The Procrastination. Loop

Good morning, everybody. How are you? Welcome to another Monday Morning Mentor. I am Chad Thibodeaux. So glad to have you guys here with us today. If you guys are watching us on YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or whatever, we welcome you guys. We're also live inside of our MyCAVOO program. Before I get into the teaching today, just some fun stuff. I am coming back from a vacation. You can see I'm a little tan. And so you may think I was like in Florida or the Bahamas. Nope, I was in New England. And apparently the sun shines in New England as well. And even though it was only 70 degrees, we got a nice little suntan, which I was really excited about. But I was able to go to New England, then up to Chicago, went to Calvary, spoke with the Speakpreneur crew. And then spent a few days on vacation there. And now I'm back in Phoenix, Arizona, back at home. It's been a hot minute since I've been in studio, and I'm in studio today getting ready to teach you guys. So I want you guys to grab a pencil and a piece of paper, and we're going to go pretty deep today on a topic, and it's going to be a little bit more philosophical than I typically do, but I think you will dig it, and I think you will love it. So I'm going to go ahead and pause 5 seconds for the editors. And then we'll just jump in into the— we'll jump into the training today. Today I want to talk with you guys about what I call productive procrastination. This is how high achievers stay busy while simultaneously avoiding the work that matters most. You guys know exactly what I'm talking about, right? So the other day I was in the process of writing an chapter in my book and that chapter in my book matters. In fact, it matters a lot because I've got a deadline of a week from Friday from having this transcript of my book sent off to the designer, which means between now and next Friday, I not only have to finish writing it, I mean it's 95% done. I already wrote a beta book, launched the beta book. Now I'm editing the beta book, polishing the beta book, getting it to the editor, etc. So I've got that done, but I've got to get it all redone and then sent to the designer by a week from Friday, because that's when we're going to be going live with the launch. Now that matters most. I've given myself a deadline. I've gone public with it. People know about it. It's a pretty big deal. But for whatever reason, Netflix comes out with a new documentary and I get glued. And then they came out with another little mini documentary and I get glued. And then there's college football. I don't even like college football, but I get glued. And then, you know, Sunday was the NFL game, and so I get, I get glued. And, you know, and then I noticed that there's a slippery spot on my floor in the kitchen. It looks like some grease had gotten down there. And so I'm on my hands and knees and I'm washing and I'm scrubbing it. Then I went to the refrigerator and, you know, man, my refrigerator is a little bit messy. So I get a trash bag and I'm cleaning it out and I'm scrubbing all the stuff. And man, now my refrigerator looks magnificent. And then as I was going back to, begin writing my book, I got a text message and I looked at the text message and my daughter asked me if I had played Wordle and I hadn't so I had to go play Wordle and then after that she goes, oh my gosh, you should check out this new game called Malduko. So I jumped on it. It's like Sudoku but with mice and— or with kittens, excuse me, and that was super fun and that was really addicting. Next thing I know, I started to go write my book at 8 o'clock in the morning and it is now 8 o'clock at night and I really hadn't done anything. But I had stayed busy all the time. And what you have to know about high achievers is we rarely procrastinate by doing nothing. What we do is we procrastinate by doing something that we can control instead of something that could change the outcome, okay? And that distraction matters because it means procrastination can look exactly like a productive day. I mean, I had a super productive day yesterday, But I still procrastinated. And you can answer every email, you can take 6 meetings, you can clean up your CRM, you can make changes to your website, you can improve your slide deck, whatever, research, rewrite an offer, organize your calendar, and you can leave the office or you can finish your day completely exhausted because you worked all day, you accomplished things, you may have even done things that genuinely needed to be done. The question is whether you did the things thing that mattered most. Okay. And so I've been doing a little bit of research and a little bit of study on this thing that we call procrastination. Okay. And I started looking at this procrastination less as a problem of laziness and more as a trade that we make often without realizing that we're making it. And the reason why I'm bringing this up is is last week I was in Boston and I was hanging out with a high achiever and this particular person was asking me a question. I said, you know what? I'm just lazy. And they looked at me and said, lazy? You're like the least lazy person we've ever met. There's nothing lazy about you. And as I began processing that, here's what I realized. We trade consequence for control. Write that down. We trade consequence for control. The consequential work carries a level of uncertainty, okay? So I could do something consequential, but the prospect can say no, or the launch could fail, or the employee could react badly. The audience could ultimately reject you, and you can make the investment and discover that you ultimately were wrong. Okay, once you take consequential action, something outside of you gets a vote. Okay, you now no longer have control. When you do something consequential, you don't always have the most control. In fact, Myron Golden says it this way. He says, you don't have a procrastination problem. Actually, what you have is you have anxiety. And as I began breaking that down, what I realized is that the anxiety that we have is we have attached a negative outcome to the result. And because we've attached a negative outcome to the result, we just don't start. Because like, if we were gonna launch and we knew 100% without a doubt that we were gonna make $1 million on the other side of that launch, well holy heck, we'd stay up all night launching that bad boy. But subconsciously, we've attached a negative outcome to the result, and because of that, we just don't start. And when we began doing something consequential, other things have control, not us. And that's very uncomfortable for us as high achievers, okay? So what we do is we gravitate toward work we can control. I just gave you several examples of the work that I did yesterday: cleaning my kitchen, mopping my floor, doing the trash, whatever, right? I can control that. In the business world, sometimes it looks like research or preparation or organization or polish, or we revise stuff, we strategize, we, we just stay busy. We figure out a way how to stay busy. And none of the things that we do To avoid the thing that matters most is actually bad. Okay, and that's exactly what makes this kind of procrastination so difficult to recognize. It's because procrastination is often a control strategy disguised as a productivity strategy. Did you get that? And what I want to do today is I want to show you how to recognize, how to have a trigger come up, recognize when that's happening because I don't think most high achievers Need another lecture about discipline. Okay, I don't think we have a discipline problem. You already know how to work. That's how you become a high achiever. This person that was you know when I called myself lazy the other day, she was like, dude, like you've launched multiple companies. You've helped hundreds and hundreds of people launch their companies. Like you're you've got three books you're writing. You you travel the world. You speak every other day. Like you're the least lazy person ever. You're the least less disciplined person that I know. And so as I thought about that, the bigger question is whether the work you're doing is creating movement or whether it's helping you avoid the work that carries consequence. Okay? And so that's what I want to do. So what I want to do is I want to talk with you about what's called the procrastination trade. Okay? The procrastination trade. Let's start with the trade itself. Okay? So every task carries a certain amount of control and a certain amount of consequence. So on one side you have control and on the other side you have consequence. And every task gives you almost completely complete control over the outcome. And so this is why you can reorganize your calendar exactly the way you want it. This is why you can rewrite a paragraph until you like every word. You can move things around on your website all afternoon. You can spend 3 hours researching a market, and nobody can reject you for doing that because you control the process. Consequential work, though, is different because consequential work creates an outcome you can't completely control. You can make the sales call, but you can't control whether the person buys. You can make the offer, but you can't control whether the market wants it. You can have difficult conversations, but you can't always control how the other person responds. You can publish the book, you can post the video, you can walk onto the stage, you can announce the event, but the moment you do, your work becomes exposed to judgment. And that's the ultimate tension. And I never realized that until I started doing some deep dive on this, is that one of the reasons why we put off work that matters is because we become exposed to judgment when we do the opposite. And that's the tension. We like to think that when we put something off, we're avoiding work, but we're not. Very often what we're doing is we're not avoiding work at all, we're avoiding uncertainty. We'd rather work hard on something that we can control than spend 10 minutes doing something that can produce an answer we don't like. And so I want you to look at that. That's actually the trade-off that we're doing. Are you choosing control over consequence? Okay, so when you've convinced yourself that another week of preparation is necessary, when the truth is that you are already prepared enough to get an answer, when you've convinced yourself of that, what you've done is you've convinced yourself that you want to be in control. Because the work we avoid is often not the work that requires the most effort, it's the work that has the greatest ability to tell us the truth. And sometimes we don't want to do that. And so that's the first thing I want you to know. If you're gonna— If you're gonna figure out this procrastination thing, you have to understand that there's a trade. You've gotta be willing to trade control for consequence. So ask yourself, am I choosing this task because it matters, or am I choosing this task because it gives me more control? Have you ever thought about that? Okay, the second thing is, is there's 3 types of work, or 3 levels of work, okay? The first one is what we call the maintenance work. Okay, the maintenance work. What do I mean by maintenance work? Okay, this keeps the machine running. So like you answer emails, you approve invoices, you, you know, you respond to clients, you do the things that you have to maintain. Okay, and you can spend literally every waking hour maintaining your business. In fact, a lot of times when I talk with entrepreneurs, hey, how was your day? Or how's it going? Their thing is, is like Busy, staying busy. I'm so swamped. I'm busy. And we sort of wear that busy as a badge of honor. And so what I want people to do a lot of times in my coaching, I'll say, I want you to trade that word busy for maintaining. You're not busy, you're maintaining. Okay? And if you have a team, clients, customers, vendors, partners, family, okay, there's never going to be a morning when you wake up and discover that nobody needs anything from you. There will always be something to respond to. There's always something to maintain. It's like if you have a lawn, Right? Okay, your lawn may look beautiful. You may have just cut it, trimmed it, watered it, fertilized it, do everything, and it looks gorgeous. And guess what? You're going to wake up tomorrow and there's going to be something you need to do in the yard because there's always maintaining things that you need to do. Maintenance never stops. But that means though, as a high achiever, if you allow maintenance work to determine your priorities, it's going to consume your entire day. So you have maintenance work. The second kind of work is what I call improvement work. Improvement work makes something better. So you can improve your website or the sales page or the program or the better system. You can always improve it. One of the— I've got 4 books that I'm writing right now and I'm almost done with the Six Figure Keynote. And what's interesting about this is I'll lock a chapter down and I read it and I love it. Okay, a couple days later I'll go back and I'll reread that same chapter and I hate this, I hate that, and I'm always in a state of improving. Okay, well, improvement is ultimately how businesses become better. Okay, it's how businesses become more efficient. It's how businesses become more profitable. It's how businesses become more valuable. There's nothing wrong with that. The danger is that improvement work feels so responsible That you— that, that we can hide inside of it. Okay? And if you understand that just as maintenance is a never-ending job, improvement is a never-ending job because almost everything can be improved forever. You can always make something better. Okay? So if the question is simply, could this be better? Well, the answer is yes, it can be. Okay? This is why I want you to ask a different question. Because the question is, could this be better? If that's a yes or no, well then it's always going to be yes, which means you're going to be stuck in improvement mode. Okay? So here's a better question. Is this improvement materially changing the result, or is it simply giving me something comfortable to work on? Now that's a hard question and it matters because sometimes the website does need another revision, but sometimes you can live with what you got. So there's maintenance work, there's improvement work, and the third type of work is what we call consequential work. And as a high achiever, this is where we need to be spending our time. Consequential work changes the trajectory of your life. It changes the trajectory of your business. It creates an answer. It forces a decision. It's one of those things that, you know, only you can do, okay? And this is what you as a— this is what you as a high achiever, you have to do, okay? Because there's a certain risk with consequential work, okay? And you are not only the risk taker, but you are also the risk manager, okay? And so you want to make sure that the consequential work you're doing is moving something from theory into reality. And the reason why we call it consequential work is because there's a consequence to what we're doing, okay? Okay, that means that it can either go up or it can go down. It can either make or it can break, okay? And so if maintenance keeps the business functioning, improvement makes the business better, consequential work changes where the business is going. So I want you to think about that, okay? So I want you— it's MIC. So maintenance becomes or keeps the business functioning. What I want you to do with maintenance work is I want you to outsource 110% of that. You never do maintenance work, okay? We're going— what we're gonna do is we're going to get a virtual assistant to do the maintenance work, okay? Because what we're— what we've got to do is, is maintenance work is time-consuming, it's tedious, but it's easy. And as a high achiever, we can get in there and it starts, you know, it gives us dopamine hits because we're getting stuff done. We want it— we want to outsource 100% of that improvement. Work then, which makes the business better. What we want to do is we want to put someone that we trust in charge of that. Okay, we want to put someone that we trust in charge of that. So this could be the other business owner or a partner or, or someone that you've hired to do those kinds of things, and their only job is to improve the business. Okay. Then you want to spend 85% of your time doing consequential work, okay? Because consequential work changes where the business is going, and you do not want to delegate that. As my buddy Akbar says, you want to do what you do best and then outsource the rest. You're going to outsource maintenance work and improvement work, and you're gonna go all in on consequential work. Now, why does that matter? Because if you go all in on consequential work, you like to stay busy, now you're staying busy on things that matter. So I want you to ask, What is the one action today that has the greatest ability to change the outcome? So like for instance, I'm the only person that can write my book, okay? Well, not necessarily, but I'm the only person that can write the concept of my book, okay? So I can literally go in and I can write the concept of my book, I can outline it, I can get the pregnant thoughts and the pregnant statements in there. I can get my intellectual property in there and then that's consequential. And then I can give it to somebody else to improve and then I can give it to somebody else to maintain, right? So that's what you do. You do what you do best and then send everything else down the line, okay? And so what is the one thing you're going to be doing today that is consequential? The value of a task is not determined by how long it takes. It's determined by what becomes possible After you do it. And the thing is, is if you're a high achiever like me, and I know you are, then you got to be able to understand you have to be spending your time with consequential. So now let's look at something here. I'm going to see if I can share my screen with you, and I'm going to talk with you about what's called the avoidance loop. And this could be some of the best stuff that you get today, so pay attention, okay? We're going to call this the avoidance loop. Okay. Oh, I don't mean to have green. Let me undo that. I like— we're going to go with a solid blue. Okay? Oh, not that blue. There we go. We're going to call this the avoidance loop. Okay? We're going to call this the avoidance loop. Okay? And what I want to do is I want to show you actually what happens and why as a high achiever, You have a tendency to put off consequential and move to maintenance and improving tasks. Okay, here we go. This is why we do this. And if you can understand this, it's going to give you a little bit better chance of interpreting it and making some changes. Okay? So researchers who study procrastination, there's some science behind this, have found that it's often connected less to time management and more to what we call emotional regulation. Okay? That means that the problem is not always that you can't organize the task. The problem is that the task makes you feel something that you would rather not feel. And this is why, you know, in this emotional regulation, we have a tendency to avoid it. And when we try to regulate our emotions, we step into this avoidance loop right here. Okay? And here's what it is. There's 4 stages. It starts with D. Okay? It starts with discomfort. Okay? It starts with discomfort, okay? This is where you encounter a consequential task and maybe, you know, let's say you need to make a really important decision today. Let's say you need to fire somebody, okay? Or let's say that you need to make sales calls today and you're worried that they're going to say no. Or let's say that you, you know, part of that firing, you need to confront somebody on your team and you don't really like conflict. Or maybe— You know, you need to go price something and you're entirely convinced that, you know, that people aren't going to pay for it or whatever it is, okay? There's something that we are doing that creates a level of discomfort, okay? So we've identified a task and it creates a discomfort. The important thing to understand is that you may not consciously say, I feel anxious about this. You may just simply internally feel some resistance. Okay? You just don't feel like doing it or you decide to do something else first or you decide that you're going to just push it off. Okay? So then what we do is we take this discomfort and we're going to move it to what we call substitution. Okay? We're going to substitute something a little bit more comfortable for the discomfortable task, okay? And so, and usually it's not like some ridiculous activity like sitting down watching Netflix, okay? That would make procrastination too obvious and we don't like things to be obvious, okay? Sometimes it's actually something defensible, you know, your email, your Slack, your presentation, whatever it is, okay? But you're gonna substitute an easier task for that particular task, okay? And you're not gonna replace this with nothing. You're gonna replace it with useful, measurable work, okay? And this is why you can, you can fool yourself sometimes if you're, if you're not a little careful, okay? And so what we, what we do then is after we've substituted that work, then we're gonna come over here and And we're going to do what's called relief work. Relief work. You no longer, when you're doing the substitution work, you no longer have to think about the difficult conversation anymore. It's long in your rearview mirror because now you're busy doing something else. You no longer have to think about whether the offer will sell because you're now rewriting the landing page. You no longer have to think about whether the client will reject your proposal because you've decided the proposal needs a little bit more work. So what happens is, is we come in here and we have some discomfort, so we come in and we do substitutionary work, which gives us an emotion of relief. And now we have a reward, and this relief is the reward, okay? The relief is the reward. Let me scoot this up a little bit. And so when we're discomfort, when we have discomfort, we're like, oh my gosh, I got to avoid that. So we substitute something. Now we've got this relief, and because we relief, we are now training ourselves that, gosh, procrastination is a good thing. And we've come over here, and according to psychologists, we've created another R. This is what We call reinforcement. And we've just trained our brain, okay? We've just trained our brain to react some way. And what you've trained it is you've trained it that says, when I feel uncomfortable, I can move away from the thing and I can feel better. And that means that the avoidance worked. And the next time the same type of task appears, This path or this rut that you've put yourself in is going to be easier and easier and easier to take. And every time relief follows avoidance, avoidance becomes easier to repeat. Okay? This is why procrastination can become more powerful over time because you're not simply delaying the work, you're practicing escape. Okay? So what I want to do is I want to show you that I'm going to put this avoidance loop in here so you can see it. Take this out here. I'm just going to scoot this in here. I'm going to shrink it down a little bit. Okay. So, what I want to show you here is that here with the avoidance loop, if this is how you work, then every time an uncomfortable situation comes up, It actually fuels your procrastination more and more and more and more and more. So you're going to stay a procrastinator if this is the process which you stay in. So what I want to do is I want to show you how do I get rid of this, how do I avoid this, how do I stop this, okay? So I'm going to bring this over here. Like how do I stop procrastinating and start doing something meaningful? It's what I call SHIP. Ship. Okay? You don't need more motivation because honestly motivation is pretty unreliable. Okay? I'm much more interested in creating a mechanical way to move through resistance, not a motivational way. Okay? And so let's look at this. So we're going to come over here and we're going to look at the S. Okay? This is what I call shrink. Now, what are we shrinking? We want to shrink the scope. We want to— for instance, so we have a tendency sometimes to define the task too broadly. We'll say things like, I need to write the book. Well, nobody can execute write the book. We say things, oh, I need to launch the program. Well, nobody can execute launch the program. We need to say, oh, I need to fix my sales. Well, that may contain 50 different problems, okay? So what I want to do is I want to shrink the scope of the work that I'm doing, okay? I want to shrink it. I want to, I want to, I want to bring it down. I want to, I want to be able to maintain it, okay? And so what we do is if we can take the big thing and we can shrink it down to a little thing, then what happens is it will motivate us and it will give us something to take action on. So what I want you to do is I want you to take the task that you've been avoiding and I want you to shrink it until you can identify the next action that creates movement. Not the thinking action, not the research, not work on, not look at. I want you to identify the next executable action. Now, why do I use the word executable? Okay? Because when you as a high achiever do something, execute something, it gives you a dopamine hit. This is like why when you're doing the maintaining thing, if you're over there like, checking your email, you're executing something, it gives you this dopamine hit and you're more likely to keep doing it. And so, what I want you to do is I want you to identify with the big thing that you need to do, what is the next executable action that I need to take? So, for instance, when I was putting off the writing of my book, I said, okay, what I want to do, all I'm going to do Is I simply want to write the first paragraph of the first chapter. That's it. I want to write the first paragraph of the first chapter. Yesterday, I was texting somebody back and forth and they were talking to me about this fundraising thing that they were trying to do. It was this really huge idea. I'm like, you know what? Here's you know have you talked with your team about this? No, no, no, no. Have you talked whatever? So what we did was we came out with up with the first executable idea, and so the first executable idea for her was to send a group text message telling her team about the idea and putting a a meeting on the calendar for today, which is Monday, for today. So they could talk about it. So that was an executable action. So what she knew was like, okay, if I can get the cat out of the bag and I can get the team together, I can schedule a meeting, I can get it out of my head and into the public. Well, then we're a lot more likely to, to take action. Okay? So you don't need to make the entire project smaller. What you need to do is you need to make the next move unmistakably clear. So what is it that you're doing? So I want you to think today about something you've been putting off. And I want you to shrink the scope, and I want you to ask yourself, what's the next thing I have to do? Write it down and go do it. Okay? Second thing, I want you to handle your emotion. I want you to handle your emotion. Now, what do I mean by this? Okay? I know that when I use the word emotion, that That's gonna sound a little soft to some of you. I understand that. But this isn't about becoming introspective for the next 45 minutes. It's about being accurate. And I want you to ask yourself, what am I protecting myself from by avoiding this? And that's a better question than simply asking how you feel, okay? Hey, how do you feel about that decision? Oh, that doesn't help anybody, okay? What are you protecting yourself from, or what do you need protected? You know, what are you protecting yourself from by avoiding this? What outcomes are you trying not to experience? And I want you to write them down. Is it rejection? Is it conflict? Is it embarrassment? Is it uncertainty? And the possibility of you understanding your emotion is a lot greater when you're forced to put it in writing. Okay? You need to name it. Because if you're afraid they're going to reject the proposal, then just simply say it. If you're avoiding the employee conversation because you're afraid they're going to quit, then say it. If you've not launched because you're afraid nobody's going to buy, then say it. Because when you can say what you're feeling, it's a lot easier to handle That particular emotion. And the purpose of naming it is not to eliminate the feeling. We don't want to suppress it. We don't want to pretend it doesn't work, that doesn't happen. You know, we're not trying to eliminate the feeling. What we're trying to do is, is, is we're trying to name it so it can stop allowing this to masquerade as strategy. Because so many of you are masquerading your fear. With strategy, so you're staying in the maintenance mode and staying in the improvement mode and never getting to the consequential mode. And you cannot make a strategic decision while pretending an emotional decision is strategic. Okay? Because high achievers are very good at creating intellectual explanations for emotional avoidance. And it's just, it just is what it is. Okay? We call fear timing. Well, the timing's just not right. Bullcrap. We call uncertainty needing more information. We call perfectionism quality. We call hesitation being strategic. Again, sometimes those explanations are legitimate, but most of the time they're simply sophisticated language for, I don't want to find out what happens next. And so you got to handle the emotion by telling yourself the truth. Then the third thing that you're going to do here The third thing you're gonna do is you're going to install the trigger. Now what the heck do I mean by that? Okay, you're gonna install the trigger. Okay, now what is a trigger? Okay, if you have a gun, okay, and you want to fire a bullet, what do you do? You pull the trigger. You pull the trigger, and that's what you're gonna do here. And installing the trigger is where you remove the decision From the moment of resistance, so you don't. You're not going to say, you know, hey, I'm going to do this tomorrow because tomorrow's vague, right? You're not going to say, well, hey, I'm going to make the call when I get a chance because you're not going to get a chance. You're not. You're you know what you got to do here is you have to connect the action to something concrete. So when I finish my coffee tomorrow morning, I make the call. Okay, when I finish my coffee tomorrow morning, I make the. Call. When this meeting ends, I send the proposal. When I sit down at my desk at 9, I open the document before I open the email. Okay, that matters because the moment of resistance is a terrible time to negotiate with yourself. Okay, when you're in that resistance mode, that's not the time to negotiate because you're always gonna lose. Okay, because resistance always wins. So you do this before you get there. Okay? You will win the argument for avoidance almost every time. And I tell my clients this often. If you are looking for an excuse, I promise you that you're gonna find it. Okay? But you have to install the trigger. Because a deadline tells you when something should be finished. A trigger tells you when something should start. Do you see the difference? Well, I'm going to give myself a deadline that this has got to be over by Friday. Okay, that's a deadline. That's when it should be over. What's the trigger to say it should start? Because here's what happens with procrastinators. If we have a deadline and we don't want embarrassment, so we're going to meet the deadline, if you're anything like me, you're going to wait till the very last possible second. And then you're going to cram, cram, cram, cram, cram, and all of a sudden your creative juices are going to flow and boom! You know, you'll end up getting it done, but you're going to be exhausted, you're going to be stressed, you're going to have anxiety. You're going to be crabby, you're going to be cranky, and then you're back in that avoidance loop and you're retraining your brain that the best way to get something done is to wait. So instead of giving you a deadline on when it needs to be over, I want you to give yourself a trigger on when you're going to start. Give yourself a trigger on when you're going to start, okay? And then P, the 4th little letter in our little acronym, is I want you to protect I want you to protect the start. I want you to protect the start, okay? Do not negotiate with yourself at the point of resistance. Make the decision before resistance gets the vote. If you decide that at 9 o'clock you're going to work on the proposal for 10 minutes, then at 9 o'clock you work on the proposal for 10 minutes. That's it. You're not committing to finishing it. You're simply protecting the start. And that distinction matters because the finish can feel very enormous, but the start is very manageable. And once you're moving, then what happens is, is the task begins to change. How many times have you avoided something for a week, you finally started it, and 20 minutes later wondered, Why did you make such a big deal out of this? The anticipation was more painful than the actual activity. And procrastination gives us a strange deal. It allows us to experience the emotional cost of a task repeatedly without getting any of the benefit of completing it. That's, that's the hard part of procrastination. Okay. And You think about— let me just show you how this works. You think about a conversation on Monday, you think about it on Tuesday, you think about it on Wednesday, you wake up Thursday still thinking about it. By the time you finally have the conversation Friday, you've emotionally experienced a 10-minute conversation 5 different times. And that is an expensive way to live because the hardest part of procrastination is is often not doing the work. It's ending the negotiation about when the work begins. Are you with me? The hardest part of being a procrastination— of being a procrastinator is not doing it. It's ending the negotiation about when you will start. So you have to learn how to protect the start, okay? So what I want you to do is I want you to write this down. And I want you to begin thinking about like, how am I going to be a high achiever that does not procrastinate? Okay? And so here's how you're going to do it. We're going to put these frameworks together, okay? Because I want you to be able to use this today or tomorrow without having to rewatch this entire training. When you catch yourself procrastinating, start with the trade. Ask, am I choosing control over consequence? Then look at your work. Is it maintenance work, improvement work, consequential work? Then I want you to identify the loop. You know, what discomfort is this task creating? What do I keep substituting it for? What relief am I getting? And what avoidance am I reinforcing? Then ship it. Shrink the scope. Handle the emotion, install the trigger, protect the start. That's the system. Okay? Let me give that to you again. Okay? Let me give it to you again. It's sort of like a 4-part process. Number 1, you're going to ask— because remember, it all starts with this trade, like we're trading control over consequence. Okay? Am I choosing control over consequence? Step 1. Then you're going to look at your work and you're going to ask yourself, step 2, is it maintenance work, improvement work, or consequential work? And what we're gonna do is we're gonna delegate maintenance work to low staff, we're gonna delegate improvement work to high staff, and we're only gonna work on consequential work. And some of you, the way that you need to avoid procrastination is by getting a team. Chad, I can't afford a team. Well, obviously you can't afford not to have one, okay? You don't have to have full-time people, you can get VAs, You, you even got ChatGPT, for God's sake. They have agents that will do a lot of this maintenance work. So you may need to create some systems to be able to do that maintenance work for you. AI, ChatGPT, Claude, all those things, they can do that maintenance work for you. And then you can bring somebody on, not full-time, maybe 5 hours a week, 10 hours a week, maybe even per project to do the improvement work so you can focus on the consequential work. The 3rd step is identify the loop. Ask yourself, what discomfort is this What do I keep substituting it for? What relief am I getting? What avoidance am I reinforcing? And then when you do that, you're gonna ship it. Shrink the scope, handle the emotion, install the trigger, protect the start. That's it. Okay? Now notice what's not there. There's no requirement in that process that you become fearless. There's no requirement that you all of a sudden feel motivated or that that you suddenly love difficult tasks, okay? What's happening is, is you simply stop giving your temporary emotional state authority over consequential work. That's really it, okay? You have a temporary emotional state, like, because your amygdala does not know the difference between, you know, between trauma and a task. It doesn't know the difference. It's the same thing. Okay, and then what happens is, is you're beginning to emotionally regulate yourself, and the easiest way to emotionally regulate yourself is to avoid. Okay, we don't want— we don't want you to do that. Okay, all we want you to do is stop giving your temporary emotional state authority over consequential tasks. This is what maturity looks like in business, right? I tell my kids all the time, like, you know, part of the, you know, Your number one job of growing up is simply to learn maturity. That's it. That's your number one job. Well, Chad, what is maturity? Learning what to do and what not to do. That's it. When you're a junior high boy, Archer, you can do spitballs, you can give wedgies, you can, you know, sit on whoopee cushions. You can do all of that because that's where you are as a junior high boy. But what maturity looks like is now that you've stepped over into young adulthood, now you're in high school, you've got to put off those childish things. That's what maturity looks like in life, and that's what maturity looks like in business. You can feel uncertain and still make the call. You can feel nervous and still make the offer. You can dislike conflict and still have the hard conversation. You can be unsure whether the launch is going to work and still launch, okay? Your emotion still gets a voice, just don't give it the vote, okay? And so this is what I want you to do. I want you to work on this procrastination challenge. That's what I'm going to call it. And I want you to focus on those 4 frameworks. And I want you to just write them down, okay? I want you to do one thing today. I want you to think about the task you've been avoiding that carries the most consequences. Okay, not the oldest task on your list, not the most annoying task on your list. The task with the greatest ability to change the outcome of your life and business. Probably already know what it is, and ask yourself four questions. First, what am I trading? So where am I choosing control over consequence? Second, what level of work am I hiding inside? So am I spending time maintaining things? Am I improving things? Or what consequential work am I? You know, using those things to avoid. The third is, what am I really avoiding? What feeling or possible outcome makes this task different from everything else on my list? And fourth, what's my next move? Shrink it, name it, choose a trigger, protect the start. And then I want you to go do it, okay? And then I promise you that you're simply going to get better at understanding how to manage procrastination. Okay, and you're going to stop hiding procrastination inside of productivity, and that is the way out. So hey, I hope this teaching and training was helpful for you. We do this every Monday on the Monday Morning Mentor, and I just am a big believer that if you're going to be a high achiever, you cannot be a procrastinator. And it doesn't mean you can't have procrastination tendencies. It means that you have to learn how to manage and maintain that procrastination and use it for your benefit and not for your harm. All right, guys, God bless you. We appreciate you. We'll see you next Monday on the Monday Morning Mentor.