Phil had been sitting on a big opportunity for six months.
His mentor had invited him to put on a webinar for an email list of thousands of people. Phil is smart, experienced, and had plenty to say. The invitation was exactly the kind of thing he’d been hoping for.
Six months later, the webinar still hadn’t happened.
Every week it came up in his mind. And every week it moved to the following week.
When Phil worked through the occurring process, the real story surfaced almost immediately. And it had nothing to do with time.
When a task becomes the thing you’re dreading
He had imagined doing the webinar and everyone being bored.
He had told himself the audience would think his ideas were stupid. That they would think he was stupid. That agreeing to do this in the first place had been a mistake.
None of that had been visible to him. It had just been running quietly in the background.
This is how procrastination usually works, in my experience. The task itself is rarely the problem. It might be a ten-minute email, a phone call, or a conversation that would probably take less than an hour to have.
But the mind has attached a meaning to it. A story about what this task represents, about what starting it might reveal about us. That story generates a feeling. And the feeling is what makes starting feel impossible.
Morty spent years studying exactly this. One of the most important things he discovered was that events don’t cause our feelings. The meaning we give to events causes our feelings.
This is the foundation of the Lefkoe Occurring Process. And it’s as true about tasks as it is about anything else.
When something sits on your list day after day, there is always a meaning attached to it. You may not be consciously aware of it. But it’s there, running quietly underneath everything.
This might go wrong.
I don’t know if I can handle what comes next.
This matters too much to mess up.
Starting means committing, and I won’t follow through.
Once one of those meanings is in place, the task stops being just a task. It becomes something the mind would rather avoid. And tomorrow becomes a very convenient place to put it.
What Phil had actually been carrying
Phil was a student in our Occurring Course.
This is exactly what the process is designed to surface — what Morty called an “occurring.”
The way the webinar was occurring to Phil (as a test he was likely to fail, a verdict waiting to be rendered) had nothing to do with the actual event.
They were in his mind.
Meanings feel like facts. They carry the same emotional weight. And because they sit below the level of conscious awareness most of the time, we rarely question them.
When Phil could see that, when he could see the separation between the webinar and the meanings his mind had built around it, something shifted.
He scheduled the webinar before he had even decided on the topic. He said he wanted to move while the feeling was still gone.
Another student in the course, Jessica, had been putting off posting to a business forum for weeks. Something she needed to do to find interview subjects for a project she was working on.
When she went through the same process and asked herself what meaning she had given to posting, the answer came out immediately. She had told herself she would not be successful, that not having posted yet was already wrong of her, that she was going to fail at what she was trying to build.
None of it was in the forum post. All of it was in her mind.
She made the post.
How to try this with your own task
Think of the thing that’s been following you around. The email you keep meaning to write. The conversation you keep putting off.
Ask yourself: What have I decided this means?
Write it down and don’t edit it. Let the story appear on the page exactly as your mind produced it.
Then ask one more question: Is that meaning actually in the task? Or is it something I added?
Pause to really notice this. Really look at the task. Can you see that meaning in the task? Or is it in the mind?
This is what Morty called “separation.” The task is just the task. The meaning exists only in the mind, placed there by the mind.
When you can see that distinction, something often shifts.
But if the meaning still seems dominant, try one more step. Come up with one or two other possibilities for what could happen or what the task means. That almost always works for me.
The task is still there but now it’s no longer something to dread. And that makes it much easier to begin.
If you want to try this right now, here are the steps:
- Notice the feeling. Think of the task that keeps moving to tomorrow. What feeling comes up?
- Name the event. The task, stated as plainly as possible.
- Ask: What meaning have I given this? Write it down exactly as it appears. Don’t edit it.
- Look at the task itself. Can you actually see that meaning in it? Or is it only in your mind?
- If the meaning still feels strong, come up with one or two other possibilities. What else could this mean? What else might happen?
- Notice how your feelings about the task shift.
If you’d like to learn this process more deeply and practice it until it becomes second nature, the Occurring Course is where we teach it.
Hundreds of people have used it to dissolve the meanings that were keeping them stuck — not just on tasks they were avoiding, but on all kinds of situations that produce fear, anger and stress.
You can join the waiting list here:
mortylefkoe.com/loc/loc-goodies.html
While you wait, we’ll send you free resources so you can start practicing right away.
