Episode 2 Science of Procrastination

Charles Jinkwater, a performance coach and psychology enthusiast, discusses his experiences as a personal trainer and cycling coach. He shares his pride in his young riders' achievements in the national championships and emphasizes the importance of not focusing solely on results at their age. He then explores the topic of procrastination, discussing its negative impact and the reasons behind it. He delves into the concepts of self-efficacy and self-esteem and their connection to motivation. He also mentions the role of fear and previous accomplishments in building self-efficacy. Lastly, he discusses the cycle of self-esteem and how it can either positively or negatively impact motivation and task success. Hello, good morning and good day to you and welcome to the Beasts in My Podcast, the podcast that seeks to use psychological insights to feed your curiosity and help you fulfill your potential and apply these psychological scientific data to your daily lives. My name is Charles Jinkwater, I am a performance coach, personal trainer and general psychology enthusiast. I'm looking to be a qualified psychologist in the next three years, hopefully doing a masters in psychology starting in October. But now I love reading about psychology and looking to apply it. So for those who don't know much about me, listen to the first two episodes of the podcast, the introductory episodes and the general episode one talking about curiosity. I am a graduate as I said, in fact I did my sports science bachelor's in the UK specialising in nutrition, physiology and psychology. I did my bachelor's thesis in psychology and that was basically the start of me wanting to delve more into psychology and see being a performance psychologist in sport as a career objective and ambition. I've been taking the year out from the classroom and so I came back to Luxembourg and I've been working as a personal trainer and coach and the head coach of a cycling team since October coaching 11 to 13 year olds. And this week was their main objective of the season, it was the national championships last weekend and the boys were nervous quite understandably. All four riders got top ten finishes with one of my riders finishing on the podium in second place and then fifth place, seventh place and eighth place in the different categories. So super happy, very proud of the boys, they all performed at their best to their levels so far. I'm doing my best to not focus too much on the results because at that age with puberty it's not necessarily a level playing field physiologically speaking and that was basically what's been happening over the course of the season in the 11 to 12 year old age group and the 10 to 11 age group and the 12 to 13 age group. There was always one or two riders that were two or three years further along in their physiological development so all of the riders pretty much performed to the best of their abilities basically. So absolutely no regrets, goal achieved this season, very happy and yeah that was my week. So the topic of today is mental blocks and barriers that we all need to overcome, the science of procrastination. Now we are all guilty of this, postponing the odd task for one reason or another and sometimes this frustrates us, ourselves at the end of the day if we haven't done it, when we said maybe in the morning that we would do it but it's our own fault so to speak, you know, we chose not to do it, we postponed it and yeah this episode is going to look at what can we do, why do we do it and what can we do to reduce the times that we procrastinate. By no means am I an angel, I am very much guilty of procrastinating, this podcast is a very good example of this. This podcast always had the objective to feed one of my major passions which is to help people, more than my audience, that I can help, coach so to speak, share my information and this idea basically was an idea that I had near the end of my studies so that would be a year ago and when I came back to Luxembourg theoretically I could have started preparations there and then at the end of 2022 but it's only now in June 2023 where I've finished up all the facilities and my setup and all of these things and actually started uploading so yeah I've postponed it by a good six months and so yeah I'm guilty of this too. Another example is that I have a couple of friends from school who both had a reputation in the building and amongst ourselves of being kings of the procrastinators, one of them particularly had a very annoying reputation in relation to his teachers because when we had, in secondary school, we had assignments and deadlines and I, through fear, always looked to finish my assignments a week or two in advance and then my friend was the complete opposite, he really like pushed it to the limit and would, if I'm not much mistaken, he would actually hand in the assignment on the night of the deadline, like within 24 hours of the deadline closing and yeah this stressed out the teachers so much there were so many times where, for example, in maths class we'd be having the lesson and then suddenly the director of the school would be at the door specifically for him and we saw it as a bit more humorous but nah the teachers definitely didn't, they were frustrated as hell. So that would be an example. Then I've got another friend who, like I said beforehand, sometimes we'd get frustrated with ourselves or stressed that we procrastinate but in the end when we procrastinate it's our own fault and so yeah he would leave a task to the following day but then get angry about it and so yeah he would get annoyed about it and you know just think that why do you do this, why do we self-sabotage ourselves and then coming back to me working as a cycling coach, one of the first things that I did in October 22 is I handed out questionnaires that would tell me what motivates them because there were four types of motivation. There's if you just look within yourself to motivate you in terms of personal goals, beating your personal best from the week before, that's called intrinsic motivation. If you are motivated by your ranking on a list and you compare yourself to your fellow competitors and you're always comparing yourself to others or seeking validation from the outside, that's called extrinsic motivation. And then you've got a motivation which is not really motivated by anything, you just do what you have to do and then there's identity regulation which is you know sporting aspect for example is you identify yourself as a sports person so to perform in that sports setting is a form of your identity so that's what you're motivated in, you do your absolute best to satisfy what you identify yourself as. Yeah I've got a cat meowing in the background, hopefully you can't hear her too much. Yeah let's carry on. Yeah where was I? Yeah four types of motivation and speaking out of questionnaire it was basically the goal was for me to, for them to establish in writing what their long term goal was, of course it had to do with their national championship performance and then in order to not, to keep them motivated throughout the whole season because again I was asking them in October so that's a good eight months, I would put in short term goals from week to week to keep that enthusiasm because especially with young kids, boredom can set in and then it's very difficult to get them to do what you want them to do and then you know if they didn't perform well in the national championships because they didn't train hard that would be my fault possibly because as my responsibility as a coach it's my duty to motivate them and get them to perform in training and set them up in a way that they have a platform to perform and then of course in the end it's also their responsibility to put in the effort in training to make themselves better so with that questionnaire and putting goals in writing that was my way as a coach to reduce any procrastination tendencies in terms of the effort that they put in in training and then another anecdote for me in the past is that when I was in the music school having exams in January and July regularly every year in piano and violin I was very guilty at times of not practicing for a whole week and then going into the lesson under prepared the teacher would recognize that within the first three notes that I would play and they would get frustrated now the reason why this procrastination of practicing because the exam was three months down the line didn't make sense to me because as a child I was quite well behaved I didn't I was not provocative I was very quiet which is a little bit different to what I am now some people might say but I was I was quite a quiet child didn't want confrontation was well behaved and actually got quite intimidated and and scared if I made someone disappointed or angry so it would really affect my my mood I would really take it to heart if the teacher was disappointed with me so that made even less sense as to why I didn't practice and that and you could ask questions as to what is it that motivates me that obviously that would be that would work if I was motivated by fear which I don't think I don't think I ever am okay that's not entirely true in my first year of university I definitely was motivated by fear of dropping out so I gave my absolute all to do really well in the exams to not drop out in the first year but anyway so but yeah motivation by fear is not a sustainable way of motivating so yeah but generally me not preparing for the lesson and then getting moaned at by the teacher and then that would affect my whole my whole day doesn't make sense so all of these things lead to the questions of why do we do this because what I've just talked about the common thread through all the anecdotes is that procrastination is a very negative word it has negative connotations and it's a form of self-sabotage so why do we do it and so what does the scientific data tell us how can we reduce procrastinating tendencies now in order to do this I think we need to define a few key words so what the how does science define procrastination now a quick google says that procrastination is intentionally delaying a task to a later time studies have attributed procrastination to the likes of lack of time management it can be tied to your personality it can be if you're if you suffer from anxiety you it's that's been linked to procrastination tendencies problem solving and then self-efficacy beliefs and self-esteem now when I read self those last two terms self-efficacy beliefs and self-esteem that is immediately one to concentrate on because I am very familiar with that in in the sports psychology classes in my degree we talked a lot about self-efficacy and self-esteem and how it's tied to motivation which is vital for performance now of course in sports psychology it had to do with physical performance but it can also be tied to academic performance or yeah any type of performance so then what is self-efficacy so self-efficacy is the perception of one's ability to perform a task successfully in a specific situation now this is not the same as having self-confidence because confidence is a very general thing so if I was to define self-confidence it would be the perception of one's ability to perform a task successfully in any situation so self-efficacy would be for example let's take a footballer for example taking a penalty now they would be very confident of scoring the penalty in training every single day day in day out week after week but if you remember the Euro final between England and Italy and you had the final the final penalty kick taken by Bukayo Saka the fact that he missed that penalty there was a possibility and I and attribute this he must have had sports psychologists and a whole load of coaching stuff around him that helped him get over that massive massive psychological obstacle of missing that penalty and all of the abuse that came with it which I do not condone I think it's absolutely disgusting that this happened and it really has to stop it could this could have had an impact on his self-efficacy in terms of putting a penalty away in a high-pressured competition setting but if you follow football and Bukayo Saka's achievements with England in the last World Cup during the winter and his performance for Arsenal during the Premier League season he has bounced back amazingly well and is one of the top main players in the England national team and in in the world as a whole so that would be an example of self-efficacy and him being able to maintain a high self-efficacy now if your self-efficacy is high it means your ambition is high and your likelihood of giving up and abandoning from a task is low sources of having a self-efficacy is is down to previous accomplishments accomplishments Bukayo's experience is verbal persuasion which can be either self-talk you telling yourself I can do this and so on and yeah doing self-talk therapy or it can be verbal persuasion in terms of a coach giving you rational examples as to why you can do it now if I tie it back to how I motivated my cyclists what I really laid a big emphasis on was to not concentrate on one rider more than the others because yes I had two riders that are more experienced and were challenging at higher further up the field but that didn't stop me from wanting to coach and help the other the other two perform because that was definitely a problem that I experienced when I was a cyclist on the national team there was definitely a discrepancy between the attention given to the one or two teammates that I had that got the results and then the amount of attention that I had as yes I was probably the brains of the team the captain but because I wasn't the strongest in ability and didn't win races I got top 10 instead instead there was definitely a discrepancy in the amount of attention that I got from from the coaches and parents and all the entourage and yeah my experiences helped me form the way that I wanted to lead the team I wanted to get I didn't want the riders to experience the same things that I did in that aspect so that would be verbal and so for example if I'm not going to name names if this one rider said oh I can't do it because I can't go down this downhill then I would say yes you can because you've because last week we did technical um technical training and we worked on we worked on weight distribution and you progress your bike control ability has got massively better so have a go try try this out you may not have been able to do it two weeks ago but this week I'm confident that you're able to do it and then also when the same rider in his first race got sixth place I was really really happy that he did that because that basically gave him that previous accomplishment for the rest of the season as proof that he can be up be up there and that worked brilliantly for the rest of the season other things would be imagine imaginable experiences so that would be you imagining you being on the top step you imagining that you will do a brilliant presentation or you're imagining that for example cooking you would your your your festival whatever whatever you're cooking your your barbecue because now it's summer so get the barbecue out your barbecue chicken or hamburger will be so tasty you're imagining that is linked to you having a self-efficacy and having that belief that you would be you'll be able to perform and then also your emotional state also has an impact on your self-efficacy levels and now we proceed on to self-esteem now self-esteem is your overall evaluation that people make themselves both positive and negative this means that self-esteem is basically what we feel about ourselves now there is a cycle that has an impact on self-esteem the negative cycle would be you getting negative feedback no having a low self-esteem which which means that it's attributed to having a lack of confidence this lack of confidence will mean that you are become less motivated which means that you'll probably fail whatever task you go into because you won't be putting in your absolute best and then this failure would lead to negative feedback neither from your experience or from other people and then this will then lead to even lower self-esteem and it's just a snowball effect that keeps on going going going going going and that's what we want to avoid this is not to be misunderstood so having a high self-esteem you would then think that having a high self-esteem is good this is not to be misunderstood with feeling too too good about something and being narcissistic there is a there is a level of self-esteem that is ideal now since there is a negative cycle of self-esteem there is also a positive cycle so this would be if you have self high self-esteem your you would score high in self-confidence this means that your motivation to do well and your confidence in being able to achieve your goals is high this would lead to a higher probability of having task success that would lead to a higher probability of being able to achieve your goals and this would be a form of positive feedback and you you would get other um claudates and then this would come back and boost your self-esteem even more so yeah and the higher self-esteem is associated with independence leadership adaptability and also associated with you know mental states such as depression anxiety phobias and then yeah a sense a lower less defined sense of self which means you're more susceptible to external external factors and events that can threaten your self-esteem so so yeah looking at these definitions it sounds like that self-efficacy and self-esteem lead are heavily linked with your motivation and how you identify yourself and would be a diagnosis of how fragile is your motivation and your identity and you know our psychology is quite fragile a lot of the time and like i said before my my bachelor thesis was all to do with motivation i looked at motivational climates so that would be how how are the athletes motivated are they do they does the coach motivate the athletes by saying you have to beat so like you have to finish within the first five races or score within the first five people within the team or you have to beat this individual that would be external ego-orientated motivation or does the coach talk about like skill-based goals for example out of these five five penalties i want you to score three at least or four regardless of what the other teammates do that would be a more intrinsic skill-based motivational climate and so i looked at i looked at that and then also looked at how this is tied with overconfidence and narcissistic traits and yeah narcissistic traits are correlated with fragile self-esteem which can lead to ego-protective measures such as such as even though narcissists and ego-orientated people do like to seek validation from external sources if they are met with a situation where if they fail that identity and that reputation could be damaged or negatively impacted in order to protect their reputation they would rather not not risk failing at all and they would completely abandon it that would be a protective measure and procrastinating would definitely be a so how would you tie this to protect procrastinating that would be for example revising for an exam instead of starting revision two months in advance or you know putting it putting your revision in immediately having regularly week on week you would disbone the start to your revision to three weeks before and then at the end if you didn't perform very well in that exam you would just say oh you know i would have done well if i'd revised more and i can but because i didn't i didn't do well basically giving a cause as to why you didn't do well giving an excuse that would be a an example of ego protective measure when i relate to myself i've always identified myself as a sports person and when i had to stop for medical reasons i immediately looked for ways to be involved in competitive sport because what i love about sport and what i love generally is i'm a very competitive person so but the problem is that my psychological barrier that i had in races i feel was that i had i was a strong sprinter as an athlete in cycling which meant that if i was in a group if i came to the final 200 300 meters in a group i was relatively confident in a training setting that i would be able to beat them and be at the front of that group but it happened in a quite a few races that in the final 10 kilometers my legs would suddenly cramp up and while i was a cyclist i did a whole load of dietary measures or made sure i was warmed up properly i it was not a factor of not putting the effort into training i was quite a disciplined trainer trainee so so upon reflection with the studies and me looking into psychology even more there's a possibility that subconsciously i was stressed and put a lot of pressure on myself in the lead-up to the event that is the sprint finish and so did my brain subconsciously just protect my identity by seizing up and cramping up i don't know back then uh 10 years ago i didn't have that much of a coaching on charge back then we we had maybe two or three coaches but by no means we didn't have a physio we didn't have a sports psychologist we didn't have all of these things that uh people have now it was it was very young and we were just told put in put in the effort in training give it your absolute all and then voila there you go so so yeah so i that that just makes me think of when you procrastinate or delay a task does that change the situation entirely into a more favorable excusable situation as to why the task was not not fulfilled and studies imply that this may be the case for me it could have been a fear of rejection of fear of failure and this could be attributed also to my to my music in terms of why i didn't revise for exams because i didn't want because i was always seen by my teachers as being very very talented and then the teacher basically got frustrated at me not practicing enough saying oh you could have you could have got so much so much better mark in the exams if you just apply yourself because the talent is there and potentially as a young musician i relied a lot on the on that talent because i was being told about it quite often by my teachers so yeah there's also that there's also that thing there um because i see it with my brother as well he's a he's his talent lies in his physical ability as a sports person he was always talented very talent naturally gifted and i think he could have had had a good shot at a career as an athlete but yeah he didn't he didn't he didn't put the work in necessarily to be the absolute best and yeah that that's that could be a fear of failure or fear of rejection just take yourself out of it entirely i personally have changed that mindset with the help of the books that i've read and the podcasts and the podcasts that i listen to and my mindset now and what i try and advise as many people as possible is to give yourself a ground that you have absolutely no regrets about anything give yourself a platform where you go i couldn't have done any more so either failing this task failing this task shows me that this paint this this area is probably not for me and i need to find something else or if you actually do succeed that gives you that absolute boost saying giving you a good idea as to where you stand and this is basically going back to the national championship performance of all four riders even though for example the rider that came in seventh uh he he didn't quite have enough legs in the sprint finish to go further up in the group i asked him could you have done any better did you give your absolute all now looking at his facial expression throughout the race i had my answer ready i think he all four of my riders gave the absolute all but i just wanted to hear it from him and he said yeah i couldn't have done done much better my legs were absolutely spent at the end didn't have a sprint and so that's exactly what i wanted i wanted to hear so it's a behavior decision procrastination now also i came across a behavioral engineer called near ale in a podcast and he believes that procrastination is a behavioral habit that can be worked on and reduced with small simple tweaks now before i get into that let's take a short break with this little interjection just a short little interjection before we continue with the episode i hope you found the topic presented in this episode and the one before interesting and the subjects presented and discussed about thought-provoking if this is the case please do follow and subscribe to the 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this habit now similar to what we've established already neil believes that procrastination is mostly a habit we get into and according to him it is a question of having a lack of control of the situation and outcome so if we feel like there are too many factors that would lead to us having success in a given field at the top of my head i can't really think of an example in my mind but i think it's a question of having at the top of my head i can't really think of an example of this but by taking the decision to delay preparation for that task that is something that we can control so that is a way that so according to neil this is this is a way of us getting more control there may be a desire there for the outcome but the personal input may not be there so we delay this so that would be maybe if we feel like we don't have enough time to put in the input that we that we feel would lead to the desired outcome we just throw it away altogether and we say if i had enough time then i would have been able to do this presentation better or i would have got a better mark in this exam or if i was given more time i would actually be able to add to this discussion more because i didn't have enough time to research all of those things for example now i but now just as a disclaimer i am just paraphrasing here what um neil says in the podcast and the and the articles that i've read um from him he is a behavioral engineer he is not a doctor and he's an or and also an author so he even says that he just paraphrases from the from science by no means is he a medical person that is able to diagnose anything so yeah why would we not want to put in the input to me it sounds like a symptom of not having enough short-term objectives so i go back to put in different types of objectives both personal skill and then also outcome objectives because to just have to just look at the extrinsic result i don't think has much benefit because as i as i established already there are different types of motivation people are motivated differently as well because also what i would like to get into more as i get more qualified as a psychologist is i would probably want to focus more on motivation and how people's individual personalities and character traits impact how a psychologist would work on seeking the best methods for them to be motivated in whichever field that they're engaged in so yeah i would say that in terms of my experience writing down a big list a big tick list i've tried it many times and it doesn't seem to it doesn't seem to work very well you need to find a way that at the end of the day gives you tasks that you can achieve and what happens with a task list is they become really really big i mean just the other day my parents asked me to bring up a word document and we would just do a massive checklist of all the things that we need to do in the house in preparation for holidays or tidying up the house and different different tasks and in the end there was so many things that need to that need to be done i immediately just thought what's the point of this the likelihood that we're actually going to be successful in doing all of them is very very small and as we've established there is a there is a cycle this by not being able to to achieve everything this would lead to a lack of self-confidence a lack of motivation this this would lead to failure negative feedback it would feed into the negative cycle of self-esteem and self-confidence and and basically you would just fall into get yourself into a rut and be very difficult to get out of so get little stepping stones little short-term goals that are a mix of challenging but still achievable or an athletic perspective i would say that you look at your personal best your personal best in a particular field and then you look to go 10 better the science says that that that is an optimal bar to set that is both challenging yet achievable so my advice on reducing procrastination is to set achievable short-term goals that don't necessarily have to do with the final outcome but just get you going and also a habit that mr ale says is that if you're for example hungry say i will go and get myself something to eat in 10 minutes time and i need to finish this task that i'm engaged in now because according to him it's also a question of being distracted by things picking up the phone uh if you work on your computer opening a tab and looking at the news all of these little things you say i'm going to do that in 10 minutes time so in order to not be distracted you're procrastinating doing doing unfavorable things in order to reduce procrastinating on the positive things so it's also a bit so in that regard it's also a question of prioritization that's why i've read and i'd be very open to discussing this further because i i acknowledge that this episode i have got no concrete answers to so i would love to know what you think again follow the social medias engage with me don't message me on instagram or on twitter or add to the feed and i will answer as best i can with any questions or any opinions if you've got a different view or disagree with something that i said in this podcast regarding procrastination or self-esteem or motivation or how a person's character impacts the different factors that we've spoken about please let me know and we will and we will discuss it you know we'll debate it it's it's fun it's insightful and it's it's how and in my view it's how we learn better yeah that would wrap up the podcast thank you very much for listening i've been charles mcwhorter please if you've enjoyed this podcast please give this a follow give this a good rating give this a review follow the social medias instagram and twitter handles are at beast or the number beast and then the number four the mind is beast or the mind number four and i look forward to hearing your feedback and hearing from you soon in the meantime so looking forward to the next subject so next week i will be talking about building resilience now i'm not going to expand on that any further if you have not listened to the previous podcast on curiosity i highly recommend you give that a listen we delve into some very interesting aspects there as well and yeah so i hope you enjoyed this podcast i've been charles mcwhorter goodbye