December 9th, 2009 | by Jack Reichert

I am sure that you have had this experience. You have a deadline, or a very important task to finish. But you can’t finish. You are choked up and no matter how comfortable you make your working environment, you cannot seem to get your task done.

My Plight

I recently had a huge project. that I could not finish. I kept putting it off, for months actually. I tried working on it, a little bit at a time – every day for an hour. But you can never get comfortable enough to actually work. And the more time passes, the more anxiety builds up and the harder it gets to actually work.

What is happening is that you are afraid to finish the task at hand. I know that that sounds strange. You probably have important things to do, that this task is getting in the way of doing. But the more that is riding on the success of your finishing whatever it is you have to get done, the more anxiety you will have sitting in the pit of your stomach, holding you back from concentrating on finishing.

You probably know step by step what you need to do in order to get done what you need to, but that does not seem to be able to translate into actually finishing.

The Solution

Here is a simple, yet powerful, solution for completing your task, and overcoming the barriers that you have set up for yourself:

1. Get comfortable. Relax. SIt, or lay down for a few minutes and take several deep breaths. Make sure to fill your lungs slowly, hold that breath for a few seconds, and then slowly breath out.
2. Visualize finishing the task. Not step by step, but the actual last step. Make it as real as you can. Imagine how it will feel to actually finish. What are the sensations you will be feeling? What emotions will arise within you?
3. Now that you have done that visualize the general steps you will need to take to reach that point. Hold on to the feeling of finishing and map out for yourself, roughly, what you will need to do to finish. Walk through completing those steps in your mind.
4. Go one level deeper and map out in detail each step at a time, what you need to complete.
5. Now you’ve finished your project. How does that feel? You’ve not only planned out what to do, but you’ve done it already in your mind. Now all you need to do is what you’ve already done. A lot easier then trying it all from scratch.

Why This Works

Many people tell you that the best way to finish a project is to map it out. But that does not help with the anxiety and baggage we’ve picked up along the way, holding us back from finishing. By following these steps you are not only planning out the stages of finishing but also reassuring yourself that you can. By doing it.

As I mentioned above, I had a project to finish that I kept putting off. After walking through these steps I was able to finish, what had been taking me months, literally, in two days.

Image Credit: jazzmasterson

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 9th, 2009 at 10:54 am and is filed under Build Yourself. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.