The Coaching 30: #1 – Celebrating Procrastination

So we all find it difficult at times to apply ourselves to the things that need doing, when there are lots of things that don’t need doing, but we want to do because they are fun!

This morning I was supposed to be settling to the redrafting of the new book which I feel like I have been working on since the beginning of the 18th century. I have been sitting down to do this for weeks now, and only succeeding maybe one in six times. The rest of the time is applied to other useful things, but not the task in front of me.

It’s a great way to clear backlogs of papers, and wipe away the dust. There must be a good book to be written on the subject of everything that can be done when you’re trying to avoid doing the main task of the day. Except that you probably wouldn’t get round to writing it, because you would find heaps of other things to do. Let’s face it, even writing weblogs is a good way of avoiding doing that difficult task.

Well, this morning I managed to overcome the problem by spending half an hour on an exercise from Julia Cameron’s book ‘The Artist’s Way’. The exercise is called ‘Blasting through Blocks’ and is well worth a try if you find it difficult to get on with things. She focuses on the two big blockages – anger and fear. By bringing them into sharp relief we can unravel all sorts of baggage about fear of success, avoiding the risk of failure and so on. The key to the whole thing is that it really does work. It uses a simple set of questions which are worked through before settling to the project. You are basically looking for issues of resistance.

The questions are:

1. What resentments do you have in connection with this project? 
2. What fears do you have that relate to this project? 
3.  Is that everything, or is there something else? 
4. What do you stand to gain by not doing this work? 
5. Make a deal with yourself – “Okay, Creative Force, you take care of the quality and I’ll take care of the quantity.”

Try working through these and see what happens.

Music and the letter B

Last night I surfed the internet and found musical downloads from Christian Fennesz (the guy who contributed to the last track on David Sylvian’s album, ‘Blemish’) – beautiful and mysterious music. And I found heaps of material in the archive of Resonance FM which is a London based music station broadcasting over the airwaves and the internet. Some interesting stuff here. I’ve also been listening to tracks by Farmers Manual and Autreche – strange noises, but interesting experiences still. On the CD player, I’m listening to Eno, Sylvian and the latest Radiohead album which is growing in my consciousness. In the car is ‘Heathen’ by David Bowie which has some incredibly catchy tunes on it. This morning my concentration was helped by listening to late Beethoven string quartets – Beethoven, Bartok and Bach really help me to concentrate. What is it about the letter B?

And why am I telling you all this? Sometimes music can permeate into the activities of the brain, and settle a distracted mind so that we can find our way to the work that we need to do.