Hello, motivation? I’m not feeling it today. The problem is, I’ve been procrastinating work off and on all week, and the result has been a much more limited output than what I promised—Womp womp. Enter embarrassment, shame, guilt, and a desire to continue to hide from my responsibilities rather than power through them and turn this whole mess around.

Sometimes I feel like a perfectionist imposter. Perfectionists are often described as people who have an immaculate house, are always punctual, and give 110% effort to their work. This. Is. Not. Me. I’m the type of perfectionist who tells myself I should have a clean and tidy house, looks at the mess around me, and cannot begin to get my house to an acceptable level of clean and tidy (especially since there are four other mess-contributing members of the household, two of which are constantly shedding fur), feels overwhelmed, binges Netflix and judges myself harshly for having an embarrassingly unkempt home. I set high expectations for myself, don’t try to meet them, and then berate myself for not meeting them. And then I also feel bad that I’m not even a good perfectionist (whatever that means).

Look at me; I digress. I’m working toward setting more realistic expectations of myself, defining these expectations more clearly (so I don’t move the goalpost on myself), recognizing my accomplishments, putting pride in my work, and not adding to my anxiety and stress.

Why am I procrastinating on my work right now? Maybe I’m embarrassed that I fell short of expectations with my first go around. Maybe I feel extra pressure to KILL it to make up for the previous disappointments. Maybe I feel like an imposter in my work.

Ok, brain, I hear you. You’re scared of feeling like you disappointed yourself and others. Let’s pause. Reframe. Why should I do my work right now? Because the sooner I have it done, the sooner I can get feedback on it so that if I need to change my direction, I can get there. Because it will feel so amazing not to have this looming over me anymore. Because the more time and effort I put into it, the better the result will be. Because I can and have done amazing work when I’ve put in the effort.

You’ve got this. I’ve got this. Let’s do this!