John Assaraf describes two exercises to beat procrastination: "Take Six," six slow breaths through your nose and out like a straw to calm your nervous system, and "AYA," noticing your thoughts and feelings without judgment before taking one small action. He says listing what procrastination costs you and what small wins reward you shifts how you see yourself.
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Awareness is what gives us choice, and choice is what actually gives you freedom. You activate your self confidence, you activate your certainty muscle, and more importantly, you're activating your take action muscle. Are you ready to do that? Let's start right now. Hey, this is John, and welcome to this knowledge and skills video training. This video I want to share with you something that I believe is one of the most powerful gifts you and I have. And it has a lot to do with our brain's genius ability. And that ability is the ability to become more aware. Awareness is what gives us choice, and choice is what actually gives you freedom. Let me explain. When you become aware of what you're procrastinating and why specifically are you procrastinating? Is it a fear? Is it because you don't have the knowledge or skills? Is it because you're afraid of being embarrassed or ashamed? Once you become aware of the root cause of the procrastination, when you are able to look at it from an objective perspective versus something happening within you, it allows you to make different choices. I'm going to teach you two inner sizes to be able to help you really master awareness. When we're in a state of fear, when we're in a state of anxiety or stress or any type of disempowering state, chances are that we've activated our stress response. So even if it's an emotion we're trying to move away from, like being embarrassed or ashamed or ridiculed or judged, that state is a disempowering state. And what most people don't recognize is that when you're in that state, mental and emotional state, the motivational circuit in your brain basically just shuts off and you don't want to take action. Hence you procrastinate. So when you increase your level of awareness where you can actually see what's causing you to procrastinate, that's when you can start making some choices. So let's start with take six, Calm the circuits. Anytime you're finding that you procrastinate, from today going forward, what I want you to do is I want you to stop and I want you to take six deep breaths through your nose slowly like this. And then I want you to breathe it out through your mouth like you're blowing out through a straw, even slower than when you were inhaling. So it would go like this. Now why do you want to breathe in slowly and exhale slowly as you're breathing out through a straw? And the answer is, because it deactivates the anxiety, the emotional center, the fear center of your brain. And when you deactivate that part of your brain, now you've opened up the circuits for awareness for you to be able to take a look at a deeper level. Why am I procrastinating? Especially when you want to achieve those goals and dreams. So when you take those 60 breaths first, then you do inner size number two, which is called aya, a I a. And aya stands for awareness of thoughts, feelings, emotions, sensations and the procrastinating behavior. And when you do this exercise or inner size called aya, you have to do it in a space of no blame, no shame, no guilt or justification. You're just becoming aware of your patterns. So awareness first. And then you ask yourself this question, what's one intention that I have? And so let's say your intention is to take action and really do what you need to be doing. Well, what is one action step, Very, very tiny, small action step that you can actually take instead of the three or four or five or six things that need to get done. So when you become aware, when you set the intention of what you want to do and then you action towards that goal, guess what happens? You interrupt the pattern of procrastination, you activate your self confidence, you activate your certainty muscle, and more importantly, you're activating your take action muscle. So that is part one of what I wanted to share with you. Part two of what I want to share with you is this. Whatever it is that you are procrastinating, I want you to do two, two little things. Number one is write down what is the real cost of your procrastination? And let me give you a couple of hints. When you procrastinate on things that you know you want to do and should do, when you procrastinate, you are reinforcing an identity of somebody who procrastinates. And the more you do that, the more you're going to call yourself a procrastinator. And guess what procrastinators do? They procrastinate. So you need to shift your identity. And the way you shift your identity is through the awareness exercise I showed you just before and then through taking small little action steps, even when you don't feel like it, a little bit of taking action is better than any, any procrastination. So write down what's the real cost? You're not going to achieve the goal. You're going to reinforce your pattern of procrastination. You're going to start coming up with more reasons why you should procrastinate and before you know it, things that are easy become hard and then you procrastinate more than you should be. The other part of this is the reward side of it. What would the rewards be if you don't procrastinate and you start taking a little bit of action? Well, the rewards are obvious. You're going to build more confidence, more certainty, more self trust and you're going to be building your take action muscle. Which does what? Changes your identity into a person who takes action. Now the key here is that you become aware of and you interrupt the pattern and you replace the pattern with a few little tiny action steps instead of procrastinating. Are you ready to do that? Let's start right now. Hey, this is John and if you like that video, watch the next video because it is packed with things that you can do right now to achieve success way faster than ever before.
