Karen Pryor, writing in Shoot the dog:

I went through Werner Erhard's "est" course, a program with overtones of hucksterism but that, from a training standpoint, I found to be an ingenious and often brilliant application of shaping and reinforcement. The program was called, rightly I think, the Training. The leader was called the Trainer. The shaping goal was improved self-awareness, and the principal reinforcer was not the Trainer's responses but the nonverbal behavior of the whole group.

To develop group behavior as a reinforcer, the 250 people in the group were told to applaud after every speaker, whether they felt like applauding or not. Thus from the beginning the shy were encouraged, the bold rewarded, and all contributions, whether insightful or inane, were acknowledged by the group.

At first the applause was dutiful and no more. Soon it became genuinely communicative—not of degrees of enjoyment, as in the theater, but of shades of feeling and meaning. For example, there was in my training class, as I expect there is in every est group, an argumentative man who frequently took issue with what the Trainer said. When this happened for the third or fourth time, the Trainer started arguing back. Now, it was apparent to all that from a logical standpoint, the argumentative man was perfectly correct. But as the argument wore on and on, no one else in the room cared who was right. All 249 of us just wished he'd shut up and sit down.

The rules of the game—shaping rules, really—did not permit us to protest or to tell him to shut up. But gradually the massive silence of the group percolated into his awareness. We watched him realize that no one cared if he was right. Maybe being right was not the only game in town. Slowly he sputtered into silence and sat down. The group instantly erupted in a huge burst of applause, expressive of sympathy and understanding as well as of hearty relief—a very powerful positive reinforcer of the illumination the arguer had just received.

This kind of training occurrence, in which the important events are behavioral and thus nonverbal, is often maddeningly difficult to explain to an outsider. Erhard, like a Zen teacher, often resorts to aphorisms; in the case of the arguer described above, the est saying is "When you're right, that's what you get to be: right." That is, not necessarily loved, or anything else nice: just right. If I I were to quote that aphorism at a party when somebody is being bombastic, another est graduate might laugh—and indeed, any good modern trainer might laugh—but most hearers might assume I was moronic or drunk. Good training insights do not necessarily lend themselves to verbal explanation.

Direct marketer Dan Kennedy on Erhard and EST: (Source)

In the 70's, when I asked Werner Erhard to sum up his personal growth thing, EST, he said "We preach independence but breed dependence."

Given our difference on opinions, I think we managed to conduct this dialogue with a fair amount of decorum. However, I don't we are going to have any agreement. I have to go with the science.

You give any group of people a perfectionism or fear of failure test along with almost any procrastination scale and you get pretty much anywhere from a negative to at best a very weak positive correlation. And if you control for self-efficacy or self-confidence, that weak correlation disappears. Science does not back you up.

Similarly, characterizing impulsiveness as a fudge factor, well that is just being silly. A simple Google Scholar search will show over 45,000 citations on the term, including the ground breaking work by George Ainslie. It really is a measure of system 1 heavy decision making, something that you yourself accept. In fact, there is enough science on it that I'm conducting a meta-analytic review. And, unlike fear of failure, you find a very strong correlation between impulsiveness and procrastination.

Now characterizing every technique that science has produced as not up to your standards is a little harsh. The book is a review of the literature. Essentially, researchers in peer-reviewed studies have conducted a variety of treatments, like stimulus control (which activates the cue sensitive system 1), and found them very effective at reducing procrastination. I organize and report what works. Since there is a thousands ways to implement stimlus control, you can describe the general methodology, report its effectiveness and give a few examples of how it can be used. If you know a better way to convery this information, I'm all ears. Of note, this is indeed an environmental fix to procrastination, one of several and not what you characterize as "don't think that way or think something else." Again, you come across as not having read the book.

On the other hand, I think you have been given pretty much a free ride up to this point. You make a lot of suggestions that are inconsistent with our present knowledge of the field (e.g., fear of failure). You make a quite bold claim that you have techniques that with one application will cure procrastinators, presumably by focusing solely on the expectancy or self-efficacy aspect of motivation. We can all make claims. Show me some peer-reviewed research (please, not clincial case studies).

On the longshot you might be right and have all the magic bullets, do some experimental research on it and publish it in a respectable journal. I would welcome the correction. I have a lot of research interests and would be happy to be able to focus on other things. Personally, I don't think you actually are going to do it. Right now, you have the warm belief that the rest of us studying this field are effectively a bunch of second rates as "science has not actually caught up to the in-field knowledge of people like myself." If you actually do the research (with proper controls, like accounting for the placebo effect which runs rampant through self-efficacy type clinical interventions), you run the risk of having a very self-satisfying set of beliefs turned into flimsy illusions. Do you really think you are willing to take that risk? Given human nature, I'm sceptical but would love to be proven wrong.

The amount of will-power or self-regulatory strength that is used up when making choices depends on the type of choice being made. Autonomous choices don't result in ego-depletion. If you're doing things you want to do, things you like doing, your brain doesn't have to expend 'will-power'.

Choice and Ego-Depletion: The Moderating Role of Autonomy

The self-regulatory strength model maintains that all acts of self-regulation, self-control, and choice result in a state of fatigue called ego-depletion. Self-determination theory differentiates between autonomous regulation and controlled regulation. Because making decisions represents one instance of self-regulation, the authors also differentiate between autonomous choice and controlled choice. Three experiments support the hypothesis that whereas conditions representing controlled choice would be egodepleting, conditions that represented autonomous choice would not. In Experiment 3, the authors found significant mediation by perceived self-determination of the relation between the choice condition (autonomous vs. controlled) and ego-depletion as measured by performance.

"While this may not be practically helpful since one can do little about one's IQ,"

I think you can change one's IQ. I have believed that ever since I read Dweck.