#87: What Rory Vaden Taught Me About Why My Dream Keeps Waiting

Have you ever ended a week knowing your dream didn't move — and you're not even sure why? You weren't scrolling all day. You weren't being careless. You were handling real things for real people. And somehow the thing that matters most to you got buried under all of it.

That's what Rory Vaden calls priority dilution, and it's the one type of procrastination most of us never see coming. In this episode, I'm breaking down all three types of procrastination from his book Take the Stairs, then going deep on the one that's most likely getting in your way right now. I'll also share the inbox metaphor that shifted how I think about my own attention, and four steps I'm using to protect my dreams without guilt.

3 Key Takeaways From This Episode:

1️⃣ The realization that every interruption felt reasonable in the moment, and that’s exactly what makes this so hard to see.

2️⃣ You get to choose your focus and deliberately put your dream at the top.

3️⃣ Permission to protect your dream time without having to earn it, announce it, or justify it to anyone.

Resources From This Episode:
Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success

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Transcript

Speaker 3 0:01

You're never too busy, too tired, too old, or too anything to pursue your dreams. Welcome to the Distracted Dreamer Podcast, where you'll learn how to move all those never ending distractions aside and chase your dreams with confidence.

0:22

Well, hello my friend. I'm your host, Carlene. Welcome back to The Distracted Dreamer, and if you're new here, I am so glad that you found us. First, I have a question for you. Have you signed up for my new newsletter yet? It's called The Tuesday Letter, and it's totally free, and I share things that are going on in mid-life for me and for you that I don't share here on the podcast. So if you wanna be part of that conversation, just go sign up at coachcarlene.com/newsletter, or the link is in the show notes. But make sure you grab that, and I'll be showing up in your inbox every Tuesday, okay? All right, let's get started with today's episode, and I wanna kick us off with a quick reflection. I want you to think about last week. So just pause for a moment and think about last week. And what I want you to think about is, did you do anything about your dream? Did you work on it at all? Did you think about it at all? Even one small thing, did you do anything about your dream? If the answer is no, I want you to stay with me because I don't think it's what you think it is, there's nothing wrong. And if your answer was yes, first of all, good for you, but I want you to stay anyways because what I'm about to share is going to change how you see the moments that you do show up and why some of them might still not be moving the needle the way that you hoped it would. So today, we are talking about the P word, procrastination, and I'm not talking about the version that you learned in a time management book from the 1990s. I'm talking about the one that's quietly stealing your dreams right now while you're being incredibly productive. But before we get there, I wanna give credit where credit is due. I've been sitting with Rory Vaden's book, Take the Stairs, and he has this framework around procrastination that I can't stop thinking about in the context of our lives, specifically women in midlife, where we are chasing real, meaningful dreams. And so that's what we're gonna talk about, the three types of procrastination and which one is getting in your way right now. And then I'm gonna give you the four simple steps that have helped me to choose myself and my dreams with no guilt, without having to choose everyone else or myself, but choosing both in a way that really fits me in this season let's dive into his work. Rory Vaden says there are three distinct types of procrastination, and I think it really matters because most of us have been treating this like it's one thing, like one big problem to fix, when these three different types of procrastination, they aren't the same at all. So the first one is what he calls classic procrastination. This is the one that we all know. You consciously delay doing something that you know you should do. You know you should work on your book, or that you should sign up for that class, or you should send that email to explore a new direction you wanna go in. And you just, well, you don't. You scroll instead, or you watch another episode, or you say, "I'll get to it tomorrow," fully knowing that tomorrow you're just gonna say it again, "I'll get to it tomorrow." classic procrastination is the intentional kind. It's the kind of procrastination where you know that you are doing it Now, the second type of procrastination is what he calls creative avoidance, and this is much sneakier. Rory says it's unconscious. You're not choosing to skip your dream, you're just filling your day with other things, you're being useful. The house needs to be cleaned before you can think. The inbox needs to be managed first, or you need to research just a little bit more before you're really ready, and the day ends, and somehow, well, the dream didn't happen. So creative avoidance, it looks like productivity. In fact, if you've been with me for a while, you know I call this productive procrastination. You do anything and everything except the thing you should be doing. You trick your brain by staying busy. So if you're busy, it's okay. It feels like you're being responsible. But Rory says it's actually a defense mechanism. It's a way that your brain is protecting you from sitting down with the thing that matters, and possibly failing at it. So you stay too busy to find out. And you know what's so odd about this is I never connected the possibility of failing as part of this, but after I was thinking about it, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is so true." I could see that pattern in my life. So I don't know if you can also feel that. But we're gonna move on to the third type because the third type is where I want us to spend our time today this is the one Rory says is capturing the chronic overachievers, the people who are doing all the things, checking all the boxes, genuinely working hard from the moment they wake up, and still somehow their most important priorities are left incomplete at the end of the day. He calls this third kind of procrastination priority delusion. So priority delusion, this is what happens when you end the day with your most significant thing still undone. And that didn't happen because you didn't try, and it didn't happen because you were checked out. It happened because of interruption, because of other things, things that felt real and urgent and very necessary. They kept showing up, and like you always do, you handled them because that's what you do. Just sit with that for a second. Because for a lot of us, that's not a procrastination story we recognize in ourselves. Procrastination sounds like watching TV when you should be working. Rory says priority delusion, it affects the do-gooders, the people who check things off a list, the people who are genuinely trying, the ones who are always responding, always showing up, always handling the next thing. They've been busy since the moment they woke up, and the dream is sitting exactly where they left it Now, here's a metaphor that really made me get this. Think about how most people organize their email box. Think about what your inbox looks like. The most recent message is at the top, right? And that's how we're wired to work. Whatever just arrived gets our attention first. But if you ask any entrepreneur or any woman who has figured out how to protect what matters most, she will tell you, the most recent request is almost never the most important one. Almost never. And yet, we literally organize our days the same way. Whatever's loudest, whatever just pinged, whatever someone else needs right now, that goes to the top. That gets handled first. And the thing we actually plan to do, the thing that matters most to us, it keeps getting pushed down. That's priority delusion. Your attention is being sorted the wrong way, and nobody told you to do it differently. So what does this look like for a woman in midlife? Let's say you've been wanting to take a watercolor class, or maybe to start the business, or to take the trip, or to apply for the program. You've had the idea for months, mm, maybe even years, and every week you intend to make one move on it. Then your adult kid calls and needs you. Your mom has a doctor's appointment, and she needs someone to come. Or the house needs something, or your partner needs something, or your job needs something, or a friend is going through something, and you are the person she calls. And handling all of that, that's not wrong. That's not avoidance. But at the end of the week, your dream got pushed to next week again. And here's what makes priority delusion so hard to catch. You don't feel bad about it, because what you chose instead, it felt important, because it was important. You weren't scrolling through Instagram, you were living your life. And yet your dream didn't move. So this is where so many of us live. We are in this constant triage of a life that is full, and the inbox is sorted by what just arrived. And the dream that came in a long time ago, it isn't loud, it doesn't follow up with you, it doesn't send you a reminder. It keeps getting buried deeper and deeper. And I think that priority dilution has an extra layer for women in midlife. For most of our adult lives, the interruptions were the job. I mean that literally. When the kids were young, responding to their needs was the work. Being available was the primary task. The caregiving, the coordination, the being the one who holds it all together, that was the priority, and we got very, very good at it But the problem is that the identity stuck even when the season changed. So now the kids may be grown. Your daily responsibilities have genuinely shifted, but the wiring is still the same. Something comes up, you respond. Someone needs something, you go. If there's a gap, you fill it. Your nervous system is trained to sort incoming requests to the top of the list because for decades that was the right move. And your dream, which requires you to be intentional, to protect time that nobody else scheduled for you, keeps losing to a lifetime of being the person who shows up. There is like a groove that's like worn really deep in how you manage your attention, and that groove, it doesn't shift just because the season did. That's a pattern, And patterns can change. So let's talk about what to actually do. Rory's core idea is this, you have to decide in advance what your most significant priority is and protect it before the interruptions begin. Not instead of the interruptions, before them. This is not about not being there for the people you love or neglecting other responsibilities in your life. This is about doing both, but it's time to do it differently. So here's how I translate this for our lives. These are the four steps that I've been using that I mentioned at the beginning of this conversation. The first thing to do is to name it. What is the one thing, not the 10 things, not your someday list. What is the one thing that if you made one move on it this week, you would feel it? Name it, write it down, pull it out of the nebulous someday space, and make it really specific. So don't say, "I want to work on my art." No. What specifically? Say, "I'm going to buy the watercolor set I've been looking at and sit down for 30 minutes on Saturday morning." See how specific that is? That's contained and it's dated, which leads me to step two, which is to block it. The dream time goes on the calendar before anything else does. Not in the leftover slots, not in, "I'll get to it if I have a chance." It gets real time. It gets a start time and an end time. And when something comes up, because something always does, you have to treat that block the way you'd treat a doctor's appointment. You don't just let it disappear. You move it forward. Reschedule it the same day if you can, because this is the thing that keeps your dream from going to the bottom of the inbox every single week. It already has a home before the week begins. All right, step three is to recognize the pattern, not just the moment. Priority dilution is sneaky because each interruption on its own is justifiable Any one of them was a reasonable thing to respond to, right? The problem is that it happens every week. The dream is always the thing that moves. Your name is never at the top of the list. Instead of asking yourself, like, on a Friday at the end of the week why you haven't worked on your dream, look at the last month. Has it moved at all? Well, whatever you're seeing there, that's the information, and once you can see the pattern, you can make a different choice. Okay, step four is to manage the guilt, and this is a big one for women and women in mid-life. And Rory actually says this, "Time management isn't just logical. It's emotional." And he's right. For a lot of us, the block was on the calendar, and then someone needs us during that time, and we feel that pull to say yes anyways. And it's not because we forgot what our intention was around our dreams. It's because it feels really selfish to hold that line. So I wanna say this clearly. Protecting your dream, it is not selfish. It is the most intentional thing that you can do for yourself in this season. You don't have to announce it to anybody. You don't have to justify it to anyone. You just have to hold the line, one block, one week at a time What does this mean? The dreams that you hold, they can be really different from the dreams that others have. So you might be working toward something creative, maybe something around writing or painting or music or a craft that you put down 20 years ago. Or maybe you're working towards something professional or a career change. Maybe you have a business idea. Maybe you're thinking about going back to school. Or maybe it's a new chapter after the kids have launched. Or you might be working towards something very personal, like getting healthier, maybe traveling, or rebuilding a sense of self that got quiet in all those busy years. Priority dilution touches all of them. It just touches them differently. The creative dream, it loses to the to-do list. The professional dream, it loses to fear, dressed up as I'm not ready yet. And the personal dream, it loses to the belief that it doesn't really count, that it doesn't matter, that you're not worth it, and that it is the last thing on the list. But here's what's the same across all of them. Your dream doesn't announce itself. It doesn't follow up. It doesn't reschedule itself. It waits for you to choose it. Your life is full, and full lives don't naturally leave room for the thing that matters most to you, not unless you put it there on purpose, not unless you move it to the top of the inbox before the day begins Now, I get it. It's not that you don't care about your dreams. You care deeply, but you've been the one showing up in a very hard way for a real demanding life. And somewhere in all of that, the dream has been sitting quietly, and it's just waiting for you. And priority dilution is a focus problem, and focus is something you get to choose. This week, do one thing. Identify the most significant thing you can move on in the next seven days, and give it a time, a specific time. Put it on the calendar before anything else goes there. Let's just say this week, Tuesday at 9:00 or Saturday morning, whenever it is for you. And if something interrupts it, because something will, move it forward. Don't cancel it. Don't ignore it. Move it. Your dream just needs to be at the top of the inbox for a little while, and you can do that. I know you can. And I hope when you look at procrastination through this lens, it helps you see that you have a choice. And if you're looking for permission to choose you and your dreams, then consider this permission granted. So tell me, what's moving to the top of your inbox? Hit the link in the show notes to text me. I read and I respond to every single one. I love hearing from you. And as always, your dreams are waiting, and the time is now. And I will be here to welcome you to the next episode the second you hit play. Bye for now

Carlene 19:24

oh, and one more thing. This is the legal language. You know, the stuff that the lawyers put together, and they say that I need to read this to you. So here we go. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I'm not a licensed therapist. This podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professionals. Got it? Good. I will see you in the next episode.