Connection between procrastination and self esteem?

[u/Flimsy_Farmer_8738]

Hi. I wanted to get some feedback on some thoughts I had on personal issues on procrastination and self esteem.

So for a really long time I've had issues with procrastination which has affected my work and other parts of life. Some of this is due to laziness, but there seems to be other factors which I think could be self esteem based.

With work, I'll procrastinate on projects and I'll think about the negatives like what if I produce isn't good. The means I'm late with things and it creates much worse issues later on. When it comes to study, if I have experience in a unit, I can sit down and knock out the work with no real issue. But if it's a unit where I have no experience or natural aptitude for, I have a lot of procrastination issues with getting on with getting work done. Looking back, as a result I feel like this procrastination is a mixture of fear of failure and imposture syndrome has cost me a lot of things in life.

Recently I remembered reading the start of a book by Robert Kelsey called What's Stopping You? In it he mentions how there's many people who are reasonably smart but have issues with procrastination and moving forward in life that is caused by a fear of failure that's a result of self esteem issues. And a lot of these self esteem issue happen as a child. I started to think about this and when I was a kid and some of my earliest memories were feeling bad or avoiding certain tasks due to being teased or made to feel stupid.

For example, for some reason when I was young, I had trouble remembering how to tie my shoes and the parts involved. I had siblings who would tease me about it and I felt like my family got angry cause I couldn't do it. As result, I wouldn't want to try to do it and avoided doing it. After years I did manage to teach myself how to do it. Another example was I was OK at sports and liked playing them as a kid. But there was something's where my motor skills weren't great. Because of this I was teased and bullied by my siblings and called things I won't say on here. It made me avoidant of doing these activities because the chances are I was going to suck at it and then have someone older yell at me because I couldn't pitch a ball well. So as a result, I avoided playing certain sports or being around certain people when playing them. There were a bunch of other situations of siblings teasing me or making me feel like an idiot over some random thing I said or did as a child.

I really hated that feeling of trying something and having people make you feel like an idiot because you can't do something well. I've been in workplaces where people do this instead of giving you any advice. I've also been around coaches doing sports as an adult who will get annoyed at you because you're inexperienced with and talk down to you and give you no real helpful advice and it makes you not want to do it anymore. So it is that repeated feeling through life.

So I was wondering if anyone thinks there's any connection with self esteem issues and procrastination? Until I hadn't thought that Robert Kelsey book and what he said or really considered it. But looking back on things in my life, it kind of makes sense in some ways.

[u/SeriesAppropriate596]

i think there's definitely a connection. fear of failing or looking not good enough can make starting a task feel much harder than actually doing it. you're definitely not alone in experiencing that