Although we may worry that our success will hurt other people, they may actually be stronger and more generous than we give them credit for. It may be a distortion in our own thinking, a misreading of the reality around us, that sets us up to assume that our achievements will inevitably hurt someone else. Some people can enjoy the success of others without feeling deprived, diminished, wounded, or left behind. Maybe Tony would have been happy for Teresa if she had let herself do well.
Success can bring both joy and pain to those you love. For example, it may be difficult to let yourself be successful when you expect that your success will carry you away from your family and culture. College students whose parents have not gone to college face this difficult dilemma. They are aware of the sacrifices their parents have made to give them greater opportunities; they want to make their families proud and to be in a position to help the family. At the same time, they are entering a social and intellectual culture their parents have not experienced, and the more they succeed, the more the differences grow. “I love my family, but I feel I’m leaving them behind, and I know that hurts them,” said Luis, a junior whose procrastination was affecting his grades. Luis’s father worked two jobs and his mother cleaned houses and spoke little English. “It’s awkward when I go home. They don’t understand what I’m studying or what school is like. It feels like I’m gaining an education but losing my family.” Procrastination can be an expression of anxiety and guilt about moving beyond a loving family.
I Could Get Hurt. One danger many people foresee in achieving success is that they would get what they want—and then would be attacked. Someone, somewhere, will challenge or criticize them, and they don’t feel strong enough to fight back. Andre’s procrastination keeps him in a job far below his capabilities. When he was hired, Andre and his manager expected that he would rise through the ranks into middle management. Instead, Andre put in minimal effort and was never promoted. “There are a lot of aggressive people in this company. If I move up, I’d have to make decisions and people would fight me and criticize my ideas; I’d just as soon stay out of their way.”
If Andre were content with his position, he would have no problem—he’d have found a comfortable niche for himself. Not everyone has to zoom up the ladder of success. But Andre wasn’t satisfied. “I’d really like to have a chance to run things and I have some ideas for improvements. But management would see me as a troublemaker and they’d make my life difficult.” Andre lives with a view that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and as the dogs get bigger, the bites get worse. Since he expects to be attacked, he protects himself by delaying; he doesn’t get promoted, and he never has to fight.
As children, many of us have learned that our successes can indeed trigger retaliation: if the drive to pursue our own goals threatened an angry parent or a competitive sibling; if our accomplishments were consistently mocked or ignored; if our success took us away from our family; if we feared being punished for having unacceptable thoughts or wishes. Recurrent experiences like these can create a worldview in which success seems a setup for retribution.
Success Is Off-Limits: There’s Something Wrong with Me
Sometimes people feel that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, a basic fault5 that is so profound and deeply engrained that it precludes any real success or contentment in their lives. This idea of being basically flawed is a construction, an idea, not a fact, but we understand how compelling this feeling can be and how it can lead to pervasive procrastination.
I Don’t Deserve Success. Procrastination can be used as punishment for “bad” things people have done—or think they’ve done. We’ve met procrastinators who feel guilty for unethical or hurtful things they have actually done, such as lying, cheating, manipulating, or defrauding someone. But many people feel guilty for actions that are really not very serious, or for situations that aren’t truly their responsibility. In their guilt, however, they do not differentiate between real crimes and imagined ones.
One hard-core procrastinator felt guilty about the unhappiness he had inflicted on his family growing up. “I was a big bully,” he said. “Especially after my parents divorced, I used to have blowups that made my mother cry and my little sister run and hide. I had fun tormenting my sister. I was mean, and it’s unforgivable. So now it’s my turn to be tormented.”
Procrastination can be used as punishment for an imaginary “crime.” Damien’s wife died in a car accident. Although he was also injured in the crash, Damien survived and appeared to make a full recovery. However, after the accident, Damien stopped progressing in his job with the power company. Damien understood that his grief affected his work. In addition, he felt responsible for his wife’s death, despite the fact that the crash had been caused by another driver.
Damien suffered from survivor guilt. As the one who lived, he felt he did not deserve to have a happy or fulfilling life. Three years later, he was still blaming himself and still stagnating. Although the stagnation of his life was unsatisfying, he didn’t realize that procrastination was serving as the punishment for his “crime” of surviving.
Some people experience survival guilt for escaping a chronically bad situation if they leave others behind. They feel guilty because their lives are improving while others they care about continue to suffer. For example, many college students who have moved away from difficult family situations feel guilty for abandoning younger siblings who are still living at home, coping with parents who may be depressed, abusive, alcoholic, or negligent. These students find themselves procrastinating in school, unable to allow themselves academic success. They feel they don’t deserve to be free while the rest of the family remains trapped.
Sometimes the people you can’t allow yourself to abandon are work colleagues. In a negative work environment, people often band together to complain about how bad things are, to get support from each other that they can’t get from their managers, and to validate their experience. They form tight bonds, like soldiers in foxholes. Some of them commit themselves to getting out, but some put off looking for a new job or work in a desultory way, eroding the confidence needed to land a better job—as well as their chances of receiving a decent recommendation. They can’t bring themselves to get into a better situation because they feel guilty about leaving their friends behind.
Sadly, the guilt most procrastinators feel is far out of proportion to their “crimes.” Often, there is not even any crime to speak of, other than wanting to extend oneself and have a life of one’s own, and it is this wish that generates guilt. Asserting the right to your own life may bring you into conflict with your family system or with cultural values. In some cultures, having a life of one’s own is less important than taking care of family members and putting the needs of the community first.6 Whereas in the United States, the individual is the primary social unit, in many other cultures, the family is the central social unit, and the individual does not expect to pursue success if it comes at the expense of the family.
Lilly is from an Asian family that moved to California when she was five. Her parents owned a small grocery store, where she worked every afternoon during high school. Lilly won a scholarship to college, majored in economics, and planned to go to business school. In her junior year, her mother fell ill, and Lilly offered to move back home. Her mother encouraged her to stay in school, but her father expected Lilly to return home to care for her mother and help out in the market. Lilly agonized over what she should do. She wanted to fulfill her mother’s dream of being well educated and successful, but she also wanted the approval of her father. Unable to make a decision, Lilly became distracted in school and put off doing her work. Her grades suffered to such an extent that she was in danger of losing her scholarship and being forced to leave school. Lilly’s difficulty working reflected her conflict about whether to go on with her academic life or fulfill her obligation to her family. In effect, her procrastination was making the decision for her.
Success Just Isn’t in the Cards
for Me. Some people have such a low opinion of themselves that they can’t incorporate success into their self-image. Feeling inadequate, unprepared, or unappealing, they don’t expect to succeed at anything, so they simply don’t try in the first place.
Rachel, for example, is a shy person who remains in the background, both at work and in relationships. She wears clothes that hide her shape, and hers is the face that gets lost in the crowd. Although she fantasizes about having a satisfying job and a loving marriage, Rachel avoids opportunities for either. “Happy marriages and great jobs are for other people, not for me, so why should I even bother trying?” sighs Rachel.
When Rachel did manage, after many delays and incomplete attempts, to get a new job, she could not enjoy it. Since she believes success has no place in her life, she sees any accomplishment as a fluke, a random stroke of luck; success can vanish at any moment. Rather than dream of success and be disappointed, Rachel avoids both hope and disillusionment by assuming that success is not meant for her. It doesn’t fit her self-concept.
There are two aspects to the self-concept: “me” and “not me.” For Rachel, happiness was “not me.” Rachel’s low opinion of herself does not fully match the way other people see her; her friends can see her “potential,” but Rachel is stuck with her own self-concept. She has identified herself as “a loser,” and her procrastination keeps that identity intact.
In making herself almost invisible, Rachel communicates that she is barely there. In fact, she’s not sure she has a right to exist at all. Rachel was the fourth daughter in her family, and immediately after her birth, her father had a vasectomy. He often said, “I had one girl too many.” Rachel lives with a deep feeling of not being welcomed into life, just because of who she was, one girl too many. If you’re not even supposed to exist, then you’re certainly not supposed to thrive and succeed. Procrastination reflects Rachel’s feeling that she has no place in the world.
What If I’m Too Perfect? At the other extreme from Rachel, there are people who worry that if they stop procrastinating and go full speed ahead toward success, it would come to them too easily. They would have “everything,” but they would achieve it with so little effort that they would be the object of everyone’s envy.
In contrast to the fear of failure, in which the procrastinator assumes, “I should be perfect, but I’m afraid I might not be good enough,” in this particular form of fear of success, the procrastinator assumes, “I am perfect, but I shouldn’t be. I have to hide it.”
Kim, an attractive woman with a loving husband and two thriving children, expressed her dilemma in this way: “People seem to think I have everything—a great marriage and family, lots of friends, enough money, and time for volunteer work. I can tell that a lot of people envy me, and it’s an ugly feeling. The one thing I don’t have, though, is a college degree. I would like to go back to school and get a degree in art history. Then I would really feel as if I had it all. But then the envy would be even worse! It’s safer to be lacking something.”
Like Kim, people who worry that they are too perfect feel they need a tragic flaw, one that provides protection against envy and makes them feel they have problems just like everyone else. The fatal flaw reassures them that they are not really so different, and therefore they can be accepted and loved.
But why do they have to prove they’re no different? After all, even though they may feel they could be perfect, nobody is perfect. Why is it so important for people to maintain this illusion about being perfect? The sense of superiority that goes along with feeling “too perfect” is a cover for a deeper sense of inferiority that quietly haunts people like Kim. Even though they may procrastinate to hold themselves back and be “like” everybody else, they nevertheless depend on feeling “special” just to feel adequate. They believe they would indeed be special if they stopped procrastinating. As long as they believe they are flawed by their own choice, they can maintain the belief that they still are perfect.
So, perhaps you have been using procrastination to avoid success because you harbor one or more of these fears. The theme common to all of them is the belief that you must choose between having success and having love. If you become an uncaring workaholic, who would be your friend? If you achieved an undeserved success, wouldn’t you be shunned for being presumptuous? If you are too perfect, who would accept you as one of the gang? If you expect your success to create problems in your relationships, you may not want to risk alienating the people around you.
How did you come to conclude that your success would push people away? Perhaps your accomplishments had an unsettling impact on your family, or you assumed they did. For example, you may have sensed that when you accomplished something, a sibling felt jealous or left out; the family may have seemed out of balance; your parents may have even seemed threatened. Eventually, you may have concluded that everyone would be better off, and you would be most accepted, if you accomplished less rather than more. Whether this idea comes from your direct experience or lives in your mind without being tested, it can have the powerful effect of inhibiting your efforts to achieve success.
As you consider the relationship between your procrastination and your fear of success, try to stand back and take a more objective look at your situation. It may help to remind yourself that just because you fear something doesn’t mean it’s true now and forever. If you can challenge the assumption that at the first sign of success everyone will leave you, then you may be surprised to notice that there are some people who will not use your success against you. They will delight in your success and celebrate it with you. However, some people may resent your success—perhaps even some of the most important people in your life. If so, the question you must confront is: Can you make progress for yourself in spite of their resentment or their retreat from you? Are you strong enough to survive without their total support?
Remember that success does not come all at once. As you begin to resolve the anxieties that lead you to procrastinate, you will make progress toward your goals. As you move ahead, your conflicts about succeeding can kick up again. Improvements represent a threat to the ways we have been organized to defeat ourselves. Don’t be surprised when you take two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back! As you see that you can live with success—and without the disasters you’ve been anticipating—you will be more able to move ahead.
We understand that success might have its dangers for you. We know these dangers are powerful. It’s natural to feel apprehensive when you’re making a change in your life, even when the change is for the better. Achieving your idea of success—whether it be going back to school, exercising and losing weight, getting a new job, finding a good relationship or leaving a bad one—will inevitably involve facing change. Change may feel risky. When you make a change, you encounter the unknown in yourself, in your relationships, and in the world. But we think you may be in a better position than you realize to tolerate the risks. You can change and adapt to new circumstances, even to success.
4
The Procrastinator in Combat
Fear of Losing the Battle
You’re building up a new business and you need more clients, but when you get a message from someone you don’t know asking you to call back at 1:00 P.M., you feel indignant. The caller isn’t giving you much leeway. You delay returning the call, finally calling back at 3:00 P.M., even though you were free at 1:00 P.M.
Last month’s utility bill arrives, and as always, it’s higher than you’d like. You resent the rising costs of energy, and you think about recent media reports about the big profits being made by the utility company. Though your checking account balance is more than adequate to cover the payment, you hold on to your check for so long that you have to deliver it in person to prevent the company from shutting off your electricity. When you finally do it, you have a feeling of satisfaction for having made the company wait for its money.
Your wife asks you for the twentieth time to finish
a chore you’ve been putting off. You promise you will do it, but you never actually get around to it. Eventually, she becomes frustrated and angry about the delay, which she feels is an act of hostility. You resent her nagging.
In situations like these, procrastination has little to do with preventing you from making your best effort. The reasons for your procrastination aren’t tied to success or failure. Another, quite different fear is at work here.
THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL
While it is important for all of us to feel that we have some control over our lives, it is also important that we be able to follow rules that are not of our own making and accommodate the requirements of others. People who are particularly sensitive to feeling controlled, however, may rebel against every rule and resist every request; for some, procrastination becomes their way to feel they are in control.
As you consider your own procrastination, do any of the above scenarios sound familiar? Proud of your independence and determined not to compromise yourself, you want to prove that no one can force you to act against your will. Procrastination is a way to say, “No! You can’t make me do this!” That caller was presumptuous for assuming you would obediently jump through his hoop, so you return the call on your terms. Utility companies may be very powerful, but they can’t make you pay the bill on time. You’ll do the chore when you’re good and ready, not when your spouse tells you. Procrastination has become a strategy for fighting a battle—a battle for control, for power, for respect, for independence and autonomy.
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