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I was recently introduced to the five-minute productivity rule. If you’re a serious procrastinator, just make space for five minutes and do the task that you’ve been delaying for so long. Once you get into it, even for five minutes, it becomes easier to continue.
However, I got interested in the five-minute rule for another reason. I saw its potential for working with our inner critic. I saw the five-minute rule as an invitation to hold the discomfort.
You can apply it to the horrible customer review, to the dreadful meeting, to the talk that you gave that didn’t go well, to how badly you planned your marketing campaign. Can you stay with the discomfort for five minutes, with all the blame and the shame? Can you hear the voices? Can you hold the space?
You can try listening to the inner critic for five minutes and then kindly saying to it ‘Thank you very much for letting me know your opinion, but now I have some other work to do’.
You can’t let go of something that you haven’t fully experienced.
Instead of trying to stop the voice and fight against it, creating a constant background noise as a result, how would it be if you just listened to it for five minutes?
If five minutes can beat procrastination imagine what it can do to your negativity.