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Flex Your Emotional Muscle to Overcome Procrastination 59

double troubles and its resolution, you can refer to The Cognitive
Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety.)

Your Short- and Long-Term Analysis

You will often have both intellectual and emotional goals that are
related to the same issue. What are your intellectual goals for your
most pressing current priority? What are your emotional goals for
the same situation? Are you limiting yourself by self-handicap-
ping, counterfactual thinking, rationalizations, and other excuses?
Can you find a better way to make your expressed goals the ones
you work on to achieve?
When you face uncertainty, associate discomfort with past
negative experiences, or just don’t like discomfort, your emotional
reactions can quickly overpower your reason. For example, you
have performance anxiety about giving a marketing presentation
before manufacturing. The simple solution is to question your fear
thinking and practice speaking in front of groups until you get rid
of the anxiety and overcome the fear. If the simple solution was
easy, few people would have performance anxiety.
Practically any form of stress can be triggered by something
as simple as returning a phone call. Let’s assume that the call is
to reschedule an appointment. It’s not a big deal. You won’t seri-
ously inconvenience anyone. You have the time to make the call.
But you feel a slight twinge of discomfort. You put off making the
call. You tell yourself that you’ll get to it later. What went wrong?
The horse is running the show.
Let’s suppose you recognize the horse’s urge to gallop away.
Grabbing the reins is a way to change the process. You can grab
the reins in many ways, including doing a quick analysis. You may
see added benefits from turning things around for yourself.
The following long-term advantage exercise helps strengthen
a rider perspective by putting short-term procrastination urges to
diverge into a broader context where you can see the frailty in your
procrastination reasoning. You are more likely to go for the greater