Procrastination...putting off what you can do today until tomorrow...7 years, 5 months, and 2 days later you’re wondering why you never started that book. It would have been done by now and you would be reaping rewards. Writing would be your full-time pleasure now. You can see yourself sitting on garden patio of your dream home surrounded by towering palm trees and luxurious flowers. You look across Pacific as ocean air gently blows across your face. The phone rings. Your latest book made Best Seller List. Funny how in regret vision is always bright and sunny, and in procrastination its doom and gloom. You say to yourself, ”No one will ever want to read my book. No one will ever publish my book”. What if you could switch that picture so you are pulled towards vision like it was a magnet. The vision will be there. Why not create it sooner rather than later. Procrastination results in stress, poor health, and regrets that last a lifetime. Taking action leads to fulfillment, life experience, and wisdom. So read on to discover how to break through procrastination, take action, and make things happen.

Step 1- Where in your life are you procrastinating? Is it appropriate decision to delay or irrational postponement? Choose one project that you want to stop procrastinating on.

Step 2- Discover source in order to create a solution. Consider when your car doesn’t start. You look for source of problem. When you find source it is easy to take action to make repair. Look behind procrastination to find what is stopping you. It may be an unpleasant task, lack of interest, someone else’s goal, a large overwhelming project, fear, poor time management, or indecision. When you discover source you are one step closer to making a change. Congratulations!

This article is about another way of looking at things I hope will be helpful. “Dysfunction” refers to something that doesn’t function way it should; something that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. “Dys” means “bad” or “difficult.”

Now, unless you’re a flaming extravert with a staff of 10 to help you, it may well be “difficult.” Whether it will be “bad” is another matter.

Thank heavens for Positive Psychology! Barring extremes, why not assume your holiday is functioning normally, that is, like everyone else’s – it isn’t perfect, but it’s functioning just fine.

How so? The reason we talk about “peace on earth, goodwill to men” at Christmas is because it’s an ideal. We pray for it because it exists so rarely, in brief moments only, or maybe a state of heart. It’s song angels sing.

Let’s put a new spin on this by looking at function of a family. The function of a family is to nurture, but it’s also about learning to relate and deal with emotions. It’s about imperfect you learning how to co-exist with imperfect others in an imperfect world, and it’s proving ground for getting out into real world. It’s where we learn many life lessons.

Some of them are what to do when we don’t get what we want, how to fight and make up, how to share and how to get our share, how to comfort or soothe someone else or ourselves, what to do when other people are angry or when we are, and how to keep loving someone when we really don’t like what they’re doing. In other words how to deal with ins and outs of interpersonal relating with resilience.

And what better place to experience this than at family get-together? It will all be there. It always is.

The only totally calm, uneventful Christmas I participated in, where there were no tiffs and sputters and frustrations, everyone was numbed from a recent tragedy and simply going through motions. We could’ve been in bed asleep, except we were sitting up, walking around, and talking. No one had energy for either joy or anger. Perspective did not allow us to be upset that year that gravy was lumpy.

Emotions are energy. They’re part of life. The only thing worse than ones we don’t like, would be having none at all.

But even that was a functional celebration. Grief-stricken, we were together for support, and we were doing what we could about Christmas, which seemed an ugly charade, and some of them will. It worked. It won’t be featured on front cover of “Saturday Evening Post,” painted by Norman Rockwell, but it will remain painted in our hearts.

Positive psychology refuses to focus on what’s wrong; it looks at what’s right, strong, and going well. If your family is together and your sister and brother are fighting again, well didn’t they always? Isn’t that what siblings do? Surely they have sense to temper it a little in light of occasion, but if they don’t, ignore it, send them outside with dogs, use your sense of humor and EQ, and get on with your own celebration.