Struggling with procrastination? Discover practical ways to overcome it and boost your confidence in this inspiring podcast episode.
Welcome to This Week’s Episode
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to this week's You Are Destined For Greatness, coming to you this afternoon out here at my hitching post with my good friend Wimpy. This is my three-year-old gilding, and we're on a training schedule.
We are on a training schedule where we ride several hours a week because we have goals for the future of competition and performance and standards and goals that we're going for.
Now, it's kind of hot today. It's kind of hot this afternoon in the Las Vegas sun, and I kind of had the thought that maybe I'd just put off this ride and procrastinate it for a while and just maybe pick up later when it wasn't so hot.
Of course, in Las Vegas, who knows when that could be.
Why We Need to Talk About Procrastination
And, but procrastination is exactly what I want to talk to you about today, and here's why.
A lot of times you might have the idea that, a lot of times you might have the idea that procrastinating just means that you're lazy. You might feel bad about it, because here's the thing about procrastination: we all do it to some degree or another. And the other thing about it is that when we do it, none of us feel good for having done it.
So that right there, a) we all do it, b) none of us feelgood for having done it, is enough for me to say maybe we ought to take a little bit closer look at this and do it less.
So, this week on the podcast, I encourage you to checkout the podcast. This week on the podcast, I have four steps to lower or eliminate procrastination. I'm going to tell you what they are, and here they are.
Understand It’s Not Laziness
First of all, just know that there’s, it doesn't mean you're lazy, it's part of the human experience.
We’re trying to, our default brain has us seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy. When we do that, when we come up against something that's uncomfortable, we want to put it off, and we go for something that's easier in the moment. It's just the natural way of our default brain setting, and that's the way it is.
A lot of times we're afraid that if we do do something, it will make us look bad. We won't be able to do it. We'll have a fear of failure. Somebody will judge us for how well we did it. It won't be good enough, and so we don't even try. Or we get in it and we never finish it because we're afraid, we have this perfectionism going on to where we don't want to do it.
Those are some of the reasons why we do it, but it doesn't matter why we do it. What's important is that we do less of it, because when we do procrastinate, it sends messages to our mind saying, "Hey, you don't do what you're going to say," and our future self doesn't appreciate us procrastinating either.
Step One: Calendar It
So, here's the first two. Number one is to calendar it.Write it down so you have something to look at, okay? Put the task into your calendar. It's a little bit easier to say no to something that's only in your mind and not on the calendar, okay? So, that's step one.
Step Two: Recognize When Procrastination Happens & Refocus
Step two is, when it gets to it, okay, it felt pretty good to put it in the calendar but just know that when you get time to do it, you're not gonna wanna do it if it's difficult. It's just going to be natural and normal. You're going to be looking for other ways to justify not doing it. Other things that are important, other things that you need to be doing, something that you want to be doing, you're going to be looking for everything but what you said you were going to do.
When that moment happens, now's the time to first of all recognize it and then focus on future you. And visualize, try to bring the reward that's going to be in the future back to that moment right there.
Importance of Squashing Procrastinating
Those are two of the four things in this week's podcast. Like I said, I encourage you to check out the full podcast. It's worth it. It's time well spent.
And I'm going to get back to my ride here because it's in my calendar, and we didn't procrastinate it today, and I'm happy about that.
And I know that as you procrastinate less over all the hundreds of decisions that you have, that we have to make every day, that you're going to increase the way that you feel about you. And that is going to increase your capacity to love and to be able to give support to the people that you care most about.
And you know why that's important? Because You Are Destined For Greatness.
