How To End Procrastination Forever

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Summary:

• Procrastination literally just means that you associate more pain with taking action than you do with doing nothing. 
• Smart entrepreneurs use pain instead of getting used by pain. 
• Stop having a short term focus and start adopting a long term focus. 
• Short term pleasure often leads to long term pain. Short term pain often leads to long term pleasure. 
• If you want to finally take action, link up enough emotional consequences to not taking action (details in the training). 
• Watch the video for the full training! 
• Procrastinators, this is made just for you!!! 

Inspirational Quotes From The Episode:

Transcript:

Welcome to The Path To Mindset Mastery! My name is Brad Bizjack! I’m a mindset strategist and coach, inspirational speaker, and creator of Appreciation Academy and I help online business owners breakthrough all the negative self-talk holding you back from your dreams so you can finally see the success you deserve!

And I'm curious if you ever struggle sitting on the couch knowing exactly what you need to do or want in your life to change, but not having the drive, the mojo, the energy to do it?...

That is exactly what I went through for a really long time. I remember seeing my laptop staring at me going “Bro, change your life!” Literally… like the laptop was talking to me, it was like telling me to change my life…and I had all the tools I needed to change my life. I saw all these successful people and I had tons of them in my network that I could reach out to for help.

And I remember not being able to take action for whatever reason. I was watching Breaking Bad or Friends or whatever was on Netflix that day. And I just didn't care that I wasn't taking action. But at the same time, I cared so much, and I felt so down…so depressed…so useless.

And I used to call them my “bad days” and then I got pissed off at myself for being depressed, pissed off at myself for being less than I could really be. And it wasn't fair to my future!

So why was I procrastinating?!

Why do you procrastinate in some ways in your business?

That's what today is about.  Today is about mastering procrastination!

Procrastination can appear in your life for a ton of reasons:

• Fear of success
• Fear of failure
• Fear of judgment
• Fear of the unknown
• Perfectionism
• Over-planning
• Low self-esteem
• Lack of purpose or direction

All of those things will create procrastination. And what it really boils down to is…procrastination is fear!

And fear is the anticipation of pain.

So, before we go into how to do this, we need to realize that hesitation breeds fear. We just need to do it because action cures fear, inaction breeds fear!

Any attempts to protect yourself from problems actually creates more problems.

Think about it like a phone call you need to make to apologize to someone, but you don't call…you procrastinate. Well, what happens?! Nothing. That idea of making that phone call gets more and more intense, almost like it becomes more and more difficult to do it and then we procrastinate more and that in itself just creates more problems.  It proves the idea. That hesitation breeds more fear, but what would happen if you just rip the Band-Aid off and call right away?!

The fear would have subsided!

You would've felt FREE!

The situation would have been resolved right away!

Action kills fear and what happens is we come up with elaborate stories and reasons why we have to wait. Right?!

“Oh, I'll just start fresh on my workout in nutrition plan on Monday cause then that's when I'll be able to plan my meals by.” Right?! “I feel like on Monday I can get a clean start.” Right?!

That's not fair to you!  How does it even logically make sense to get a start on Monday when literally you could just eat a vegetable today? One of the ways that I built my Appreciation Academy course was that I would do different trainings on social media and webinars. That's how I built my course. I did different trainings in public and I would rationalize to myself before I started really getting into it that I needed to learn more skills before I could do that.

So, but that's not true! It's just an elaborate way to procrastinate. Right?!

Have you ever done that?

Have you ever come up with a complex story or explanation of why you can't do something, and you know it's bullshit, but you still say it and you even go out of your way to make that story true?!

So, you don't have to act!  You know exactly what I'm talking about where you literally try to prove that story is right, and you find all the reasons to make it happen, so you don't have to act. We know this, right?! We logically know this stuff, but for some reason we can't get ourselves to change. And we know that if we wait until the right time, you'll be waiting for the rest of your life! You know that tomorrow…next week…someday…all that, they're just really saying the word NEVER.

And it means you'll never do it.

And sometimes, maybe those words are toxic.  Someday is a cop out for the word ‘never’.

And maybe a giant gateway to regret. Let me repeat that.

‘Someday’ is a cop out for the word ‘never’ and might be a giant gateway to regret!

Saying the words like “I can’t” …It's not fair to YOU!

What if I had said that for creating my course?! It’s not fair to my future! It's not fair to my clients that I serve!  So, how do we use this?

Well, we all procrastinate because we have fear and we've talked about it in other podcast episodes, fear is the anticipation of pain.

So, what needs to happen is you need to learn how to use pain. Everything human beings do is either stemmed by the need to avoid pain or to gain pleasure.

Everything!  You watching this video, it's the same thing.  Or listening to this podcast. If it's on your phone, it's the same thing. And a lot of people don't recognize the horrible cost of the status quo because we live in anticipation of pain.

If you live craving certainty, living in anticipation of what could go wrong, you don't even realize what it's costing you!  It’s not just protecting you from what could go wrong, but it's keeping away everything good in your life!

We know we need to act because of the anticipation of pain, but on the flip side… Have you ever been in an experience of putting something off for so long and then suddenly you felt like you just had to get it done?

And an example would be studying for a test. You put it off for weeks and weeks and weeks until the night before the exam.  And you say, you know what, “Shit, I gotta do this!” because what happened? The pain of not taking action became greater than the pain of doing it. That's exactly why it changed, because you knew the consequences of not getting a good grade on that exam were greater than the consequences of what would happen if you studied for it, right?

This is where a lot of people mess it up. They have a short-term approach to success instead of a long-term approach. Tony Robbins says that the secret to success is learning how to use pain and pleasure instead of having pain and pleasure use you. If you do that, you're in control of your life. If you don't, your life controls you. So my point is if we link enough emotional pain to a behavior or an emotional pattern we get into, we will avoid it at all costs.

But we can use this!

So, think about exercise… This is what a lot of people link massive pain to. Why? Because they have to think about (what a lot of people make it seem like) they make it seem like this huge deal that is going to take a bunch of massive steps.  It's going to take going across town to a gym and getting sold a membership and getting into the locker room and getting changed and get into a sweaty machine, not knowing how to use the machine. Then even getting sold a membership drive back across town. All these insane things go into it and when you look at all the steps in your mind that it takes to go into a gym, your brain goes, “Whoa, let's not do that!” Right?!

So, we're essentially linking pain to working out, even though we know it would be good for us! Right?!

But thinking about how fit people view it… think about the difference in their mind about it. People that like to exercise, to sculpt their bodies and experience pain daily. Why did they do that?! They've converted the discomfort that they feel while exercising into pleasure and link more pain to not working out (or to disease). Right?! More pain linked to that then to eating healthy. They see it as more painful to be overweight without self-confidence and tired all the time instead of the effort to go to the gym.

So, my point is that it's how you use pain and pleasure that will determine the action you take. So most of us have an instinctual reaction to pain and pleasure, right? It's not calculated. It's just something we do. And most of us are more motivated by pain than we are by pleasure. So here's an example:

If I were to say, “Would you rather work harder to save up $20,000 or to protect $20,000 from getting stolen from you?” Which would you choose? For most people (not everyone), but most people, they choose to protect $20,000 from getting stolen from them because they are reacting more to pain than they are to pleasure.

So, the problem that most people do is they don't consciously choose this. They just go with their gut and don't choose a long-term approach. Most people use short-term thinking instead of long-term thinking. Most of us think pleasure now instead of pain now. So think about it. The short-term pain of making the right decision typically leads to long-term pleasure, right? Short term pain. So exercising, eating healthy, typically leads to longevity, long-term pleasure, feeling healthy, living longer, right?

But if you choose short-term pleasure, that cheeseburger (whatever it is) you're going to experience long-term pain, heart disease, right?! That's what most people do!

That's what they experience.  There's a quote (I forgot who it's by), but it says “Easy choices = hard life, hard choices = easy life”  So, if you've ever tried to make a change in your life, but you've procrastinated, it just means that the level of pain for failing to change is not intense enough. That's it!

If you can find a strong enough reason to change, you can change anything!  In a single second that you've been failing at for years, you can change it!

The greatest leverage you can create is failing to live up to the standards for your life that you have. Isn't that true?!

If you look back at your life when you're 85 years old, isn't the most painful thing to not live a life that you really wanted to live?!

So how do we solve procrastination?

Well, procrastination is really simple!  It just means we have you taking action is more painful than doing nothing and we'll experience less pain by doing nothing. So the simplest way to put it for you is to start linking consequences to not taking action.

Start linking consequences to not taking action!

And don't just say, “Oh, I won't get it done…”but you need to actually think worst case scenario here.

What I have my clients do is I want you to think about what happens if you don't take action emotionally six months from now and you're going to write out all the consequences of that.  You're going to say, “What are the emotional consequences in my life and not just emotional, financial, mental, spiritual, anything, consequences in my life two years from now, then five years from now, then 10 then 20?!” and you're going to do that for each one.

Think about the long-term consequences that you will face, and when you look at that, you're going to realize the fear of loss is so much stronger because what you might be missing out on is a little bit of TV time or being judged, right?

That's what you're missing out on or that's what you're getting away from by not taking action. But if you actually link up emotional consequence to this, then what's going to happen is you're going to look at these situations to go…

“Oh my gosh, I am never going to live a life of freedom if I don't take action right now!”

“I'm going to drive my husband or wife away from staying at this bullshit job and being so sad all the time and depressed all the time about work that doesn't fulfill me!”

Or “You know what?! I'm going to have heart disease!”

“I'm going to have a stroke or a heart attack if I don't start taking care of my body!”

You realize the long-term consequences!  The long-term pain from choosing short-term pleasure is so much greater than the short-term pain for long-term pleasure.

Does that make sense?

So, my homework for you coming out of this podcast today is to choose one main action step that you've been procrastinating on and go through that link consequence of not taking action.  What does it cost you? Six months…two years…five years…10 years…20 years from now and get deep, get dark and see if that pain is more intense than the pain that you currently associate to taking action!

And that's how you beat procrastination! You link consequences to NOT taking action. You can do this for any part of your life, I promise! So, I hope this was helpful today.

Thank you so much for tuning into the Path to Mindset Mastery!

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I'll see you next week.