What does people pleasing have to do with your procrastination?

And how can you use it to benefit your goals - instead of having it work against you?

Today’s sponsor is MYSELF 🫶 

Replace doomscrolling with creating an ADHD-friendly productivity system

It takes 15 minutes a day and you’ll go from:

• Feeling overwhelmed with all your to-dos

• Constantly re-planning your projects without making meaningful progress

• Guilty for not doing “enough”

• Wondering where all your time goes - because you keep getting distracted

• Being unable to stay consistent with your goals

To knowing exactly where your time goes - and how to spend it more intentionally. 

Just take it from one of my students: “6 months later and I’m staying consistent with my reflections. I use the 5 whys exercise every time I find myself overthinking, and my priorities are super clear.” 🫶

How people pleasing shows up in your life

Let me know if you’ve ever thought these:

• “I can’t tell them no because I don’t want to do it - that’s not a valid excuse”

• “Why am I relaxing/doomscrolling right now? I should be doing work…”

• “Everyone else is more successful than me, I shouldn’t even try. I’ll just embarrass myself.”

That was me too.

When I was just starting my content creation journey, I started avoided all the painful, boring admin work.

For months.

Every day, I told myself I’d set aside time on the weekend - but of course I always got distracted.

I started avoiding anything content-related,

Because I felt this overwhelming feeling of shame every time I thought about it.

It just became another one of my “failures” that I couldn’t stay consistent with.

But obviously something changed because I went viral and it kickstarted my entire business.

What was it?

Use people pleasing to your advantage

Before I share what happened, I want to point out something I noticed in people I think are successful.

They have a community by their side.

And that’s what my students’ favourite parts of my course was.

They felt more accountable - and maaaaybe they also didn’t want to disappoint me cuz I was commenting on every post haha.

It was the same thing that got me to actually stop avoiding my goals (my content creation business):

I didn’t want to disappoint or distract my friend.

She asked me to cowork together, and I locked in hard (which led to my viral videos). I only did that because I knew it’d have an impact on her productivity and focus too.

When I think about it, using my people pleasing tendencies to my advantage tends to work well for me:

• Procrastinating content → remind myself my ideas impact people → stop procrastinating

• Don’t wanna do admin → coaching clients are relying on me → I do it to help them

• Feel shame and embarrassment seeing a judgmental comment → my friends asking me for content business advice → I keep going instead of giving up on my business so I can better advise my friends lol

You might think I’m wrong…

You might be thinking - “that’s not people pleasing, it’s just trying to be a good person.”

I think of people pleasing as something I sacrifice in order to please someone else when I wouldn’t do the same for myself:

• Not wanting to ask the waiter for extra ketchup for myself, but if my friend needs it, it’s easy to ask for them

• Cleaning my house before people come over, but not for myself

• Waking up (no snoozing alarm) for a meeting with someone else, but not for my own goals

Usually, I’m sacrificing my own comfort (I do need to get out of my comfort zone sometimes) and some peace of mind (it gets stressful) in order to put others’ needs above my own.

So it’s not all great sometimes (I still need to work on communicating my boundaries), but I like to think of it as something I can make work for me.

That’s why productivity advice doesn’t always work for me

A lot of it is:

• Just keep a to do list

• Stay organized

• Force yourself to sit down and use a pomodoro timer to work

And when it inevitably fails cuz I keep getting distracted or keep forgetting things that aren’t right in front of me…

I feel ashamed and guilty.

Then I give up and think I’m a failure.

It took years to build a better system that worked with my energy instead of against it:

• Tons of reminders/alarms that are super in-your-face so I never forget my tasks

• Walking outside and yapping to my phone (voice note) as “work” instead of sitting and writing something down

• Using a task prioritization system that vibe checked me so I’m not delusionally chasing after shiny objects

When I worked with my natural tendencies, life is more fun and freeing rather than a constant cycle of failures I feel guilty about.

And that’s exactly what I teach in my course - how to build systems that work for you.

Enrollment closes on Sunday - it’s the last cohort this year 🥺

Til next time,

Jennifer

P.S. if you’ve already enrolled or if you’re a course alum, I’m adding live calls to this cohort for extra accountability! Would love to see you there 🫶 Will send email updates next week.