EP 263: The Truth About Procrastination: What Your Resistance Is Really Telling You with Guest Expert Elyssa Smith

Are you a people pleaser with a high tolerance for handling what life throws at you? Do you pride yourself on your deep empathy for others, often procrastinating on what’s important to you?

If perfectionism and procrastination feel like inescapable parts of your life, then life is trying to tell you something. 

Procrastination isn’t a flaw. It is a signal that’s urging you to dig deeper into your underlying fears, recognize what’s misaligned, and identify what doesn’t feel safe. 

Today on The Bridge to FulfillmentⓇ, Blake welcomes Elyssa Smith, a trauma-informed life strategist who helps people understand the brain science behind self-sabotage. She’s the founder of Your Best Moment and creator of the Ultimate Self-Regulation Method. Her work empowers women to overcome self-sabotage and trauma and break free from procrastination, people-pleasing, and overwhelm. 

In this episode, you’ll learn how trauma from our past influences behaviors like procrastination and perfectionism. You’ll begin to understand the two types of pain, identifying the kind that strengthens versus the kind that injures, and why knowing which is which is critical for growth. You’ll gain a fresh perspective on why you might be feeling stuck and how you can finally break free by addressing what feels unsafe.

If you’re a high achiever who often pushes yourself into burnout, these actionable strategies will help you shift from survival mode to a place of thriving.

 

What You’ll Learn:

• Identifying when people pleasing is helpful versus harmful (8:11)

• The build-up of ‘shoulds’ that keep us stuck (15:03)

• Pain and our fear of failure (25:32)

• Big and ‘Tiny T’ traumas that influence our patterns in life (35:25)

• Working through procrastination (43:13)

 

Favorite Quotes:

1. “I think often we've been rewarded for focusing on everyone else, and in some cases, made to believe that it's selfish to take care of yourself.” –Blake

2. “Helping that's harmful is helping that is at your expense. There's something to be said for sacrificing for other people, but if it's a lifestyle, that's where you get into burnout. That's where you get into resentment.” –Elyssa Smith

3. “The vast majority of our stress, anxiety, and our problems are not circumstantial. It's not the toxic boss or the environment. It's whatever belief systems, patterns, etc, that we are dealing with that are creating that anxiety.” –Blake

4. “We have this special switch that we can turn on or off that's like, ‘I will tolerate more than is reasonable for no good reason’. So I had to find that switch, and I had to turn it off and say, No, babe, we don't need to do that.”  –Elyssa Smith

5. “The path of gentleness is sort of paved with a fear of failure. And the fear of failure is what the pain of strengthening looks like.”  –Elyssa Smith

6. “If those are your answers, work harder, be better, do more, you know that that is the pain