You might believe that your entrepreneurial success is about coming up with great ideas or doing the unimaginable, but most success is the result of doing the same boring things again and again.
It’s doing the mundane things that no one wants to do.
Whether it’s losing weight, building a business, getting more clients, or saving millions of dollars, the process is largely boring, monotonous, and unenjoyable.
In most cases, you already know what needs to be done. The challenge is getting yourself to actually do it.
Dealing effectively with procrastination is the challenging process of getting yourself to do all the things you don’t want to do. It’s the practice for learning how to become successful!
If you can win over your procrastination, you can accomplish just about anything.
Consider the process of procrastinating:
1. You think about doing something.
Isn’t that how you start a task? You think about doing it.
2. You notice how it feels.
Every thought generates an emotion or feeling. When it feels good, we complete the task right away. That’s why it’s very easy to leave the sofa to get a bag of chips. It’s not as easy to get off the couch to go pull weeds in the summer heat.
3. If it feels bad, you don’t it.
You have your own consistent ways of putting off the task. Do you know what you do when you procrastinate? Make a list of the things you do when you want to avoid a task.
4. When your feeling of putting it off feels worse than your feeling of doing it, you’ll finally take action.
You will eventually file your taxes, take out the trash, make the call, or work on your loan paperwork.
This is a common process. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work well if you’re trying to get ahead in your business or to prevent your life from spiraling into chaos.
Try this alternative method for dealing with your unpleasant tasks:
1. When you feel bad about a task, get excited that you’re being given an opportunity to learn success skills.
This is the moment that separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls. The least successful people are the worst procrastinators. Successful people do the hard things.
2. Take just a minute to sit with your feelings and notice them.
Sit with your discomfort. Close your eyes and begin to breathe slowly. Notice where you physically feel the disturbance. Is it in your head? In your chest? Your gut? Try to relax the area of your body and release all the tension.
3. Spend 5 minutes doing the task you want to avoid.
Anyone can handle just a few minutes. Getting started is always the most difficult part, so become an expert on just getting started! You’ll often find that you will continue beyond your five-minute goal. Always congratulate yourself for lasting at least five minutes.
4. Forgive yourself for failing.
Somedays you win, other days you lose. Working through discomfort and defeating your procrastination is a challenging skill to learn. Don’t give up on yourself; you can do it!
Procrastination is a very human habit. There’s little doubt that its origins were incredibly helpful. Poor decisions could be disastrous 10,000 years ago. Our brains had to be 100% convinced that an idea was worthy of doing before it would even allow us to act.
Doing something today that’s unenjoyable doesn’t make logical sense if it can be put off until another time.
Use Your Procrastination to Succeed
Decide for yourself that right now is the right time. Use your urge to procrastinate as the jet fuel you need for learning to be successful. It will tell you want needs to be done.
