Day 107- Getting Out of the Work

I am using the tool of

self-forgiveness to work through the following experience:

“I’ve gotten to the point where I am able to move myself to go and actually set time for something and sit down to start it, but then, as I’m doing it, I “just start going crazy” within myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. But I get super uncomfortable and distractible and preoccupied which I accept and allow to pull me away from the task at hand and prolong the time it takes to do it, instead of sitting down, focusing and working through it comfortably.”

In my previous blog I identified the tendency I have to make this an all-consuming experience, affecting many different dimensions of my beingness/awareness/ability to move myself. Thus it is a character I become, as ‘all of me’ is engaged in the experience. The character I identified in my previous blog was what I called the ‘underestimating character’, but upon further looking into it, I see that it’s more of a ‘getting out of work’ character, wherein, I will leave the assignment to last minute because I don’t ‘want’ to do the work.

Then, instead of having left myself enough time to do it, I will have to rush at the last minute and do it all at once. Eventually I ‘get into it’, but it takes a lot, and then I have to really skim and make it look like I had spent a lot of time doing it.

This was a ‘skill’ that got me through elementary and high school, but when I got into college, I could not get away with it, and I dropped out for this reason, among many others. Now, in university, it is impossible to pull this trick. This had made my university experience quite a reality check. Even when I got to the point of sitting down to do it, ,I would try to get out of it, manipulating myself and falling in the face of many resistances. It’s like, if I didn’t have that ‘last minute’ stress pushing me, I simply could not move myself to do the work. If I had two weeks to do it, I would complete it at the very end of that two weeks, if I had one day, I would get it done at the end of that day, and if I had six months, I wouldn’t look at it for five months.

Now I am doing my classes online, so I have to rely on myself completely to manage my time. I have done pretty well with writing about this and pushing myself, but I have still not gotten to the point of simply sitting down and moving myself, breath by breath, through the work. Trying to ‘get out’ of the work had become so ingrained in me as a survival technique throughout my entire academic career, that when it came to a time where I actually wanted to learn and do the work well, I simply did not have the tools such as discipline, focus, time-management and self-movement to do so. So here I am taking on the ‘getting out of the work’ character, because enough is enough, I can no longer accept nor allow this behavior to continue.

So, herein, I will be looking at all the dimensions of a ‘character’, which are the thought, fear, imagination, reaction and physical dimensions, beginning with thought:

Getting Out of Work; Thought Dimension:

1) A picture of me sitting at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a complete blank.

2) The thought that there’s a whole big action packed world ‘out there’ that I’m missing out on, and that the work I have to do is so slow and boring and pointless.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to create and manifest this thought of sitting in front of an assignment and drawing a blank, as a form of self-sabotage, based on past memories of being a student in elementary, high school and college, wherein I would daydream and doodle all day long in class, ‘enduring’ class, so that when I got homework and assignments to do at home, I literally had no idea what I was supposed to do, and would sit in front of it and feel as though it were an impossible task, and give up, or just do some bare minimum work and hope for the best, in which case I would get a bad grade. Within this:

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to not see, realize and understand that I now DO pay attention in class, and I do know what’s going on, and instead of applying what I learned in class and have read in the material, I go into the ‘getting out of work’ character as a survival mechanism, within the assumption that I am incapable of doing the work, and going into the ‘getting out of the work’ character as a survival mode technique, creating and manifesting stress and anxiety within me, wherein I can’t focus and end up easily distracted and unable to absorb and synthesize all the information, thus creating the exact thing I’m trying to avoid, which is: sitting in front of my work, drawing a blank.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to validate and perpetuate the ‘getting out of the work’ character, by conjuring up thoughts that CONvince me that I’m only going to draw blanks, which I then believe and follow by participating in them through giving them my attention and energy, thus actually making it real in fact.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing the thought of ‘me sitting down at my desk in front of an assignment drawing a blank’ to exist within and as me.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to further sabotage my application of myself by thinking that there’s a whole big action packed world out there that I’m missing out on, and that the work I’m directing myself to do is so slow and boring and pointless, which triggers the ‘getting out of work’ character in which I will put it off and then try to do quickly all at once right before the deadline.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to try to read through material really quickly, looking for key words, and then only reading the parts that I think are relevant to the questions I have to answer or the part I need to research. I understand that there is a certain amount of skimming I have to do, but self-directed skimming where I am grasping concepts and strategically focusing more on some parts and not others is different from frantically trying to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ immediately in an attempt to ‘get it over with’, which is NOT acceptable.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to read frantically through my texts in an attempt to get through it as fast as possible and ‘find the answer’ in an attempt to get it over with, instead of slowing myself down and reading with patience and focus, allowing myself to absorb the concepts the author is trying to convey, in order to integrate the information into my understanding in such a way that I can convey it in my own words.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to participating in the thought of there being ‘a whole action packed world out there’ filling me with an energetic pull or desire to go ‘out there’ and see it, while at the same time, participating in the thought that my work is so boring and slow and pointless, instead of stopping the thought as it comes by instead taking a breath and continuing to read.

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to place judgments on the work at hand, such as work being ‘bad and boring’ and not working being ‘good and fun’, wherein I create all sorts of energies within me, instead of stopping my judgments and moving myself to do that which I decide I am going to do in a given moment, and simply moving myself to do it as the directive decision of what I am going to occupy my time with in that given moment. No judgment is necessary to do this, in fact, the judgments placed upon the work create unnecessary relationships that cause me to become frustrated and easily distracted within myself.

Self-commitment and self-corrective application statements to follow…