A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I have giant Internet crush on the very cool Havi Brooks.

She is an expert in patterns and habits, specifically;

-how to gently and compassionately notice the patterns that are keeping you stuck

-how NOT to beat yourself up over the fact that you have patterns that keep you “stuckified”

-how to gather important information from these stuckified places

-and how to use that information to gently and easily create new patterns to get you where you actually want to be.

Havi has created a lot of great products to help us with our own, personal destuckification, such as her “Emergency Calming Techniques which I reviewed in an earlier post.

My other favorite product, which I almost bought just for the name alone, is her “Magical Procrastination-Dissolving Fairy Wonder Dust.”

Most of the other things I’ve tried in order to help me get past my procrastination start with the assumption that, because I am experiencing some temporary procrastination, I am “bad”. Quite often I have already made this assumption about myself, so the new person or technique begins this process by joining with me in agreeing that I am somehow wrong, and basically just giving me some more ways that my Inner Slave Driver can use to beat me up some more.

But not Havi. She starts out by telling me that I’m okay. Yes, I am temporarily experiencing some “stuckness”, but that’s okay. That’s just life, and my “stuckness” does not mean anything who I fundamentally am.

She helps me meet myself exactly where I am with kindness and compassion, which in and of itself goes a long way toward dissolving the resistance I’m feeling to doing the things I want-or need-to do.

Then, when I’m in this gentler place, she gives me a simple-and slightly wacky-technique I can use to help soften the rest of my resistance.

Just for fun I decided to track this process for a bit, and these are a few of the tasks on which I used my magical fairy dust over the past week:

-cleaning the cat box
-taking out the trash
-calling the phone company to report a problem with our phone line
-making a vet appointment for one of the cats
-making a phone call I’d been dreading for a week
-writing a new blog post and announcing it on Twitter
-answering 2 emails which I’d been avoiding
-emailing a friend to ask for some help with a project I’m working on

My application of this technique also had an unexpected benefit. As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, a few months ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalagia, and I’m having to re-learn how to be me, in my life, with this new health situation. It involves a lot of trial, and error, and bashing around on this occasionally steep new learning curve.

So one day last week I had a list of things I thought I should be able to accomplish, but I was feeling very reluctant to actually work on any of them. So I applied a liberal dose of my fairy wonder dust, and was able to get through maybe a third of my list. However, when I got to that point and actually stopped for a moment I realized that I was in a fair amount of pain, and instead of working anymore I needed to take some medicine and go rest.

So instead of just encouraging me to push my way through the pain so I could complete my list, the Dissolve-O-Matic helped me see that my procrastination was actually there for a very specific reason; to help me stop working and deal with my pain so that I could feel better.

Here, in Havi’s own words, is what’s included in this seriously, you-need-to-have-this kit:

1. “MAGICAL PROCRASTINATION-DISSOLVING FAIRY WONDER DUST (the instant-help-right-now guide)”

2. “THE E-BOOK: DISSOLVE PROCRASTINATION (108 pages of pure unadulterated problem-solving)”

3. “Bonus mp3 recordings of me (Havi) doing the emergency genius technique with real, live people who are in the throes of stuckness. This is a great way to experience how it’s done in a powerful, visceral, body-memory kind of way so you can get even better at doing it on your own.

So if any of this feels like something that could help you get through your stuck spots a little bit more easily and gently, just click on the graphic at the top of this post, or you can click here.

And here’s to all of us learning how to be just a little bit kinder and gentler with ourselves.