"How Can I Overcome Procrastination?"

0:00How can I overcome procrastination? Even if I get myself sorted and put in the effort, the moment I get close to results, I can feel my bad habits coming back. >> Yeah, Leila. >> Oh, me? >> The bad habits are returning. The return of the bad habits. >> a procrastinator. However, I think there's three reasons that people tend to procrastinate. Um anxiety, which is the task that you need to do makes you anxious, and so you avoid doing it.

0:27Boredom. It's not The task is not stimulating enough. So, when you think about doing it, there's always something that's more exciting and more stimulating. And rebelliousness, which is somebody else has asked you to do the task, and because of that, or because of some deadline somebody else put on you, whatever, you would like to say [ __ ] it to the man and not do the thing. Um all of those things, I think are solved in the same way, which is um frustration tolerance, which is most of the time when somebody is procrastinating something, it's because they're not good at you could say or not practiced at tolerating the feelings of boredom, anxiety, um or frustration in general.

1:06And so, that is why a lot of people end up procrastinating something, because they don't want to feel the feelings that will occur when they do the work on the thing. So, I think it's good to know which of those you tend to lean into. Like, I would say if there's anything that would ever be for me in my past, it would probably be more of anxiety. I would say now it'd probably be more boredom of just like that's just not stimulating. I don't feel like doing it. Um And then, the next piece to it is like, okay, um if I continue procrastinating this thing, right? Um then you're obviously going to keep reinforcing those habits. So, how do I raise my frustration tolerance? Well, the only way to do that is to decrease your sensitivity in the situation, which is to increase your surface area of exposure to the situation, which is to do the thing.

1:52>> Do more [ __ ] >> So, the best way that I like to tell people to do that is to just um create goals that are incremental of how long you spend doing the thing that you're avoiding or procrastinating. So maybe it's like I procrastinate by you know, I'll start doing the thing and then I start doing something else. Okay, well, let's just do the thing for 40 minutes, then 45, then 50, then 60, whatever it might need to be. The second thing you can do is say you continue to put something off until the last minute.

2:19It's also a common one. Okay, well, tend to typically is that you wait until a day before the thing. It's like could we do three days before the thing, four days before the thing, a week before the thing. So like even with myself, I have things that I don't like to do that are good for me. I have plenty of things right now that I am doing that are not fun, but they are good for me. Like say physical therapy exercises so that I'm not in pain all the time cuz I'm pregnant. The first day I did those, it's like okay, I don't want to [ __ ] do this. It's like I'm just going to do it for 10 minutes.

2:48And it's like okay, I'm going to do it now the next day for 15 minutes. And then the next day I'm going to say I'm going to do one set of each. Give myself small goals because it's almost like building up a tolerance. It's like a muscle. And so if you have atrophied that muscle, you don't just go and bench you know, 300 pounds the next day. It's like we're going to bench 150, then 160, then 165, then 170. So these are just emotional muscles or I would say like soft skill muscles and I think that you have to train them in one way or the other.

3:17>> I think something that I've learned a lot from Layla is that she is able to recognize emotional discomfort and act despite it, meaning we do not need to change our plan. And this is where like [ __ ] the mood, [ __ ] the mood, follow the plan really came from, which is like how you feel and what you do do not need to have any correlation to one another. And so the more you can act in an uncorrelated way to your emotive state, the more likely you will stick with things for extended periods of time past the points of emotional volatility, which ultimately gets you to your goal faster. And so you feel uncomfortable and you feel because of that discomfort you must change something, but the fact that you were uncomfortable is why you should persist.

3:54>> And here's what's really interesting is that a lot of the time people think, "Well, I feel this way or I think this thing, therefore, I don't want to do this thing." Well, you can either say, "Okay, that means that I have to wait until I feel or think differently to do the thing." Or, what I know is that doing the thing actually changes how you think and feel. So, if you start to do the thing, what you'll find is that if you've been procrastinating, is 20 minutes in, 30 minutes in, suddenly you feel like doing the thing. Suddenly it doesn't give you so much anxiety.

4:24Suddenly, because your body is teaching your brain the same way your brain teaches your body. So, it's a two-way system. It can work either way. So, it's like whatever one you got, use that. For me, it's that easier for me to take action. Most of the time, I'm not as good at changing my mind about something. >> If you like this video and you're business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling roadmap that I've used to go from zero to one, zero to 10, and zero to 100 plus. And so, you can click here and you can check it out.

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