Even though you may have a stated intention of working on your dissertation and making steady progress, you do everything and anything to sabotage yourself. Could this be you?
If this sounds familiar, read on.
A dissertation client is having great trouble moving forward. Every week when we talk, there’s been another obstacle which has kept her from meeting the weekly goal.
What gets in her way is that she discounts all of the success she’s had that got her to where she is now. From what she has told me, I know that for ten years she has been moving ahead in her academic life, but she routinely discounts any academic accomplishment or even the stamina that it’s taken for her to keep on this difficult path.
She’s doing all-or-nothing thinking.
Because she doesn’t have her PhD, none of the work along the way matters. She made it through her qualifying papers, made it through 3 or 4 years of courses, got her master’s, and all the time has continued to work in a demanding job.
But none of it matters.
She understands intellectually how a person can dismiss past success, but she thinks she doesn’t dismiss it because she intellectually understands how a person could do this. But she does it.
She continues to distort her experience.
Without acknowledging how hard she’s worked and how that work has brought success, she makes it incredibly difficult to make steady progress toward her PhD.
Giving yourself credit for each success, no matter how small, helps you gain momentum and ultimately move into flow. If you distort your experience, you very likely will make procrastination the usual approach to your daily work. With procrastination your first response, you waste time and energy.
Your work is hard enough without handicapping yourself.
How about making a list of your successes? Want to share them? I’d love to hear what you conveniently forget about yourself.
To your best!
Nancy
Your International Dissertation and Academic Career Coach
www.nancywhichard.com
P.S. Read more about procrastination in my newsletter Smart Tips. Go to www.nancywhichard.com to sign up.