Pattern Interrupts

Hamilton Chan
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

It has been 4 months and 3 days since I last wrote a blog post.

Gulp.

And here I am, an executive coach, who counsels startup founders on self-optimization.

No worries! When I do coach founders on defeating bad habits, including procrastination, I preach the following 3 essential tactics:

  1. Stay positive.
  2. Lower the bar.
  3. Interrupt the pattern.

Staying Positive

One unfortunate hallmark of most procrastinators and high-achievers is a lot of negative self-talk. Procrastinators are notorious for beating themselves up.

They feel guilt and shame for not doing the work they know they are supposed to be doing. They low-ball themselves to motivate themselves to work.

Change starts from self-love, not self-hate. Give yourself some credit. Cut yourself some slack. Most of us get a tremendous amount done and often put an excess of care and thought (not a shortage of it) in so many things that we do.

If you find that you are not getting your work done or you are not sticking to your dietary plan, start first by saying, “That’s okay. I’m still great, and I still get a lot of amazing things done.”

Lower the Bar

As the saying goes, “Perfect is the enemy of good.” In other words, by striving for perfection, we risk never making anything that is simply good.

I encourage my clients to set the bar as low as humanly possible, in order to simply complete a task. Perfectionism and procrastination go hand in hand. The reason why we don’t complete a task is because we’ve built the task up in our head to require so much thought (that no one will ever notice) that it would take a Herculean effort to actually complete and accomplish the task.

When we actually do complete the task, it is an A+ job, we receive kudos, and that feeds the cycle of needing to do perfect work every time, fueling our stress and our procrastination habit.

Instead of doing great work, aim to do shoddy work. Just see what happens! This blog post could be amazing if I whittled the words like a master craftsman, or edited like the pained wordsmiths, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway. Both were alcoholics and suffered untimely deaths — no thanks.

Instead, lower the bar! Do your work as horribly as possible. Your impossibly high standards will still provide a safety net of quality. But what you may do is unlock the activity muscle in your psyche and start shipping stuff out the door.

Interrupt the Pattern.

“A rolling rock gathers no moss.”

Whoever coined that phrase exemplifies the virtue of “lowering the bar,” because let’s be real — it’s a ridiculous phrase.

Nonetheless, it works for our purposes. When you are engaging in a backslide of bad behavior, eating poorly or shirking on a task that is burning a hole in your head but which you refuse to complete after months of it gnawing on your brain, you need a pattern interrupt.

You need to do the opposite of whatever it is you’re doing. If you know you need to be doing sales calls, but you refuse to pick up the phone or email a prospect, just break that pattern by making one horrible sales call to one prospect you don’t care about.

If you have let your inbox fill with hundreds or thousands of emails and you know you should comb through them and file some away and delete others, just break that cycle and spend 1 minute filing away a few emails.

The affirming feeling of breathing fresh air into your bad routines will fill your sail and provide lift under your wings. You just may start a new habit in the right direction.

And if you have a beautiful streak of 123 days of no blogging, break that streak, give it a bump in the road, and write some horrible blog post about Pattern Interrupts.

Hamilton Chan

Written by

Entrepreneur, thinker, coach. http://www.coachingforstartups.com

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