Episode 196 - Why You Feel Overwhelmed and Procrastinate
Making progress on your goals can feel impossible when negative self-talk is too loud or the standards feel unattainable. In this episode, I share a compassionate, curiosity-driven approach to help you show up for yourself and focus on what truly matters. By creating an environment that embraces your authentic selfârather than one ruled by constant criticismâyou'll be more motivated to pursue your goals. Tune in to learn how to replace self-doubt with self-acceptance and supportive habits that foster genuine confidence.
Topics
Observations on self-criticism and procrastination
Introduction of self-compassion and curiosity as solutions
Questioning Standards and Aspirations
The transition from judgment to curiosity
Recognition of personal traits as strengths
Links
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Transcript
[AUTO-GENERATED]
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:06]:
Welcome to the self growth nerds podcast, I'm your host Marie, a courage coach, creative soul and adventure seeker. Since thru hiking the Pacific Crest Trail in 2019, I'm on a mission to help you embrace your most confident self so you can achieve your dreams too. If you're eager for deep conversations, big questions, and meaningful connections, join me on the quest to discovering how we can create a more magical and memorable life. Hello, nerds. How are you? Honestly, I'm pretty sad. I'm recording this, the morning after the election, the American election. I'm in Canada. I'm Canadian, for those of you who didn't know.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:00:56]:
But I feel so sad that we live in a world where a racist, misogynistic rapist can be president of the United States. To me, this is unbelievable. American politics feels like you're watching reality TV. I can understand having different values. I'll happily have a conversation with someone who thinks differently from me. But this is not a person you could have a conversation with if you disagree without being disrespected and called names. And now this is going to be normalized because he's going to become the president. Anyway, I have a guest room so if you need an abortion and you can't get it done where you live then let me know.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:01:54]:
I might be able to help. Actually, you know what this reinforces for me is the importance of small scale living, local, forming local support networks, getting to know my neighbors even better and seeing how I can support them. Alright, let's take a deep breath and jump into today's topic, which is why we get overwhelmed in procrastinate. I came up with the idea for this episode after the last class of my 8 week course, the courage to start new, when one of my clients shared that she was worried about not following through. She had made a plan about what she wanted to do and she said I'll probably be lazy and just stop making progress. I've observed this time and time again. People beating themselves up for procrastinating, for not following through, telling themselves they're lazy and incapable, shooting the hell out of themselves. I should have figured things out.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:10]:
I should be better than this. It's not that complicated. Why, why does it seem so easy for others? I should be able to do it. This is the inner bully, and it's not useful. This is actually counterproductive. You can't whip yourself into progress. Imagine your kid coming back from school. They're super down because they got a bad grade and you tell them, what? Again? You really need to get your shit together and study more next time.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:03:46]:
This wouldn't be helpful. It would just lead to them closing up. It would just add shame on top of the disappointment that they're already feeling. This is what so many of us do to ourselves. Today, I want to talk about what I advocate for instead. What's going to make your journey on this earth a lot more bearable? It's compassion and it's curiosity. Let's start with compassion. There's a horrible video of Tucker Carlson talking about how the, the Democrats are like a 15 year old rebellious teenager who's acting out on her parents.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:04:32]:
And he says, at some point, if you want this behavior to stop, dad has to step up and spank her so that she understands that she can't act this way. Sure. Violence is going to quote unquote fix the problem on the surface, but what's happening deep down is your your daughter will most likely be afraid of you and learn to silence herself. As a society we have been conditioned to use rewards and punishments to get what we want. The first example that comes to mind is parents telling their kids they will be able to have dessert if they're they finish their main meal. This has been shown it can lead to dysfunctional relationships with food. Then as adults we do the same. You can only watch your favorite TV show tonight or eat your Oreos if you've been good today.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:05:31]:
You can only rest if you finished what you said you were going to do. Don't you think this sounds like conditional love? I will only be kind to myself if and when, and it's followed by a list of conditions. I will only be kind to myself if and when I wake up early, I work out, I eat well, I get positive feedback at work, and I do everything on my to do list. What is your list of boxes that you need to tick before you can give yourself the love, the rest, the kindness that you crave. Don't get me wrong. It's okay to have standards for yourself or quote unquote success metrics or aspirations, but be careful not to weave them with your personal worth or to use them against yourself. If you say, for example, I would like to be the kind of person who wakes up around 7 in the morning. Okay.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:06:27]:
It's neutral. It's not moral. If you struggle to accomplish this, you don't have to make it mean anything about you as a human being. I would hope that if your kid struggles to get good grades in school, you wouldn't love them any less. Instead, you would support them and try to figure out what they need. But also, I want to encourage you to question what seems important to you, to question your standards and aspirations and where they come from. Are they really yours, or were they programmed into you? There's a a meme going around of a tired mom who has a baby in her arms and she tells herself she didn't get anything done all day. She sucks.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:17]:
She's lazy. And meanwhile you see that her baby is thinking, wow, I'm so lucky. Mommy snuggled with me all day and I feel so loved. So what is it that you evaluate yourself on? Let's say you didn't make a lot of progress on your to do list at work today. Maybe productivity is not the best way to evaluate yourself. Maybe you actually made someone feel seen because you took time out of your day to to sit with that colleague and truly listen to them and be there for them. That to me matters so much more. I wanna share a personal example.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:07:57]:
Part of me used to evaluate my worth based on the number of clients I had as a coach. The more clients, the better I would feel about myself. When actually having a small number of clients can just mean that you're starting out. And there's no shame in being a beginner. Plus, having a bigger number of clients can mean that you're a very talented coach, but it can also mean lots of different things. Like, maybe you're a great manipulator who uses coercive techniques in their marketing. It could also mean that you're a workaholic who doesn't spend time with their family and friends, who struggles to set boundaries and says yes to everyone. The point I'm making here is that you have to be careful how you evaluate yourself.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:08:47]:
If you set the bar too high, like I need to have x amount of clients otherwise I'm less than, of course you're not gonna want to show up to work. Of course you're going to procrastinate because you're being an asshole to yourself. Personally, I think I was so hard on myself because I had been greatly influenced by following a bunch of coaches who talked about their definition of success, which was based on numbers above all else. I had to redefine what success means to me. I want to have clients I'm excited to work with and enough time and energy to go deep with them. I want to have an authentic and inspiring community of support. I want to have the freedom to make my own schedule and I want to make enough money to do what I enjoy and save some of it for the future. I remember meeting the coaches I was putting on a pedestal, the people I thought I wanted to be in community with and realizing actually this is not an authentic community.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:09:55]:
These people are here for their own benefit. They're name dropping. They're focused on numbers. They're not focused on the well-being of their clients. They're using unethical techniques in my opinion so why am I pushing myself to reach the goals that they say I should reach? Of course I'm going to feel overwhelmed and disconnected and I'm gonna want to procrastinate if actually I'm trying to make myself do something that's not aligned with my core values. If you find yourself procrastinating it might be because you're pursuing a goal that's not really yours, that's not coming from a place of true desire but coming from a place of compliance, of having been told what to think and what to pursue instead of looking in and getting curious, which is the second theme of today's episode, and the mindset shift I advocate for. Replacing self judgment with curiosity. Think about what you're struggling to follow through on.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:11:11]:
Let's say it's, searching for a new job. Instead of telling yourself, oh, why is it that I can't figure this out? Try asking yourself, honey, tell me about what feels hard right now. Let's try and understand so I can better support you. Tell me, what do you need? What would help you? What would make this feel a little bit easier? Can you hear the relief? You might not come up with an answer right away but at least there's space, and if your brain wants to go straight to I don't know then it's a sign that you need to slow down and create a space where all the answers are welcomed. There's no good or bad answer. It's like a brainstorming session. If you shut down the ideas that rise to the surface, no ideas will want to rise to the surface again. So a potential answer to the job searching example is, well, maybe I need to chill a little bit and spend a few less hours on the job searching sites because it's making me crazy.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:12:28]:
I think I need to rest a little bit. And maybe I could ask my friend to go for coffee and help me work on my resume. What I often see is people looking for the answer that's going to fix everything, instead of just little crumbs, little pieces of what could help. The idea is that instead of ignoring or being annoyed with the part of you that's struggling, you're listening to it. You're working together. We have so much internalized ableism. If we don't fit the quote unquote typical way of being, we shame ourselves with shoulds. If you have ADHD, for example, I had lots of clients with ADHD.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:13:17]:
They have been told their whole lives that they're not trying hard enough, that they're lazy. So that discourse is conditioned into them, and now they don't need to be told. They tell themselves nonstop. That's internalized ableism. It can make you reluctant to advocate for your rights or to seek accommodations because you believe you should, should again, be able to manage it on your own. You've got to stand up for yourself the way you wish grown ups had stood up for you when you were younger. Rebel against that inner bully the way that you would if your kid now were in the same situation and they were not being taken care of. Practice telling yourself a different story.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:07]:
Like, you're not broken, there is actually nothing wrong with you. You are beautiful and unique, and we need people like you in our society. You deserve to be heard and to be considered and taken care of. Once you actually start believing such a narrative, you'll be so much more likely to allow yourself to consider accommodations and create a supportive environment that works with your unique traits instead of against. Let me give you another personal example. I'm a very sensitive person. And the old story I was telling myself, that I still tell myself every now and then, is I'm too sensitive. I need to toughen up.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:14:52]:
But the new story I'm practicing and it's helping me to read the book Sensitive by Jen Grandman and Andrei Solow is that sensitivity is a personality trait. It's not me trying to be difficult. It's just part of who I am and it comes with challenges, but it comes with so many qualities. When I focus on this instead I spend less time trying to fix myself and more time getting to know my needs better in creating an environment that supports them. It's kind of like we're expecting everyone to function in the desert. The desert is great for cacti, but it's not for a bunch of other types of plants. It's the same with us. So I know I get overwhelmed easily in dark and noisy places.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:15:48]:
Therefore, I try to avoid them as much as possible. I know I need a lot of alone time, so I don't plan activities 2 nights in a row. I know I don't work well under pressure and I'm slow in the morning, so I don't plan stuff before 11 am. I know I'm emotional, so I won't work for someone who doesn't allow vulnerability in the workplace. Instead of gaslighting myself and pressuring myself to try and be quote unquote normal, I just allow myself to be different and try to find ways to create an environment that supports that difference. I know it's a massive privilege for me to be able to experiment with this. We're not gonna lie, I'm at the top of Maslow's pyramid. There are people who are stuck in a job that barely pays the bills and doesn't allow them to be their authentic self, but they don't know how to get out because they have a family to support.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:16:49]:
I have lots of empathy for that. If you can't change your external environment, start by changing your internal environment. You might be in a broken system, but you still have control over your mind. So if you can make your mind a place where there's more unconditional love, where there's less judgment, then it's a massive step in the direction of a higher quality of life. It's not the whole battle, but it's a big part of the battle. And if you're wondering right now, wait, Marie, what's the link with overwhelm and procrastination? I I didn't wanna give you an episode with, like, tips and tricks to stop procrastinating because at the end of the day, it all goes back to the source. You're not going to want to sit down and do what you were meant to do if it's chaos in your mind, if you're trying to push a square peg in a round hole. Start by looking at your relationship with yourself and improving your relationship with yourself, and then everything else will fall into place.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:17:58]:
K? Tips and tricks are not gonna do it. It's it's deeper than this. Alright. If you wanna work together on this, message me on Instagram at self growth nerds. We're gonna have a conversation. I'll probably invite you on a call, free call with me to see if we're a good fit and so I can tell you about my services and you can make a decision moving forward. Just find me on Instagram at self growth nerds. And, that's it for this week.
Marie-Pier Tremblay [00:18:25]:
I'm sending you all so much love. Please take care of yourselves. And, I'll talk to you next week. Bye. Hey. If you love what you're hearing on the self growth nerds podcast and you want individual help finding a new direction for your life and developing the courage to make your dreams a reality, you have to check out how we can work together on selfgrowthnerds.com or message me on Instagram at selfgrowthnerds. My clients say they would have needed that support years ago. So if you're tired of feeling like you're wasting your life, don't wait, get in touch now and I cannot wait to meet you.