A short motivational talk by Robin Sharma explaining that a subconscious "saboteur"—the voice of fear—causes procrastination by creating distractions and excuses (checking email, hunger, tiredness, socializing). Sharma argues fear of success, failure, ridicule, and change triggers self-sabotage as people near important goals; awareness of this pattern is the first step to greater productivity.
Chapters
Well, on this theme about super productivity, I want to share an insight and an idea that most people don't know about. And I think it's such a powerful idea because once you know it, you really can shatter your past performance and you can really strip away your life from all the distractions and really become one of the productive people who gets great work done. And here's a simple idea. Deep inside, not within our conscious mind, but within our subconscious mind, every single one of us that doesn't know this idea has what I call the saboteur. The saboteur is basically the voice of fear. Most people are afraid. They're afraid of the same things. They're afraid of success.
Success? Yes, we're afraid of success because when we're kids, we are socialized to be like everyone else. And so what we do is we think like everyone else, we perform like everyone else, we dress like everyone else, we talk like everyone else. Well, to become really productive, really successful, really innovative, move out of your comfort zone into your next level of excellence, you need to leave the crow and be different. And that's frightening to most people. Most people have a fear of success. They have a fear of failure. They have a fear of loss. They have a fear of being laughed at and ridiculed. They have a fear of being different. So what starts to happen is every time you make a conscious commitment to being more productive and you focus on doing that great work, you know, will really create value for lots of people and really help your career and really stretch you so you express more of your talent. As you start to make progress, as you start to become more productive, as you start to get closer and closer to your dream of achieving that big thing that you want to achieve, you get scared. And here's the thing, consciously you don't even know what happening. You can't even see how manipulative the saboteur deep inside of you is. It does things like this. You're focusing on that key project, you've got a clear schedule, but all of a sudden you pick up your BlackBerry and you start checking your email or you're doing some planning that will really help you in your career or really help you in your business. And rather than staying focused for an extended period of time, so you start to do some excellent planning and some world class thinking, what do you do? You say to yourself, oh, I'm hungry right now. And you get up and you distract yourself. And what we start to do is we start to do all of these things that are nothing more than self sufficient sabotage. We come up with these excuses, but we check email, we check Twitter, we start to talk to people, we get up, we feel tired, we sleep too much, or we say we're hungry or we go for a walk, or we check our watch, which gets us into oh, I guess it's too late to work on this. We distract ourselves in a million different ways and we think it's because of the distractions which are real. But these are nothing more than the manipulative ways that the saboteur is preventing us from doing the productive work that will really get us closer to the few things that matter most. The big idea is simply remember this. We all are afraid as we get closer to being more productive and achieving more and getting closer to our dreams. So the more you can start to see how you're sabotaging your own productivity with all of these distractions and all of these excuses, the more you can actually say, I am not my saboteur. I see why I'm being busy being busy shuffling papers, checking email, picking up the phone versus doing the productive work. It's because I'm scared. Because I'm scared of not deserving my success. Because I'm scared of failure, because I'm scared of change, because I'm scared of loss. In that awareness of how your saboteur operates.
