The Emotion Behind Procrastination

In an earlier post, we identified procrastination as the number one reason black businesses fail. As Dante Lee states: (Dante Lee is the president and CEO of Diversity City Media.)

Not sure what some of the symptoms of procrastination are? Let's start with that client you promised to follow up with yesterday. Did you make the call? How about getting that business paperwork in order? Can you pull your taxes from three years ago within minutes? If not, then procrastination could be keeping you from fulfilling your promises, organizing your business and managing your finances to ensure your business is not pulled out from under you, by you.

However, in order to cure ourselves of the procrastination bug, we have to understand the emotion behind procrastination. The emotions behind procrastination are fear of failure and fear of success:

Fear of failure - the feelings of being pressured to do a perfect job come up at the same time there is a sense of the inevitability of failure(doing something that is less then perfect).

Fear of success - The fear can be: If you are successful then more will be expected and how would that be?

The genesis of these emotions is a low sense of self worth. Collectively, many of us in the African-American community suffer from this disease. We do not value ourselves, our abilities and community, therefore, we possess negative thoughts about what we can accomplish. From childhood we are bombarded with negative messages about working with each other ("niggas never can't work together") or our business skills ("see that's why you can support black businesses").

These negative statements become self-fulfilling prophecies; we believe it can't be done, verbalize it can't be done, then we sit back after the failure and say I told you niggas ain't shit.


Consequently, in order to address self-worth, to cure procrastination, we must begin to become more aware of the negative messages we communicate and circulate among ourselves and to our children. We must not dwell in the conceptual land of negativity if we want to promote higher productivity. As a mentor once stated, will power, build power.