By Abisola Buari, Certified Execution Coach and Therapist
At 10:47 p.m., you finally open the application. The house is quiet. Your CV is ready. All that’s left is to answer one question: Why are you a good fit for this role?
You type two lines, read them back and delete both. Then you open WhatsApp. A friend needs help with her own application, so you send her a voice note. You know exactly what to tell her. By the time you return to yours, it’s past eleven.
Let me sleep. I’ll do it with a fresh head tomorrow.
You probably mean it. You meant it on Tuesday, too. And if the deadline passes, what may hurt most is seeing the vacancy close and knowing you never gave yourself a chance.
Why can I show up for everyone else and still put off my own goals?
Sometimes your own task has more at stake than it seems. Helping your friend with her application doesn’t ask you to sit with the possibility of being rejected again. Sending yours does.
Imagine you’ve already applied for five jobs and heard nothing. By the sixth application, you may be tired of getting your hopes up. Leaving it unfinished gives you a little relief tonight. Tomorrow, you still have the same application to finish, plus the frustration of knowing you’ve put it off again.
I wrote about that cycle in Why Am I a Chronic Procrastinator?. Here, I want you to look at something more specific: what makes it hard to follow through, even on a day when you’ve managed to do plenty of other things?
What are you actually putting off?
Say you run a small business. A customer asks for your price on WhatsApp. You type ₦85,000, stare at it, then delete the figure and reply, “Let me get back to you.”
A few hours later, you’re updating your price list. It feels useful. But if you already know what the work costs and what you need to charge, the price list isn’t the reason the customer is still waiting. The hard part may be sending the figure and hearing, “Ah, that’s too much.” Especially if you’ve heard it before and immediately felt you had to defend yourself or offer a discount.
Now imagine you typed the same figure but realised you hadn’t priced delivery, materials or the extra work the customer asked for. In that case, you have a real decision to make before you reply. Both situations end with “Let me get back to you.” They call for different responses.
The same goes for the rest of your life. If you come home from work, sort out dinner, help with homework and sit down at ten with nothing left in you, take that seriously. A plan that depends on your having two clear hours every evening may simply ask for time and energy you don’t have.
How do I stop procrastinating when I already know what to do?
Start with one task you’ve carried over more than once. Finish this sentence: “I keep saying I need to ___, but the part I actually put off is ___.”
“I keep saying I need to get serious about my business, but the part I actually put off is telling customers my price.”
Read that second half again. There’s a big difference between a business owner who needs help deciding what to charge and one who knows her price but backs down every time someone questions it. The first may need time to do the costing. The second may need to understand why a customer’s disappointment feels like something she has to fix.
Try that question with your own example. If you can name the exact moment you pull back, you’ve learned something useful about where to start. And if you realise you’ve known the answer for a while and still can’t move past it, that’s useful information too.
When you’re tired of having the same conversation with yourself
As a certified execution coach and therapist, I can help you work through that moment. Bring the unsent application, the price you keep deleting, or the decision you’ve been carrying for months. We’ll look at what happens right before you pull back and what kind of support makes sense for you.
Sometimes the work is practical: deciding what matters this week and making a plan you can follow with the time you actually have. Sometimes the next step is already clear, but fear, shame or a painful experience keeps coming up when it’s time to act. There’s room to talk about that, too.
Message me on WhatsApp to book a private session
You can start with, “Abisola, there’s something important I keep putting off, and I’d like help with it.” That’s enough for a first message.
Abisola Buari is the founder of Fully Her Global, based in Abuja, Nigeria.