Fear of conflict is about fear of power of your own strength. It's fear of doing irreparable damage, fear that the display is going to escalate. It's "I'm so mad, I can't imagine what I'd do." You might yell at someone and deeply regret it 10 minutes later. Then you'll think, "Oh my goodness, I've said those things, and they're out of the bottle. There's no way of putting them back now."
People who handle conflict well are those who have worked with it a lot and who aren't afraid of it. Conflict is not something that you can get comfortable with in the abstract. You'll never feel comfortable with conflict without engaging in it. Try desensitizing yourself systematically. Start out by having a small conflict with someone who overcharges you in a restaurant - someone who you probably won't ever see again. Move up step by step to prove to yourself that you can handle conflict. No one will end up dead, and you can even talk with the person you've challenged afterwards.
Procrastination has a lot to do with shame. You're putting off something because you feel - rationally or irrationally - that completing the task will lead you to feel shame in one form or another. Your shame will either come from not being able to face the challenge, or from somehow having your expert status in the organization compromised because you failed to deliver.
Procrastinators do finally get the work done, because a deadline looms or the shame of not completing the project outweighs the shame of their work not being good enough. Whatever procrastinators do, they feel that it's not good enough. They envision themselves at the top of the mountain, but they don't want to learn how to climb. They imagine that everybody is watching them learn how to climb a hill. The idea of being in an introductory class is humiliating. They would do anything to avoid that sort of shame. So they never get started, they never learn, and they never take those early steps. Other people take those steps and eventually learn how to climb mountains. The procrastinator's defense is "Well, I could have done that." Or "Well, we lost by a score of 34 to zero, but we didn't do too badly, given that we didn't practice." Since procrastinators feel like they fail all the time anyway, it's less painful to fail if they never really try.
The first step toward overcoming procrastination is recognizing that shame is the demon in the closet. It's not that your skills aren't up to par. It's that you're avoiding a very particular emotion that has grown out of proportion within your unconscious mind. The way to cure that shame is to stay with it and to experience it. Pay attention to how you're feeling, and catch yourself when you're rationalizing in order to make yourself feel better. Don't say to yourself, "Well, if I complete the project and it's not perfect, that's okay, because no one is perfect." Stay with the shame for 45 seconds. Then do something else. Turn away from it. You're gradually inoculating yourself against the pain. You have shame in your bloodstream now, so it doesn't seem so foreign or so demonic. Now you can tolerate a little shame. Feeling embarrassed is part of being alive.
In "Fast Company", January 2001