will you choose to repeat yourself in their lives?
It is about now It is about then What is it you are searching for? What is it you are searching for? Is it the now? Is it the no? Is it the yes? Is it that subsequent “I love you” that you need? What is it you are searching for? What is it you are searching for?
On the days I don’t see Elliott (my beautiful 5 year old daughter), I often find myself (re)watching recap videos of us on my iPhone, short little clips that I stitch together to capture a moment in time, a snapshot aimed to honor our relationship (as well as share with some friends and family).
Right now, I’m sitting at a café located near her school; I’m working remotely and just sent off a proposal for a 3 month engagement, now getting ready to grab a bite to eat before walking over to school to pick her up. And while watching the video below, I sensed a wave of calm and love and joy, these emotions washing over me.
In this video clip, she’s sitting on my lap as I feed her pasta that I had picked up from M&S, the two of us singing along to Dua Lipa’s “Levitating” performance that’s taking place on Tiny Desk.
Creating YouTube Playlist on my channel serves multiple purposes. First, doing so in a way for me to practice my organization skills. Second, a playlist enables me to chronologically view my dance journey. Third, playlists help viewers (subscribers and non-subscribers) paint a better picture of what dance classes in studios look and feel like.
Now, I do have a backlog of edited house dance recap videos that live on my iPhone and Instagram (stories), not yet uploaded to YouTube. How many? If I had to guess, probably in the range of 50 videos or so. Will I upload all of them? Although I’d like to, probably not. Perhaps a select few.
What other playlists will I want to create? Off the cuff, here are a few ideas
Stretching and flexibility journey – I started stretching on May 16, 2024 (162 days ago) and similar to my dance, I’ve been documenting my flexibility journey
Daughter and dad recap videos – Whenever I watch videos of Elliott and me, I feel joy and love. It’s yet another way to remind myself that I am living a life that’s both worth living and living a live that’s aligned with my long term values
In the middle of recording a video during yesterday evening’s dance class, my iPhone popped up an alert, a message notifying me that I ran out of disk space and that the current video recording was halted. After seeing the notification, I had mentally prepared myself to visit the Apple store to trade in my phone, upgrading the iPhone to one with larger disk capacity — perhaps doubling the capacity, from 2TB to 4 TB — but fortunately discovered that I can reclaim about 1/2 a TB of space by performing some clean up, pushing out the need to upgrade my phone.
What’s taking up all that space?
I attend dance classes ritually on Tuesdays and Thursdays and almost every class, I capture footage of the entire class, recording myself in order to both 1) create recap videos and 2) reflect on my dance, what I liked, what I dislike. These dance classes in London tend to run 90 minutes and recording at 30 frames per second (FPS), 1080P, HEVC encoding (I had assumed video was being encoded with H.264 and today learned about HEVC, a more efficient format), that’s about 3.6 GB of disk space per hour of video, taking up about 5.4 GB of space per class.
But why the hell is CapCut program itself eating up almost 1TB of space, almost half of the capacity on my iPhone?
What the hell is going on!?
It appears that CapCut duplicates each imported video file in a project. That’s my guess and it would make sense because the application should not affect the original file. This would explain why a project file consisting of a 30 second video clip extracted from 2 hour clip take up 10GB?
So now, I am currently performing some maintenance on my iPhone, carefully deleting project files. What’s odd is that there seems to be some sort of misreporting of disk space because when I delete what I think is 10 GB of project files, I only see a few hundred (about 400 MB) reclaimed. Maybe, just maybe, there’s another reason, like perhaps some background process or thread has not kicked in to update the disk utilization?
Either way, I am going to hold off on upgrading my iPhone that contains a larger capacity and try and reclaim 500GB of space.
All the time, we all hear the following: “Just be yourself.” On the whole, I concede that these words form sage and sound advice. In fact, as someone who historically shaped shifted throughout his life in order to conform to social expectations, I mindfully practice being myself every day.
The act of being oneself is a topic over the past six months occupies a large portion of my mental real estate. Because I’m interested in this topic, I fall victim to Baader-Meinhof phenomenon (i.e. frequency bias), my attention antennae keep gravitating towards discussion where the topic of “being oneself” centers the conversation.
In fact, this entire post was motivated by a podcast episode (from The Capsule, a London based dance podcast) revolving around sports psychology performance. During that episode, the guest (Jo-L) shares his perspective on having the choice to be yourself:
“You can make a choice … People are going to love you for everything that you are … and everything you want to be … [or] they are going to hate you for that. Then, on the other hand, there are going to be like hating you for all the things that you are not, as in that you pretend to be. So like, essentially speaking, you’re making the choice between like …. you’re going to be loved or hated anyway, so you might as well be loved for the things that you wanted to be loved for.”
In response to this, the podcast host points out even a more subtle, more dangerous aspect to what I’m going to call betraying yourself.
“… or even worst, lose [a dance battle] cause of who I am not. Imagine changing your whole dance because that’s the RIGHT thing to do or the RIGHT way of dancing”.
Overall, I agree and I myself will continue biasing towards just being myself.
However, my curious nature wanted to dig into the notion of betraying yourself (i.e. “not being yourself”) and how I consider it to be quite a seductive position. Because there will be moments in which you betray yourself. Because there are moments when you will be rewarded in the form of praises from others.
According to Chase Jarvis, he believes this constant betrayal happens to all of us:
“We will all betray ourselves over and over again and the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1 percent better every day … the person who is a degree off who walks a thousand miles”
With that in mind, let’s compare being yourself versus betraying yourself.
Be yourself
When you just show up as who you are, you might be liked by others. This quadrant, to me, is the ideal condition, wouldn’t you say? There’s no performing. You spend little cycles taking the temperature of the room. You spend less time evaluating body language and attuning to facial micro expressions. You are doing what dialectical behavior therapy calls participating, mindfully being in the moment.
Of course, when you are being yourself, you may be disliked by others. This is inevitable, considering there are over 8 billion people occupying this earth. How could any one person be liked by everyone? That’s statistically impossible. Furthermore, every individual person on this earth is unique, according to Reiss Motivation Profile, which posits that though we are all motivated by the same 16 basic human desires, how much we’re motivated by each value differs.
Betraying yourself
On the whole, betraying yourself is more or less “masking”, being someone you are not. At the risk of being overly understanding (is that even possible), we all do this, according to Chase Jarvis
“We will all betray ourselves over and over again and the goal is to just do so slightly less and return to ourselves with a little more kindness and a little more awareness and get 1 percent better every day … the person who is a degree off who walks a thousand miles”
Now, betraying yourself can be effective (and dare I say, useful) in certain contexts. For me, personally, assuming we all betray ourselves on and off throughout the course of our life, I want to both give latitude to myself and increase my awareness when this betrayal occurs.
Though we can betray ourselves in the short term, it is not, according to sports Psychologist Michael Gervais, unsustainable in the long term.
“You contort to fit in. You sacrifice authentic expression on the altar of approval. You twist yourself into a shape that appears socially acceptable but it’s performative in nature. The response does not represent your authentic self. Contorting creates a temporary relief but leaves you feeling disconnected from others. Because you don’t share your true self, you never feel connected, understood, or embraced, nor do you become a trusted member of the community. By pretending to be someone you’re not, you constantly feel the pressure to maintain the facade. This can intensity the feelings of insecurity and fear of exposure.” (pg. 40; Gervais: First Rule of Mastery)
Now, what about betraying yourself and being disliked by others? If being yourself and being like by others is the most ideal quadrant, then betraying yourself and being disliked is the least ideal, the most disappointing. The possibility of this happening sufficiently motivates me to shy away from this behavior: what a slap in the face to pretend to be someone you are not, only to be rejected?
Summary
So, armed with this information, how do I want to approach my life from this point? These days, I tend to choose “Be Yourself”. I’m someone who values high degrees of acceptance (i.e. two standard deviations from the norm).
I will end this post with a little snippet from Steve Job’s commencement speech, which I’ve been memorizing and rehearsing daily, as if it were my own personal mantra. I wake up in the morning, verbally recall these words, and then from memory, try and write down these words. For me, it is one of the ways I am practicing a stoic approach to living:
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what’s truly important. Remembering that you’re going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You’re already naked. There’s no reason not to follow your heart …
Your time is limited, so don’t go wasting it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other people’s opinions drown your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly to become. Everything else is secondary”
Best part of my day yesterday was when Elliott handed me over a little drawing (see featured image above) that she drew with a pen and 8×11 printer paper that was folded in half. I felt joy wash over me and had asked her to what drawings on the card were: “That’s you. That’s me. And that’s a heart, for us”
Today
Talked with Martin and Ethan on FaceTime video – nice catching up with my good friend Martin and his son. Ethan was eating a “healthy” ice cream that he had made (with his mom) made of fruits and (cow’s) milk. The color of the ice cream was … orange … and when I had asked what the flavor was, Martin said “Maybe Watermelon?” I was like, come on Martin, it’s god damn orange, how could it be watermelon, are you color blind ?!?
Stretched – forward fold, elephant walk, and hamstring lunge. And posted on the Stretch Therapy forum
Sent a voice message to Kennedy and sung her happy birthday – my little Libra friend just turned 23 and I had setup a notification in my task manager, reminding me to wish her happy birthday
Cancelled Dance Class – Every Tuesday, without fail, I dance at Pineapple and take a house dance class. However, my legs are still shattered from this past Sunday’s 1:1 Dance Private with Samantha Mavinga. So I listened to my body, honoring its request to get some rest.
Worked out of Starbucks at Wimbledon – they have way more comfortable seats than the Costa I typically work out of. In addition, because this Starbucks has a long bench, I can periodically alter my sitting position. And because I’m more flexible than ever, I can (without pain) sit crossed legged (i.e. Indian Style)
Tackled administrative items that I’ve been procrastinating on – sent 3400.00 GBP to my (soon to be) ex wife for interim spousal support, an amount I disagree with but accept (side note: I believe in universal laws and will leave it at that for now), contacted IRS
Practiced skills learned from Waves of Focus – pausing, considering organizing one thing, link bury and mark
OrganizedElliott’s slime party – contacted the slime vendor and coordinate with other parents to confirm time and place. My ex had thrown a party for Elliott and I wanted to do something nice for Elliott on the weekend that I had her and she was so excited about the idea of a slime party
