If You Are Procrastinating on Your Life's Work, Here's (Probably) Why

The challenge is a feature, not a bug.

“The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.”—Louis E. Boone

Hi friend,

A while ago, I coached someone who had been thinking about writing a novel for a long time… but hadn’t gotten started.

Can you relate to this issue? That there’s something you really want to do in this lifetime—and yet something is holding you back from pursuing it?

If so, this article is for you!

What follows will be deep. It will talk about things that are very special to you, and the journey you have to take to get there.

So, I thought I would share a picture that I took in the most special and beautiful place I have ever seen: inside the magma chamber of a volcano. But first, here's a picture of the journey it took to get there:

All pictures in this article were taken by me. :)

(During this hike, I kept on joking that I felt like I was in an episode of Prison Break. With penguins.)

What you cannot see on this picture is how cold and rainy it was, and how tired and hungry I felt while we went for this hike. It was the last day of a very busy trip to Iceland, we hadn't had time for lunch, and I was wishing I could be back in a warm hotel room, finally getting some rest.

Well, about an hour later, I felt very, very different: I was so glad I had completed the journey. My tiredness and hunger were forgotten. All I felt was joy and awe.

Of course, this picture doesn't do the experience justice. But if you look at my face, you can notice just how happy I am to have made it there. I’m as lit up as the lamp on my head (which I should have turned off before taking the picture…).

It's truly an experience I will remember for the rest of my life!

Why am I sharing this? Because that's how I want you to feel when you follow through on your heart’s work.

But before we talk about where you want to go, let's talk about where you currently might be, using my journey to the volcano as an example.

📍 Base camp: your situation

On our hike to the volcano, we started out at base camp. Base camp was pretty comfy— we had a roof and benches to sit on, we were protected from the rain and cold, and even had warm water to make ourselves some tea.

So, there was nothing wrong with base camp.
It just wasn’t why we had come there.
We had come for something else.

➡️ The same might be true for you. For instance, you might be in a pretty good spot in your life right now. When you look around and see how things are going for other people, you can’t complain.

Except… there’s this nagging sense that you are still not doing THE THING you have been wanting to do for years and years. And sometimes, when this feeling intensifies, you quietly wonder if you will die with your music still inside you.

Perhaps you can clearly describe what THE THING is for you… or perhaps you just have a fuzzy sense, telling you that there’s something that you haven’t yet gotten that you really, really want.

Welcome to base camp! Let's talk about your destination: where do you want to go from here?

🌋 Magma chamber: your destination

Here’s something I haven’t yet told you about the volcano we visited: it’s utterly unique. As far as I know, this is the only magma chamber you can enter—in the entire world.

I mean, check this out:

There’s nothing like it anywhere else.

Your life’s work is like that—utterly unique. As Martha Graham put it:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it."

THE THING you want to finally do—it’s likely a part of your unique expression. Your life’s work. And it might feel as hard to access as this volcano’s magma chamber.

How can you bring your life’s work forward?

Doing your heart’s work is a deep soul desire.

And there’s one problem with those: it's incredibly easy to procrastinate on them!

I call this form of procrastination soul purpose procrastination. This is different from everyday procrastination (such as not wanting to do your taxes).

💡 While everyday procrastination can often be solved through traditional approaches (time management, deadlines, etc.), soul purpose procrastination requires a different approach.

So, shall we explore why you haven't yet taken as much action as you would like on your soul desire? Perhaps you have been beating yourself up for your lack of action, and wondering if there's something wrong with you.

Well, it turns out that there's a good reason for your procrastination—and it has nothing to do with your willpower or abilities!

The root cause for why people don’t take action on their dreams

The core root of soul purpose procrastination is fear. You see, when it comes to our dreams, we often experience a push-pull: we both really want it—and we are deeply afraid of getting it.

This is because we truly do contain multitudes—think of this as different aspects of your being. Often, an inner conflict comes from two or more of these aspects being in conflict. ↔️

For instance, a typical inner conflict is between one’s “health nut” and “couch potato,” arguing about whether one should work out or eat a bag of chips instead.

When it comes to your soul desires, the main aspects you need to be aware of are

• your intuition, and

• your fear.

💡 Fear is an integral part of your dreams. You cannot have a big dream without fear—the fear is an indication of how important something is to you. Because you want your big goals so much, the stakes are a lot higher:

• What if it doesn’t work out?

• What if it does work out?

If you wonder why it’s often so much easier to take action on something you don’t care that much about, this is why: your fear isn’t holding you back because it doesn’t matter that much to you.

It’s similar to asking someone out for a date that you kinda like… versus asking the person you have secretly been in love with for the last decade. Obviously, the latter would feel much more nerve-wrecking. To solve soul purpose procrastination, you have to deal with the underlying fear.

🐉 This fear is like a scary dragon guarding your most exquisite treasures. As every hero’s journey tells us, we can’t have our treasure chest, filled with gold, without coming face-to-face with that dragon.

What will probably happen if you don’t address the root cause

If you don’t address the underlying fear, you will probably continue to procrastinate on your dreams. One day, you might realize that 5 years have passed, without you getting any closer to your big goals.

Sometimes, people get “lucky” and an outside event forces their hand. For instance, someone who might have wanted to quit their job for years gets fired and has no choice but to finally start their business. While this can lead to a happy ending, it does make the journey a lot more stressful than it has to be.

⚠️ When people don’t address the underlying fear, they also often end up spending money and energy on surface-level solutions that don’t get them closer to their goals.

For instance, you might end up buying an expensive course from a business coach that teaches you the nitty-gritty of Instagram ads when you haven’t even started your business, have no idea who you are trying to reach, and what you want to offer them.

🌼 However, if you deal with the underlying fear, it’s likely that you will make progress on your dreams. While this might not happen as fast as you will like, you are moving in the right direction.

And one day, you might realize that 5 years have passed… and you feel proud of how far you have come in that time!

🧭 How to overcome soul purpose procrastination

Overcoming soul purpose procrastination is a multistep process:

1. Clarity & commitment: To begin the process, you need to get clear on what exactly you want—and commit to it.

2. Inner work: Then, you need to address the fear that comes up when you think about your goal. Doing the necessary inner work will reduce the internal resistance, which makes it easier for you to take external action.

3. Outer work: You need to take small, consistent steps towards your goal. Taking smaller steps is actually more sustainable than aiming for big leaps. And because they don’t activate your fear as much, they might even help you get to your destination faster!

One caveat: in my experience, it’s best to get competent support while you go through this process. That way, you won’t have to face the challenges of the journey alone. 

When I first made the shift towards doing my heart’s work, I needed a ton of support—from coaches, peers, and my partner.

While you can make progress on your own, not having someone by your side will make it much more likely that you stop moving forward when something comes up.

(It was a good thing that I didn’t have to hike up to the volcano in the rainy cold, and then go down into the magma chamber—in a very rudimentary elevator—all by myself. Left to my own devices, I probably would have decided to just head for my comfy, warm hotel room somewhere along the way.)

This brings me to my coaching offer:

How I can help you with this process

If you are struggling with doing your heart’s work and have reached the point where you feel something REALLY has to change, please consider getting in touch.

Helping people do their life’s work is part of my life’s work. In my heart of hearts, I’m a treasure hunter—and the treasures I hunt are the gifts hidden within the people who cross my path.

I want to help you share those treasures with the people who most want to receive them.

I’m definitely not the only person who can help you with this. However, one of the challenges you might be experiencing right now is around having too many options and possibilities.

In that case, it’s often helpful to begin by exploring the obvious option that’s presenting itself, rather than continuing to look for more and more options.

As I shared in this article, when it comes to soul desires, it’s so easy to decide to do something later. To postpone. To allow resistance to stop us from the next step that takes us closer to our heart’s work

But if we continue to avoid too long, eventually, we run out of the most precious thing we have… time.

Often, we avoid taking a step because we’re unsure of what it entails. But many times, we just can’t know things before we try them.

So here’s what I suggest: schedule a complimentary assessment call with me. This call will give you more clarity on your next step towards your heart’s work—whether that is working with me, or exploring another option.

We don’t need to know the whole journey ahead of time. We just need to take the next step.

Warmly,
Louise

P.S.: If this is not something you are currently struggling with but you have a friend who does, please consider sharing it with them.