One of the key contributors to procrastination is self-confidence.

There is no one in the world that is 100% confident all of the time. We all have areas in life where self-doubt creeps in and tries to tear down ideas or destroy dreams.

It’s important that you have the mental training that gives you the confidence to put your goals into action. There are negative statements in each of us. These are phrases designed to keep you from succeeding – or in some cases, from even trying.

You might be living with a negative mental teleprompter that feeds you lines that erode your confidence. This can cause you to have a battle that you can’t afford to engage in.

This negative mental attitude can damage your peak performance by causing you anxiety, depression – and even convincing you to give up. You need confidence on your side.

If your inner voice is feeding you lines such as, “You can’t do that” or, “You don’t have the skills, talent, money, or goals to accomplish this,” then it’s time that you shut it down.

What this negative self-talk is doing is poisoning the soil of your mind so that you don’t aim for peak performance because mentally, you’ve already lost the battle – and the war.

This kind of self-talk gets you to picture what can never be (anything good) or what you want (success) because you don’t deserve it. It’s time to silence that inner voice by correcting these false mental statements.

When you hear, “You can’t do that” in your mind, you need to give that statement the boot. Picture opening a door labeled, “I can” and kicking the negative “You can’t” right out of your mind.

This requires some mental training to do this. Don’t give your negativity an audience. Have some fortitude where you visualize giving the negative statement their walking papers for good.

Retrain your mind with positive thoughts about yourself and about what you can do. Replace every negative statement with a positive one, immediately. It takes practice to recognize when you’re being a downer to yourself.

If you have a setback, it’s not that you blew it. You just have to find another way. How you work in life and what you can accomplish will be settled within you long before you even make the first attempt.

Don’t allow yourself to dwell on any thought that stands in the way of your dreams because you deserve for them to come true. The mind is a tool that you can use to accomplish any task – whether it’s mental, emotional or physical.

Over time, as you implement the practice of positive self talk, you’ll notice that this becomes your new way of automatically viewing things – in a positive light. You won’t even have to try hard anymore – it just happens.

Train yourself to see the opportunities in every failure. This is a chance to learn and grow stronger. It’s almost like how we tear down muscles in order for them to grow back – bigger and stronger with every workout.

There’s a lot of discomfort in failure.  But mental training means you sit there and learn how to tolerate that feeling without quitting. Feel uncomfortable – it won’t kill you. Calmly practice working through those moments with calm clarity instead of frustration and panic.

We have all experienced procrastination at some point in our lives. For some its something that comes and goes while for others it is a frustrating habit that often prevents them from ever achieving any of their dreams and goals.

There are many definitions of procrastination, but they all seem to point to one common characteristic in behavior, or rather, lack of behavior. When you procrastinate you are quite literally stuck between advancing and staying where you are. Consciously you want to advance, but subconsciously you want to stay. On a subconscious level you are preventing yourself from taking the very actions that you know you need to take to achieve the results you desire from a conscious or rational point of view. The frustrating thing about procrastination is that although you know what you want, and even how to get it, you still remain immobilized and unable to act on it.

Probably the most accurate definition of procrastination is that its the irrational delay, aversion or even evasion of a task or action. Its irrational because we cannot explain this behavior from a rational point of view. We can only explain and understand it from an emotional point of view because the reason why we procrastinate is because at a subconscious level we have an emotional association to the task that prevents us from taking the action. Wanting one thing and then doing the opposite seems stupid and completely irrational, but that is why procrastination can be such an odd behavior to deal with effectively.

The definition of procrastination, when translated from the original Latin, means in favor of tomorrow and although you might intentionally postpone your tasks there is an underlying reason why you do it which is irrational, emotional and stored in your subconscious experiences. You might want to loose weight and even though you can see how fat you are and how your health and vitality is deteriorating, you still can get yourself to exercise. Why is this? Well, on a rational level its very obvious that you MUST take action, but on an emotional level it seems too painful to give up the foods you’re addicted to and to sacrifice an hour of TV-time to go and kill yourself on the treadmill.

This association to exercise and changing your diet is nothing but a belief and an association that exists in your mind. Because you believe it, you will act upon it, even if it only exists in your imagination. On a very basic level all our actions are driven by need to avoid pain and the desire to gain pleasure. Procrastination is nothing but this basic truth in action. When you procrastinate you’re your beliefs about what will be painful and what will mean pleasure are what prevents you from taking action. Since your beliefs reside mostly in your subconscious level of thinking, you will be immobilized even if you say you want the opposite.

The definition of procrastination as an irrational behavior is indeed a very accurate one and explains the frustration when you can’t seem to get yourself to act on your conscious desires. Procrastination guarantees a life of frustration and striving. You must overcome procrastination if you really want to make any significant progress in your life.

Here’s a new definition that you might want to adopt to empower you to be more effective and to consistently act on your ideas, dreams and desires:

Procrastination is a call to action. It is a signal that you must act on the very things that you do not want to act on and DO the very thing that’s holding you back. It is the necessary resistance you need to be able to grow, develop and gain confidence that only comes from actually doing it. When you do break through the short term pain that held you back you come out on the other side with an increased sense of esteem for yourself and you start to see yourself and your abilities from a different perspective. The fact that you are procrastinating about something means that it hold significant enough value for you to be uncomfortable with not taking action.The things that are holding you back most are that which will free you most – once you take action. What will free you most is taking action. Not because of the absence of procrastination, but despite the procrastinating.

Be honest – are you one of those people who puts things off? It’s ok – we all do it. It’s human nature. “Why do something today when you can do it tomorrow,” or so the saying goes. But procrastination (to give it it’s “proper” name) can cost us more than we can imagine.

Why do we procrastinate? In general, we procrastinate because the task we are putting off is unpleasant in some way. Either we don’t like doing it (like making that phone call…), or there is some physical discomfort (like going to the dentist). The task may even be boring and monotonous, or just plain difficult. Its about avoiding some sort of stress, be it fear, anxiety, low self-confidence and the like.

But the effects of procrastination, the costs, can run deeper than just not doing the task. Other problems it may cause are:

Being branded as lazy: When people notice that you haven’t completed particular tasks, you can be branded as a lazy person. Not only can this affect your job or personal life (promotions and the like), but it may mean the tasks you really want to do are offered to someone else who is considered more reliable!

Creates clutter: Many unfinished tasks can leave a lot of clutter around – books, papers or other items that are needed to perform the job.

Bad for morale: There is nothing worse than knowing you have a job you need to do, and knowing at the end of the day that the job wasn’t done. It can make you feel down, and even preoccupy your mind while you’re trying to concentrate on other things.

You have no leeway: When you put something off, jobs accumulate. This means if an urgent task suddenly comes in, you have no leeway to drop everything and work on it – there are too many other outstanding things that need doing.

The task becomes more unpleasant: The job itself may not change by putting it off, but the feeling in our mind of how unpleasant we think the job will be grows. We think about how we have to explain not doing the job to other people, and the whole situation feeds on itself and becomes ugly.

Now to be fair, sometimes procrastinating isn’t a conscious action. Particular jobs just never seem to get done, even though you never consciously decided not to do them. But at other times you do make the decision not to do the job at the moment, and just put it off.

But you can save yourself a lot of mental clutter, and perhaps even more discomfort later on, if you just adopt a “do it now” attitude. Decide that you’re just going to get the job out of the way when it comes it, no matter how uncomfortable it may be. By doing the job straight away, often you will realize that the discomfort you associated with the task was simply your mind feeding on itself as you were putting it off. And the sense of relief you get from finishing the task is well worth it.

So, now you know about procrastination you have to ask yourself the question – “what am I going to do about it?” Hopefully you will decide to banish procrastination from your life, and reap the rewards of that decision!