Have you met inspiration’s wicked twin yet? Author and motivational speaker, Nick Williams, says that inspiration and resistance are like twin forces. When you get inspired, fear and resistance are probably close by, preventing you from becoming the truest version of yourself.

Imagine two hands. “The left one is inspiration, ideas and our natural creativity. The right one is fear, doubts, negative beliefs and impatience to get to the result. When we procrastinate, we often focus on the left side,” says Yakov Pyatnitskov.

“What’s missing in our motivation? How can we push ourselves, trick ourselves to do it? And we may succeed for a while but if the resistance on the right is strong, creating feels hard and sooner or later we’ll stop.”

According to Yakov the solution is to work on the inner obstacles on the right, not your motivation on the left. The weaker fear and doubt become, the more natural it will be to follow the path of inspiration.

Is fear the only reason why we procrastinate? Not by a long shot. According to Michelle Pugle there are six different types of procrastination:

Perfectionist: This person has high standards and fears that she won’t meet expectations. She puts off work because she fears that she won’t do it well enough.

Dreamer: This is someone with big goals, but no plan for success.

Worrier: The individual has worst-case scenario thinking; she fears change and resists risk-taking.

Defier: This is the promise-maker with poor follow-through and many reasons or excuses for not doing the task.

Crisis-maker: This is someone who may unintentionally or intentionally create chaos at the last minute, which delays work.

Over-doer: This person has unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved and lacks priority-setting abilities.

So, fear plays a big part in procrastination with the Worrier and the Perfectionist and might be a background factor with the others as well. Often it is not that you don’t want to complete the task you feel inspired to take on; it is that you are afraid of what might happen if you do finish the task.

While you’re procrastinating you’re stuck in what British cultural anthropologist, Victor Turner, called liminal time – the stage between no longer and not yet. The word ‘liminality’ comes from the Latin word ‘limen’, which means ‘a threshold’.

In anthropology, it refers to the disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when you no longer hold your pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status you will hold when the rite is complete. This does not have to be seen as a crisis, but as a chrysalis, a time for transformation.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell calls this transformation the hero’s journey: heroes have to leave the comforts of the familiar to face a challenge and find themselves moving towards a point of no return. Heroes have been set upon a path that will change who they are within their own minds and within their community.

When the threshold, the point of no return, has not yet been crossed, the hero experiences fear, confusion, uncertainty and anticipation, while he or she tries to gather the nerve to take the next step. Spending time in this gap between “no longer” and “not yet” can be unbearable.

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us, writes Herman Hesse: “Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts . . . You are anxious because your path leads away from . . . home. But every step and every day lead you back again . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.”

Herman writes that it is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. “It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death . . .”

“Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is,” writes Herman. That is home, girlfriend. That is happiness. – Angie Kleijn