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PROCRASTINATION

While prejudice is an external force we have to navigate, procrastination is all our own making. Yet it’s also one of the greatest barriers for the under-confident to overcome, not least when it comes to gaining confidence through achievement. Procrastinators are the people who delay execution until tomorrow, often employing valid-seeming excuses to justify their inaction. Yet the excuses are just that – invented delays that mask the real reasons for their repeated postponements.

‘The emotional roots of procrastination involve inner feelings, fears, hopes, memories, dreams, doubts and pressures,’ write psychologists Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen in their definitive book Procrastination (1983).

Burka and Yuen introduce the ...

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