No, You Are NOT LAZY!

LISTEN, I'M THE FIRST PERSON TO BE HARD ON MYSELF.

- STEPHANIE DOLGOFF

I chide myself for flaking on an appointment, screwing up a travel plan, having cheese and crackers for dinner rather than a prepped healthy meal. But one thing I have realized is that, imperfect though I am, I am not lazy. Neither are you. None of us is.

This is true no matter how long your to-do list is, regardless of how many workouts you've missed, and whether or not you've updated your LinkedIn, learned to meditate, or volunteered to be class chaperone - it's true even if you haven't called your dad and so he's trash-talking you to his third wife. Perhaps you're reading this on your phone with your feet up instead of powering through that heap of obligations, but even if so, you're still not lazy.You're probably not even as big a procrastinator as you think you are.

"I don't believe 'lazy' is a thing," says Andie Coller, a personal and professional coach in the Washington, DC, area and a researcher at the Interpersonal Relationships Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is also a dear friend of mine who has helped me unpack the reasons it feels as if I am always behind. "I just think there's always a reason-one we may not understand - that we can't do something we want or need to do," she says. "And 'lazy' is an unhelpful way to describe someone who is feeling unmotivated or unwilling or unable to do the amount of stuff somebody else thinks they ought to do."