Inspiration, procrastination, and brute force… oh my!

Have you ever wondered why it is that sometimes you’re totally fired up and are super productive – ideas flow, the right people show up, things happen – and other times you feel like you’re hiking uphill in peanut butter and can’t motivate to do anything?

I’ve thought about this often and have come up with a way of dealing with what I call the inspiration vs. procrastination game that completely eliminates the need for brute force.

To play this game you have to believe in the concept of synchronicity. Synchronicity is like a higher-ordered experience of coincidence – coincidence with meaning beyond what is directly observable. Synchronicity is what I would consider the engine that powers this game.

Relative to synchronicity, you now have to alter your definition of procrastination. If synchronicity is real, in other words, if it is possible that the coincidental occurrence of events can seem related and cannot be explained by conventional mechanisms of causality, then procrastination is not a symptom of laziness. I repeat: procrastination does not equal laziness! What it means is that on some level, your being is synchronistically tuned in with who you are and what you are up to and is “motivating” you to hold back. Your being understands that in this moment, you can engage but the effort will NOT be worth the return. And so you feel sluggish.

So what if this is true? If your being knows on a higher order when the right time to act is, for EVERYTHING, then the opposite of procrastination is that feeling of inspiration. Inspiration is your being recognizing that relative to who you are and what you’re up to, ahem – the intentions you’ve set, it’s time to GO, GO, GO! Act now because the right ideas are available, the influential people you need to make things happen are right around the corner, the books you’ve been looking for and didn’t know it appear, and the timing for every little thing you do is optimized. Inspiration is the knowing that it’s time.

So then, to eliminate this concept of brute force you have to honor both experiences as real. If you take on the view that procrastination is not laziness, but you telling you that it’s not optimal and though you can engage, you won’t get what you’re ultimately wanting out of it, then you must honor inspiration and never question your drive to do something that might appear illogical. That out-of-nowhere feeling you get that you’re on fire, that wild horses couldn’t keep you from this – is you knowing that this action is MORE than worth the effort and that synchronistic events will follow to confirm.

But what about all those things that need to get done that you’re not inspired to do yet? Here’s the challenge: don’t worry about them. Trust that your knowings and inklings will take care of it – you’ve set the intention and now it’s your job to listen. Relinquish the need to logically understand how this all works and just try on the idea that it does.

I committed myself to this perspective a few years ago and I’m convinced that it is how I got here, doing this, embracing and not balancing all aspects of my being, and enjoying every single minute of it with very little stress. Only once can I recall my recent need to engage brute force. The difference between doing it now in this mindset versus me a few years ago is that understanding the mechanisms in this perspective removes my resistance to my experience. In other words, stress does not result.

It’s a nice perspective to have and it’s ridiculously fulfilling when synchronicity continues to show up and reaffirm the truth in this. It’s also what kept me from feeling the burden of obligation to this blog once I got this up and running. Once a week I said I’d do this. Well, it’s been more than a week since my last blog and I know there is good reason – you wouldn’t be reading this if it were otherwise. 🙂

Amy Eliza Wong is a life coach, writer, and speaker in the Sacramento, CA area committed to helping people figure out what makes them tick so they can finally live with joy and real purpose. Learn more about working with her.

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