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COURSE

One Small Thing: Breaking The Trance Of Procrastination

With Alison Potts

In this course, you'll discover a kinder, more compassionate, and effective way to understand and overcome procrastination. Rather than blaming yourself or trying to force your way through, you'll learn to recognise what's making things difficult, understand what your particular mind and body need, and discover practical ways to get unstuck. At the heart of the course is the concept of One Small Thing — a simple but powerful strategy for breaking the trance of procrastination. You'll discover how one small action can interrupt the feeling of being stuck, create movement where there was resistance, and help your mind and body experience something different: "I can act. I can move. I can make something happen." Through accessible teaching, transformative insights, guided practices and simple experiments, you'll learn how to: - Recognise different kinds of procrastination, including task paralysis, perfectionism and difficulty switching between activities. - Use the powerful One Small Thing strategy to interrupt stuckness and create momentum, even when you don't feel ready.. - Harness self-compassion to reduce the self-criticism, pressure and avoidance that are also keeping you stuck. - Understand how fear and protective patterns can keep you from moving towards things you genuinely want. - Discover body-based practices that help you feel more supported, capable and ready to take action. - Build your own personal toolkit of strategies that genuinely work for you. By the end of the course, you'll have a greater understanding of your own "stuck places", a collection of practical resources to return to whenever you need them, along with greater self-understanding, self-trust and confidence in your ability to move forward. And importantly, you'll have learned how to use One Small Thing in your everyday life — a strategy you can return to whenever you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unable to begin. You'll know that you don't have to tackle the whole task, solve every problem, or wait until you feel motivated. Sometimes one small movement is enough to change what's possible next. The aim isn't to become someone who never procrastinates. It's to become someone who knows how to help themselves when they get stuck — and begin again.

Understand what's keeping you stuck and discover simple, compassionate and transforming ways to get moving again.

11 Days

21 students

No ratings

15 min / day

English

About this course

Meet your Teacher

Alison Potts

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Brisbane QLD, Australia

Alison Potts is an experienced integrative coach, meditation and inner practice teacher, who brings together psychological understanding, compassion-focused approaches and body-based practices to help people navigate life's challenges, discover new possibilities and experience greater aliveness, wellbeing and flourishing. She holds a professional certification in Coaching and Consulting Psychology. She is also a certified meditation and yoga teacher, with specialist training in embodied approaches to wellbeing. Drawing on her professional training, years of teaching experience and personal understanding of ADHD and procrastination, Alison offers a compassionate, practical approach to understanding why we get stuck and discovering what helps us move forward.

View Profile

11 Days

21 students

No ratings

15 min / day

English

Lesson 1

A Different Way Of Seeing Procrastination

What if procrastination isn’t a character flaw, but an understandable human difficulty you can meet with insight, curiosity and compassion? In this opening lesson, we question the labels of laziness and lack of discipline, explore why different brains and bodies get stuck, and introduce three simple questions to help you find your own way forward.

Lesson 2

Finding What Works: Experiment

We're going to try a short, body-based experiment in working with yourself rather than against yourself. This involves letting go of comparison, trying one small change in what you’re doing, and noticing what happens. You don’t have to get a particular result: every time you do this experiment, you'll get useful information about what helps you.

Lesson 3

Why Am I Not Doing The Thing?

There isn’t just one kind of stuck. You might be overwhelmed, under-stimulated, depleted, afraid of messing up, caught in hyperfocus—or busy building, preparing and refining instead of finishing. This lesson helps you recognise what may be making movement difficult, without turning self-enquiry into another reason to either beat yourself up or to delay.

Lesson 4

The Signature Strategy: One Small Thing

You don’t have to climb the whole mountain to create movement. Discover why one small action—even something that isn’t part of the task—can interrupt stuckness and give your body the experience of being able to act. You’ll be invited to choose and actually do one small thing, right now.

Lesson 5

How Self-Compassion Disrupts Procrastination

When a task is already difficult, self-criticism can add shame and pressure to the struggle. Here we explore compassion as a practical resource: recognising what’s hard, staying on your own side, and making the journey towards action kinder, more comfortable, and perhaps even enjoyable.

Lesson 6

What If I Can Get Unstuck? A Practice With Havening Touch

A gentle-but-powerful Havening Touch practice for those moments when you want to start something — or leave one activity for another — but feel unable to make the shift. Combining soothing touch with inviting “What if?” questions, this psychosensory practice helps regulate your nervous system, ease resistance, and create the conditions for a real shift in how you feel. Discover how a change in your inner state can open the way for movement, possibility, and that all-important first step.

Lesson 7

The Hidden Protection Of Procrastination

Sometimes resistance appears precisely when we move towards something we deeply want and is very important to us. We may feel full of confidence at the stage of daydreaming, planning or talking about it, but when it comes to taking action on it, it seems there is an "invisible wall"" preventing us from moving forward. This session explores the idea that some of our resistance comes from protective responses that have learned to associate things like visibility, making mistakes, confidence, using our voice or creating change - with danger. Rather than fighting your inner critic or calling yourself a self-saboteur, discover what it might fear—and how that points you towards approaches and resources that can help you move forward.

Lesson 8

Practice: Meeting The Fear Of Moving Forward

This lesson gives you an embodied practice for meeting the part of you that feels afraid of stepping into something new. Instead of pushing fear away, you’ll be invited to notice its sensations, acknowledge the protective part with care, and explore reassuring possibilities and resources. The aim is to move with yourself, not leave any part of you behind.

Lesson 9

Stop Making The Task Bigger

Sometimes procrastination begins when we unknowingly make a task much bigger than it needs to be. We add extra steps, higher expectations, more things to research or prepare, and perhaps even turn one simple job into an entire to-do list. This can happen through enthusiasm and good intentions, but the growing scale and complexity can overwhelm our capacity to act, leaving us unsure where to begin. In this lesson, you'll learn to recognise when you're expanding a task beyond what's needed, and how to bring it back to something clear, manageable and doable. Discover how defining what actually needs to be done, reducing unnecessary complexity, and choosing an achievable next action can help you build real capacity, develop practical skills, and get things done.

Lesson 10

Build Your Own Procrastination Toolkit

You’ve explored plenty of possibilities; now it’s time to gather what actually works for you. Learn to notice and record your own evidence, recognise the small signs that a strategy is helping, and create an easy-to-revisit toolkit. It doesn’t have to be elaborate, and it doesn’t have to work perfectly every time. Your toolkit is also something that can change and grow with you.

Lesson 11

Begin

Congratulations on making space to understand yourself and advocate for what you need. This final lesson isn’t another set of techniques: it’s an invitation to trust that getting stuck is not the end of the story. You can return to the course whenever you need it, and you can always begin again, from where you are.