One thing that’s hit home for me, in giving workshops on using meditation and other spiritual practices to transcend procrastination, is how deeply personal and unique everyone’s hangups and concerns about their careers are.  To use procrastination as an example, some people put off working to avoid anxiety about how others will receive what they do; others do it because they feel resentful about “being told what to do”; still others avoid their work because they feel a weird tension in their bodies when sitting at their desks; and so on.  No two people experience working exactly the same way.

Inevitably, this means that, when I put out an article or give a talk, someone will say “what you’re talking about isn’t an issue for me.”  A few people, for instance, have come to my procrastination workshops and told me “this isn’t relevant to me—I don’t have trouble paying attention or staying motivated.”  On the other hand, others have told me how deeply understood they felt when listening to me, and how what I said changed their perspective on working and other parts of their lives.

A while back, I used to take the people who said my material didn’t resonate with them as signs that I was “out of touch” with what “real people” want in their careers, or something equally pessimistic.  But I don’t see it that way anymore.  My new perspective is that, because each person is unique and faces different challenges, it’s impossible to resonate with every single person who reads my writing or hears me speak.  And, I’ve come to understand that I can serve the most people in my work by giving less advice and inviting people to do more inquiry into themselves.

What Self-Inquiry Is About

By inquiring into yourself, I mean just paying more attention to how you experience your work, or whatever part of your life you’re seeking change in.  Take a look at what you’re actually thinking and feeling when you find yourself procrastinating, getting frustrated with your work, becoming anxious about how your projects will be received, or wherever you’re feeling blocked.  What I often find, when people simply focus their attention on their inner experience of working, is that the awareness they develop naturally leads to the kind of transformation they want.

For example, just recently, I was working with a man who wanted to know how to “stop making his boss angry.”  His boss had sent him an e-mail that he saw as critical, and he wanted to know how to change his behavior to get fewer e-mails of that kind.

I pointed out that it seemed he was assuming that he was responsible for his boss’s anger.  With surprise, he said he’d never realized that was an “assumption” before.  He thought that was just how the world was—that everybody’s anger was “his fault”—as if he were solely responsible for other people’s childhoods, intimate relationships and all the other factors that determine how they feel.  Just doing this little bit of self-inquiry helped lessen the anxiety he felt at work, and made relating with his boss go more smoothly.

You Have Your Own “5 Keys To Success”

Of course, this isn’t how we’re used to thinking.  When we want change in our lives, we usually look for books, seminars and other materials that offer a simple, straightforward list of behaviors to get us where we want to go—what to buy, how to dress, what to say, and so on.  This is why books and articles with titles like “10 Keys To Success At Anything” and “7 Steps To Financial Freedom” are so popular.  And no matter how many of these “proven, strategic plans for getting what you want” we follow without success, we just keep buying more.

The drawback of these approaches to personal growth is that they’re necessarily based on someone else’s experience.  The beliefs and behaviors these methods offer may have worked for some mega-wealthy CEO or world-class athlete, but that doesn’t mean they’ll work for us.  This isn’t because we’re genetically inferior to billionaires and Olympic gold medalists or something like that.  It’s simply because our minds and bodies are different from theirs, and require different kinds of attention.

For instance, take people’s common desire to “make a great first impression.”  It would be wonderful if there were a simple list of “5 Ways To Be Likable” that worked for everyone.  In fact, however, we all have unique beliefs and behaviors that tend to drive others away from us.  For some of us, our bodies tense up when we enter social settings; others get easily hurt and defensive; still others become pushy and overbearing; and so on.  If we want choice around these behaviors, we need personalized attention, and this is why I find it so important to do one-on-one work with people.

When we become willing to shift our focus away from imitating “successful people,” and train it on ourselves, what we need and who we are, we start treating ourselves with genuine love and respect.  It can feel like hard work to learn about ourselves, because it requires us to face parts of ourselves we usually push away as scary or unacceptable.  But it’s some of the most rewarding work we can do.  And yes, it can help you make more money and have better relationships too.

Related posts:

1. Guest Post at The Change Blog: “Procrastination and the Art of Allowing”
2. Sample From The Work Consciously Audio Course
3. Is There Such A Thing As “Boring” Work?
4. Your Inner Productivity Questions Answered
5. Work Consciously Audio Course Now Available