Jack Canfield explains the five-minute secret: set a timer and commit to just five minutes on any task that feels overwhelming. He shares examples like Lee Brower reading one minute of the Bible daily until he finished it in a year, and recommends tracking your progress for 30 days to build the habit.
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Hello, everybody. I know you've had times when you've had to do something either that you didn't want to do because it was unpleasant, like cleaning the garage or decluttering your office or whatever that might be. Or it could also be times when you feel so overwhelmed by the immensity of the task, the enormity of the task, that you just kept putting it off because you just knew it was going to take a lot of effort and a lot of time. So you just never got around to starting it. So I'm going to give you a secret today, a tool you can use. It's called the five minute secret. Here's the deal. Every time you're faced with something that's challenging, something where you feel like you're not going to be able to do it, or something that's really difficult to start doing, what I want you to do is simply commit to do it for five minutes. Now, it could be something like decluttering the office, starting to make those difficult phone calls, practicing the piano, you know, doing the writing you need to do. It could be the emails you have to do. It could be washing the car. It could be anything at all. Maybe you want to, you know, clean out the inside of your car, or maybe you want to clean out the trunk, whatever it is. There's lots of things that we keep putting off, putting off, putting off, putting off. And what I want to ask you to do is simply get out a timer, it could be on your cell phone, whatever, and simply set the timer for five minutes and do it for five minutes. And what happens for most people when you do it for five minutes, you find that the five minutes extends itself because now you've leaned into it, you're in motion. You know, one of the things I don't like to do is clean up the kitchen. My wife grew up the idea you clean the kitchen in the morning, not at night. But I don't particularly like to wake up in the morning and see a huge mess. And so if I know that I really don't want to do it, I say, I'm just going to clean for five minutes. Just maybe clean off the counter. Next thing I know, I've washed all the glasses, filled the dishwasher, scrubbed down the countertops, whatever, and the whole thing is done. Or what about meditation? You don't think you have time for meditation? Come on, you got five minutes. You can always find five minutes. I'll sit down for five minutes. The next thing I know, 20 minutes have gone by, and I'VE had a really deep, powerful meditation or writing. You know, there's this one chapter in the book I feel stuck on. Well, I'm just going to write for five minutes. And once I start to write, something begins to happen. I get into the groove of it, and often I find myself writing for half an hour or an hour. You know, it's just, it's the idea of getting into motion. You know, same thing with practicing the guitar, practicing the piano, you know, whatever it might be, writing your blog, maybe even putting that off, but just give it five minutes. Now if it, if after five minutes you want to stop, stop. But you have made a little progress, whatever that progress might be. You know, I have a. A friend named Lee Brower, you may have seen the movie the Secret. Lee's in there, the guy talking about the Gratitude Rock. And Lee's a Christian. And he was, one of his friends said, you know, if you're a Christian, Lee, you should read the Bible cover to cover. And when he thought about that, he thought, that is a long, long, long book. It's a long task. I don't think I'm up for it. And his friend said, could you give it one minute a day? Could you just read the Bible for one minute a day? Lee said, okay, I can do a minute. So he would read for a minute, and nine times out of 10, the next thing he would know, he'd read five or six pages because he got into it. Now some days he would just read it for one minute. But the idea being he was getting into momentum and he finished the Bible in a year. And so he was very proud of himself for doing that. But it's just that getting started, that's such a, such an important part. I have a friend named Dina Proctor. Dina Proctor teaches what she calls three by three meditations. Nine minutes a day of meditation. Three three minute meditations. And think about that. Everybody has three minutes. Just simply close your eyes, do a little deep breathing, start to focus on your breathing. Perhaps focus on a mantra that you might be saying to yourself over and over, like relax or be still and know that I am God is a Christian mantra. Sat. Nam would be the Sikhs, you know, all these kind of things, whatever that is for you, for your religious background. Or just relax. Just repeating. Inhaling. Re. Inhaling. Excellent. Three minutes. Now you can go to Dina Proctor's website. It's just dinaprockter.com and she's got some free 3 minute meditations that you can use to help you get started. It's so simple to just do the work if you let yourself get started. Also, I want to tell you, Dina wrote a book called Madly Chasing Peace. And so the idea there is she talks about some of the stuff that backs up this three minute meditation. How much can happen, just meditating, three minutes a day, three times a day. So what I want to ask you is what have you been putting off that you know you need to do? Maybe you don't want to do or you're afraid you're not able to do it well, but just put in five minutes. So down below in the comment section, just write down what's the one thing that you'll do today and spend five minutes doing it. And then each day, and I would encourage you to do at least five minutes every day on something and check it off every day, 30 days in a row. And and I promise you your life will get into action in a month from now. You're going to be in a much better shape in terms of the things you want to accomplish than you were today. So have a great month. Also have a great week. We'll see you next week when we have another one of these that you can watch, bringing you more techniques and tools that you can use to make your life better. Well, thanks for watching today. I hope you got value and if you did, please take a moment to like it, share it with someone you care about who could get benefit from also watching this. And make sure to subscribe to our channel here at YouTube so that we can you can get more information. There's going to be a lot of these coming out over the course of the year. We'd love to have you get take advantage of that. And if you'd like more information on what we talked about, make sure to go to my website@jackcampfield.com where there's a lot of free resources that will help you take what you learned today even further. So thanks for watching, Sam.
