We humans are weird creatures and kicking habits especially the bad ones is more about the understanding of why we do them in the first place. There has to be a perfect explanation why we do these things subconsciously and have no idea why they happen.
A while ago (5 years to be precise) I have managed to overcome what many of us struggle with daily and that is procrastination. The old me was never lazy and I used to delay doing certain tasks even though I know I had to get them done often putting those on to the next day or later in the week. I do think an underlying factor at the time was some of the elements were out of my control like delivery times which has since been resolved.
I used to find some days or weeks better than others and it had nothing to do with energy levels being higher, but more about self confidence. Whether we like to admit it or not even if we protrude confidence on the outside the chances are you still have doubts on the inside.
I am probably one of the most confident people you would ever meet and in a good way and never cocky. I am very good around people so meeting people for the first time holds no fears yet you have to ask why was there any procrastination at all.
I believe in my case is was down to a fear of failure and never realised this at the time and this fear was holding me back. This sounds kind of weird to me now and was something I had thought about many times until I diagnosed what it was.
The easiest way to describe this is when I was working and running an assembly plant employing hundreds of staff in the very beginning I had no idea what I was doing. This was all self taught breaking the plant down into numbers as that is the only part that I understood. There was no fear of failure as I was learning and expected things to not go right or fail along the way. Failure was expected as being part of the growth process and as a person you grew with the role.
When I turned my hand at starting a new business with the packaging it was second nature selling something I already knew. The problem which I know now and did not know then was I was about 80% comfortable with my knowledge so 20% of a sales pitch would be made up nonsense. I was not the finished article like I am today so there was doubt lingering whenever I was selling.
I would generally overthink why a certain company or client is not buying my product not understanding it was not my lack of ability, but other underlying reasons. Corrupt buyers receiving back handers or possibly having a long standing business relationship with someone else which price was never going to change. I could not understand why 4 out of every 10 sales pitches left me empty handed and should have focused on the 6 successful ones. Sounds kind of stupid and keeping it simple would have fixed my questioning mind.
These days there is no delays or procrastination and if I encounter something I have never seen before or heard of I first ask and then make a couple of phone calls to find out the correct answer. There are no more lingering doubts with my abilities and I am the first to admit it was self confidence that made me question my abilities which sounds stupid, but it was true.
There is always a reason why we act or do things like we do and like in my case there was an underlying reason I had no idea was even a problem. If you procrastinate and are not lazy then the chances are it could be a self confidence issue which is easy to overcome when you admit this to yourself. By no means am I perfect, but over the last 5 or 6 years I have definitely tried to tackle anything head on that was holding me back.