Can Coaching Help Me Finish Projects I Keep Starting?
Yes, coaching can help you finish projects you keep starting. But this isn’t just about accountability or forcing yourself to finish. This is actually about asking the right questions to discover the misalignment(s) under the frustration…
Do you even want to finish the project? I mean c’mon. You’re not finishing it for a reason right?
Sometimes you want the identity attached to completing it. You want the money, recognition, business, lifestyle, or imagined future the project represents. You like the idea of having finished it. You like what it would mean about you if you became the kind of person who completed it.
That doesn’t always mean you want the daily reality of building it. Or maybe you do?
🔸That is worth knowing.
If you do genuinely want to complete the project then the next question is:
▪️What keeps pulling you away from it?
The unfinished project is only the visible surface of a larger system at play. You. You are the larger, complex, beautiful, capable, fucking AWESOME machine trying to soulfully move your life forward. And build the person who can live that deeply meaninful life others have. Let’s get into it…
Why do I keep starting projects and not finishing them?
Highly capable and creative people often have more ideas than they could complete in several lifetimes. The problem is not a lack of intelligence, imagination, or potential. The problem is you treat every exciting idea as a demand. Not an option to investigate.
You begin one project with real interest. Then a newer idea arrives. The new idea feels cleaner, more exciting, and full of possibility. The current project has moved past its exciting beginning and into the slower work of making decisions, solving problems, tolerating uncertainty, and producing something real.
So you switch. Difficult and boring for easy and exciting. - Make sense?
The newer project may seem unrelated, but it often promises the same outcome as the first one so it “feels” like a “better” idea. It might still be about growing your business, becoming financially independent, expressing your creativity, helping people, proving your capability, or building a more meaningful life.
One question and one potentially destructive behavior arrives from this insight:
🔸Question: Which of these ideas are most likely to make the biggest impact toward my goal?
▪️Problem: Am I switching because the new idea is better, or because the old one became uncomfortable?
This is why awareness matters.
Starting can feel like progress because it produces energy, possibility, and movement. Finishing requires you to choose and stick with it. Which again is hard and boring.
The river of fish - Letting go for highly creative people
I use an analogy called the river of fish. Imagine a circular river filled with bright, interesting fish. A new idea swims past, and you grab it. You take a bite. It tastes fantastic. It feels like the project you should be doing. You want to put down everything else and follow it immediately.
Instead, put the fish back.
If it is genuinely important, it will swim around again. If it never comes back, it probably did not matter as much as it seemed to in that first exciting moment.
The river does not stop producing fish because you let one go. You are a person who creates good ideas. You do not need to act on every idea to prove that you are creative. You need to learn which ideas most effectively move you toward your goals.
🔸Insight + Impact + Effort = Success🔸
If you can’t release it - write it down
One of the easiest ways to release a new idea is to write it down.
I keep a running list on my phone allowing me to drop the mental load of trying to remember it. This also let’s me get back to work faster. Most ideas don’t FEEL as interesting when you look at them a day later. It’s a great way to scrub the bullshit off the to-do list by waiting for the excitement to pass.
A small sleep study found that people who wrote a specific to-do list before bed fell asleep faster than people who wrote about tasks they had already completed. It supports the practical value of placing unfinished thoughts somewhere outside your head. You can read the study on bedtime writing and sleep here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5758411/
Success isn’t about the absence of creativity. Far from it. It’s more about sticking with it. Which is way more complex and difficult than you think…
What pulls you from the project?
Look at what happens during the work itself.
You sit down to do something important. The work becomes confusing, boring, uncomfortable, or uncertain. You feel a moment of friction. Then you get up.
Sometimes the distraction is obvious: video games, food, pornography, social media, or another quick source of comfort. Sometimes it looks responsible. You answer an email, clean the kitchen, research something, reorganize your notes, or move to another task you can reasonably argue also needs to be done.
At the end of the day, the question is still simple:
Did you do the thing?
Do this instead - It fuckin works:
🔸Sit down to work
🔸Set a timer for 15 minutes
🔸Write down what you’re doing every 15 minutes.
🔸If you aren’t working directly on the project - write down why you stopped.
🔸If you don’t know, keep going. It will show up again.
I hated this excercise because I was frustrated with what I saw. I had built a habit, a very small subonious one (habits!) to get up and look for something pleasurable when I felt a bit of discomfort. Typically when I felt frustrated figuring something out, the work felt like too much, or I felt tired.
By doing this I learned to recognize the small “triggers” of discomfort that moved me away from the work. I found that if I kept with it, I usually had the ability to keep working.
If the answer is no, ask what happened immediately before you moved away from it. And this is well studied - I’m just giving you the quick hack through it.
Procrastination: A way to escape difficult task-related emotions, especially when someone is already under stress. It can also be affected by exhaustion, unclear expectations, low interest, executive-function difficulties, competing rewards, or a task that has grown too large to understand - ie. Overwhelm!
Researcher Fuschia Sirois describes procrastination under stress as a low-resource way of avoiding unpleasant emotions associated with a task. You can read her review of procrastination, stress, and emotional avoidance here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049005/
You don’t need to assume that every distraction reveals a deep psychological wound.
You do need to become honest about what the distraction is doing for you.
Awareness makes the pattern available for change.
Learn to enjoy sticking with it
How? Presence and emotional management. You can do that already. You just need to apply it regularly where it’s needed while working. The key is to place the emotional reward in the present, not the future.
▪️Unsuccessful people place the emotional reward at the end.
🔸Successful people apply the reward of the effort while in it.
One of these creates fulfilling, energizing effort. The other creates stress and fatigue. Simple.
🔸You can enjoy progress to your goals every day or wait to enjoy it when you’re done.🔸
When you focus on the positive emotional energy in the work it might look like:
I am being responsible right now because I am staying with something difficult.
I am being brave because I do not entirely knw what I am doing, and I am doing it anyway.
I am building confidence while I have this conversation, not after I know how it ends.
Confidence is not only the prize you receive when something works. It is also the experience of watching yourself remain present while the outcome is uncertain. Where do you think that feeling of “I can do this!” comes from? The idea here is to apply that more universally vs only in hard work you know you’ve completed before, to the high degree you want.
Pull yourself through difficult projects by connecting with something meaningful
There’s a balancing act we are becoming aware of that people who often struggle with basic effort don’t see. It’s the emotional and physical positive sensations from your distractions vs the much more deeply meaningful things in your life. One is short lived, the other lasts much much longer.
Look at what you’re doing. Who benefits when you do this? Does it support your partner, children, family, clients, or community? Does it move you toward a life that means something to you?
🔸Purpose does not make every task enjoyable. It gives meaning to the suffering of our efforts.🔸
Perfectionism may keep the project unfinished
One of the strongest questions I ask clients is:
Would this project be easier to finish if nobody ever saw the process or the result?
If the answer is yes then maybe it’s the judgments of others you’re afraid of. Not the project itself.
Perfectionism is often seeking safety from judgment. If you never finish, no one can evaluate the final result. If you keep researching, revising, planning, or adding to the scope, you can delay the moment when the work becomes visible to others. This is often a learned habit from past criticism.
(You can read more in this research on perfectionism and social evaluation. )
I have seen this in people who grew up around critical parents, partners, teachers, or authority figures. Their work was not simply corrected. Their mistakes became evidence that something was wrong with them. This is also common in people on the spectrum who tend to think and achieve differently than others. So it’s a double whammy for them!
All that changes how a person approaches learning.
Instead of trying, observing, adjusting, and improving, they attempt to prevent judgment before they begin. They set a standard so high that almost any real outcome feels disappointing. They compare their early work to someone else’s developed ability and ignore the years of imperfect work that created it.
Finishing is the only way you learn what to improve. Maybe it’s time to face that old fear? ‘Cause that shit will hold you back.
Can a Coach Help Me If My Brain Works Differently? - Of course - But it’s not that simple…
That is what you are doing reading this. But only if you try these new ideas out. This is what building yourself looks like.
Creativity and associative thinking
The task you engage in is often not overwhelming. It’s the associated thoughts, feelings, memories that pile on which do that. Highly successful people learn to manage their thoughts and feelings. Everyone can do this. The degree to which you do this greatly affects time on task.
Notice when the thoughts and feelings you add to the present task are from the past or fears of the future. Neither the past nor the future exist. So why are you giving them so much attention.
Let’s move past the trauma work and simply look at this as habit.
Your brain is a predictive machine. It interprets the present through prior experience, expectations, and learned beliefs. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett explains this predictive process in her TED Talk, “You Aren’t at the Mercy of Your Emotions: Your Brain Creates Them.”
If you learned that mistakes lead to humiliation in the past, you may pile that memory into the present moment. BAM! - Overwhelm!
If working on today’s tasks reminds you of all the uncompleted tasks, BAM! Overwhelm.
If this causes a debilitating pattern it may be time to hit up that therapist. If this just feels like old habits that are frustrating, and not completely overwhelming - then working with a coach may help you move forward. Highly successful people have support networks they grow with and learn from.
Do you have that?
Believe in Yourself: Cultivating Confidence and Self-Esteem with ADHD - More complex than you’d think.
What if I’ve tried everything and nothing works?
You have not tried everything because you have not found what works.
That’s it. Sit with that…
…
…
…
“I’ve tried everything” is hopelessness speaking. Feelings don’t need to make sense. There’s two things happening here under the feelings. One, you’ve exhausted what you know how to do. Two, you can’t actually do the thing…yet. Now it’s time to find the way out of that box you’re in.
Write down what you have actually tried. Then ask what all those attempts had in common.
Did you keep buying different planners while avoiding the same fear?
Did you keep changing routines without improving your sleep?
Did you keep trying to discipline yourself into a life you do not want?
Did you gather more information while never practicing being uncomfortable?
Did you keep treating the surface problem as separate from the rest of your life?
A planner may help. Medication may help. Accountability, therapy, coaching, exercise, schedules, reminders, and productivity systems may all help. But the answer may not be one thing. It takes many things to complete a big project. Just as it takes many things to create your greatest project - YOU.
🔸Human beings are systems. Improvement in one area creates capacity in another.🔸
When you care for your body, you have more energy to face challenge. When you work through an emotional pattern, you become more present with your partner to create more connection. More connection at home creates calm to cook dinner instead of numbing yourself with junk food. And healthy eating helps you think clearly the following morning. Then you get more done. Simple.
Actualization is not one heroic breakthrough. It is an ongoing process in which physical, emotional, social, practical, and meaningful changes reinforce one another. That’s how people create a meaningful life. Not by focusing on the problem, but by treating themselves reverently, as the embodiment of that which will create a truly meaningful and goodly life.
Find the path you deserve to live - Step outside the box -
You don’t need someone to slow you down. You need someone who can keep up, see the patterns you’re stuck in, and translate that into meaningful forward impact!
🔸Jump into a free call to map the patterns you’re stuck in and find what moves you forward.🔸