5 Keys To Stop Procrastinating | The Mindset Mentor Podcast

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor podcast. I am your host, Rob Dial. Today we're going to be giving you five keys to stop procrastinating. If you are a lazy person or if you feel like you have a lot to do and you really want to create an amazing life and you have all these goals and aspirations, but you find yourself procrastinating a little bit too much. This episode is specifically designed for, so let's just jump straight into it. So the first thing I want you to do, number one, stop lying to yourself. That's the first thing I want you to do. I want you to admit your laziness. Now, it's kind of like a 12 step program, right? The first thing you need to do is just actually acknowledge the laziness that is there. Stop lying to yourself. Just admit it. Yeah, you know what? I've been really lazy over the past six months and I really have been slacking on my business and growing my business. I need to get it together. Just admit your laziness first. Put it on the table. And once you can admit it, then we can actually start to work through it. But you're gonna keep lying to yourself and telling yourself that you're doing the best that you can and you don't have a whole lot of time and you're trying to keep it together. Just be honest with yourself. Because sometimes we just all have to be adults and just say, hey, you know what? Yeah, I have been lazy and I'm gonna change it. So the important thing though is to admit your laziness or that you have been lazy. Don't call yourself lazy. Don't call yourself a procrastinator. Because if you say I am lazy, I am a procrastinator. That is an identity statement. And when you say something and you identify with it, it makes it much harder to break. Because there's a small difference. Just listen to this. I am lazy versus I have been lazy. I have been procrastinating a lot recently. One of them is an identity statement. One of them is talking about behaviors that you've been having recently. And so the why I say don't say I am blank is because when you say I am blank, your subconscious automatically stores that thing as true. You are not lazy. You have just had lazy tendencies as of recently or shit, you've had lazy tendencies your entire life. But really what it comes down to is stop identifying with it is an important aspect of it. But admit your laziness to yourself. Call it what it is. And once you admit it and you put it out there on the table, then you can say, but I no longer want to have this laziness. Just like, hey, I'm wearing. If you're looking in this video, I'm wearing a blue shirt, right? I happen to be wearing a blue shirt. I am not the blue shirt. But if I want to change this blue shirt, I can change this blue shirt. Same way. Where I have been lazy, not an identity statement, I have been lazy. I've had some laziness, some procrastinating in the past six months, the past year, two years, whatever it might be. I no longer want to wear this shirt of laziness. I want to change it and realize, if I'm being honest with you, I think humans are just inherently lazy. Like, I honestly do. Like, if you look at it, if we go back a million years ago and I live in Texas and it's the. Let's say it's the middle of summer in Texas a million years ago, it's really hot here in the summer. I would imagine, just a guess, that at noon, 1pm ish, if anybody who is in Austin, Texas, the place that I live, and it's 105 degrees in the middle of the summer a million years ago, they're probably not out working all, all day long. They probably wake up right when the sun is starting to rise. They do a lot of work, they go out, they do their hunting, they get their water, they do what they need to, they. And then in that time when it's the hottest, probably, if I'm being honest with you, sitting under some trees, relaxing, maybe eating some food, all of that stuff. And then once it starts to cool down, towards the end of the day, the sun starts to get closer to setting. It's another opportunity to hunt, to do things, to go find water, all of that stuff. And so I think just by knowing and coaching people for the past 17 ish years, 18 ish years at this point, that I just think humans are inherently lazy. And that's okay, but it doesn't mean that's who we have to be all of the time. We can work ourself out of it. For me, I was a very lazy person for the first 19, 20 years of my life until I found a company where hard work was rewarded. And I actually started to build that inside of myself. So I do believe that we will be able to build it inside of ourselves, hard work if we really, truly want to and stop blaming anything outside of you. Take control of it. Say hey, this is my fault. I am lazy. I'm sorry. Shit, I'm even doing it myself. Not I am lazy, I have been lazy and I'm going to blame myself and I'm going to take full acceptance of it, but I am going to change it. So that's the first thing I want to make sure that you do, okay? That's the first thing to get past is you have to admit it. The second thing is you have to make your goals. You have to first off, take your goals and make sure you have goals and they need to make them bite sized, right? And so I don't mean that if your goal is to make a hundred thousand dollars this year, to chop it in half and go to $50,000 this year, what I mean is to make that, take that goal and make it smaller, right? Like if you get a plate of steak put out in front of you, you don't start to stress out about the entire plate of steak because you have to fit the entire thing in your mouth. It's one bite at a time, right? It's the same thing with your goals. It's one bite at a time. So you know, if, let's say for example, you're a sales rep and your goal is to make $100,000 this year and you do your math because as a sales rep you should know for how many calls you need to make, turns into how many conversations, how many conversations turn, how many closes that you have. You could look at and say, okay, based off of making $100,000 over the course of the entire year, that means that I need to make calculations. 100 calls a week, okay? And if I'm working five days a week, I take those hundred calls divided by five and I come up with 20, I need to do 20 calls today. So what you do is you focus on the 20 calls that you need to do today, not the hundred thousand dollars that you want to make over the course of the year. And what you do is you start to focus on the action based goals, not the result that you're working towards. You always want to know the result that you're working towards, but you need to take your goals and make them bite size. What do you need to do today to move the needle? Now you might do 20 calls and nobody answers. You might do 20 calls and you have more people answer than normal. There's gonna be on days, there's gonna be off days. All it's about is knowing your numbers and working towards that thing. You know, if you want to Save, let's say you want to save $6,000 this year. If you want to save $6,000 a year, that's $500 a month. How can you save 120? What is that, $125 a week? Right. You start to make them bite size. Because it's hard to focus on something that's really far in the future sometimes. And I found with a lot of people, we have really big goals, and the bigger that our goals are, the more that we get paralysis by analysis, and the more that when we start to look at our big goals, we see all of the stuff that we have to do. We see the entire process, all of the work that has to go in. And I have actually found that a lot of people become demotivated by the size of their goals because they're too big and they seem too far away. So how do we get past that? Let's start focusing on what do I need to do today? How do I take action today towards whatever it is that I'm trying to work towards? So you take your goals and you make them bite size. The third thing that you want to do is you want to find your. Your why, right? If you care about your goals, that's good. But the way to care about your goals more is to find the why behind the goals, to find out really truly why you want to do it. I always love to use this example, and I've given it many times. I'm giving a speech as I say, hey, you know, I'll be in a room with 200 people and I'll say, out of this room, how many of you will make a million dollars? How many of you think it's a. It's possible for you to make a million dollars legally this year? I'm just going to ask you what, how many. You know, think about this to yourself. What's the percentage chance of you making a million dollars legally this year? And usually it's like 0%, 0%, 1%, 2%, 3%, 0%, 000. And it's all of these zeros, all of these ones. Everything. Almost everybody in the room is under 5%. And they say, okay, what's the percentage chance of you making a million dollars legally this year? And if you don't, everyone that you love dies. Everyone's like 100%, 100%, 1000%, a million percent. There's no way on earth I won't hit that goal of making a million dollars legally this year. And I say that's really interesting because the goal didn't change, the timeframe didn't change. The only thing that changed was your why behind the goal. So if your why is strong enough, my very first coach used to always say this to me. When your why is strong enough, your how will reveal itself. When you know why you want to do something, you will get very resourceful as to how you're going to get there. Right? It's 100% possible for everyone listening to this podcast to figure out a way to make a million dollars legally this year. Maybe that's not your goal, maybe it is. But just as an example, it's 100% possible, but you just don't care enough. In order to hit it, you just don't care. And that's very simple. You have to make yourself care more. So when you look at your goals, when you look at what it is that you want to do, and you're trying to stop procrastinating, trying to stop with your laziness, what do you do? You start to look at them and say, why do I want to hit this? And I've told this story many times before on the podcast, but my favorite story on this was I had a coach years ago, one of my very first one on one clients, and this was 8ish years ago, I would say 9ish years ago. And I said, hey, how much do you want to make this year? And he said, I want to make $100,000. And I said, okay, why do you want to make 100,000 dol? I want to make $100,000 this year because I have never made that before. Okay, why do you want to make it though? Like, tell me why. Well, I want to make it because I feel like it would make, you know, my life better. Okay, why? Why would it make your life better? Well, it'd make my life better because I could, you know, provide for my family better. Okay, tell me more about that. And we deeper and went deeper and went deeper and why, why, why, why, why, why, why? And eventually it went from he wanted to make $100,000 this year to the real reason why you want to make $100,000 was because he had recently gotten divorced. He had lost custody of his children, his ex wife had the children, and she lived in a really bad part of town. And his main worry, I'll just tell you flat out, what he actually told me was that his main worry with his young children, they were both under the age of seven. His main worry was that his daughter would get pregnant before she turned 18. Years old, and his son might be killed in a drive by, and he wanted to make $100,000 so that he could buy a house, afford to be able to put the down payment down, go back to the judge, say, I have a safe place for them to live, and I want them to live with me, and I want them to have a better education. Now, which one of those two goals? It's still the same goal. But which one of those whys do you think is stronger for him? I want to make $100,000 because I've never done it before, or I want to make $100,000 because of all of this stuff and the ways that it would change his children's life. Yeah, the children is much stronger. Why? You have a much. He, at that point in time, found a version of himself that didn't exist because he got really clear on why he wanted to take action. So you've gotta find your why. That's number three. Number four, get really good at removing distractions. A lot of times I've found that it's not that you're lazy, or let's say that's an identity statement. It's not that you have laziness or lazy tendencies. It's not that you procrastinate often. It's that you actually have too many distractions in your life. And so one of the biggest things everybody knows of our biggest distractions, our phone. And so if you're really trying to be productive, is there a way that when you have your absolute productivity time of. I need to be productive right now. You take your phone, you put it somewhere else. You know, if you work in an office and you need to make your 20 phone calls today, leave your phone in the drawer, or, you know, go ahead and give it to your boss and say, hey, I can't get this back until I get my 20 phone calls done. Or leave it inside of your car, whatever it is that you need to do if you work from home. The thing that I do when I work from home is I end up just taking my phone and I put it inside. I work in my office, in my house, is I put it inside of the drawer in the kitchen, and it's literally probably takes me 15 seconds to walk and get it if I really want to. But that little bit of resistance of it being further away from me allows me to be way more productive. So how can you move your distractions? You know, there's. There's your phone, there's tv, there's your, you know, completely cluttered desk that you work on and you can't find anything in there. How can you remove the distractions of other people? Sometimes other people want to come in and they want to talk to you, right? Can you, can you figure out a way to do that? Can you put on headphones so that no one comes and bothers you? Or can you put a sign on your office so that no one comes in and actually knocks or anything? Hey, if it's an emergency, come in. If not, you can talk to me after 3pm, send me an email, whatever it might be. Turn off all the notifications on your computer so that while you're sitting down and working and getting that deep work done, there's no way for any notifications to get your focus right. Let everyone know, no distractions. Put your headphones on. Turn the computer notifications off. Put your phone in another room. How can you get really good at removing distractions so that therefore you can move the needle on the things that are most important for you? So that's number four. Number five. My favorite technique for being productive is the pomodoro technique. I don't know how many times I've talked about the pomodoro technique on this podcast, but it's many. What it means is you do one task and one task only for 25 minutes. You can do anything for 25 minutes. And so if you just say, all right, you know, I'm not worried about this huge goal that I have. I just want to take the right steps in the right direction for the next 25 minutes. And you give yourself one task and one task only, no distractions. You set an alarm. Like, I literally have an alarm, not my phone, but an old school alarm that is on my desk that I can set for 25 minutes. And, and I give myself 25 minutes of dedicated deep work at working at this thing. You do it for 25 minutes, you take five minutes off. And the key is when you take those five minutes off, you don't look at your phone, you don't do any of that stuff. What you do is you go outside, you go for a walk, you just, you know, you close your eyes and just do some deep breathing. But the point is, you want to be focused for 25 minutes and then five minutes of being unfocused when you're looking at your phone or you're doing something else or talking to that is still focused work. And so it's the same thing as, like when you're working out, you can work out really hard and Then you rest for a minute, and you work really hard. You rest for a minute, and you work really hard. You rest for a minute. Same thing with your brain. 25 minutes of dedicated work. Give yourself 5 minutes off. Close your eyes, do some deep breathing, go outside, go for a walk, sit on a park bench, and just look at the, you know, the. The. The scenery, the landscape around you. A lot of times, I'll go out on my porch, and, you know, we have a few acres around us, so I'll just stare at trees. And I'm just like. I'm just gonna relax for a little bit. I'm gonna let my brain just kind of chill for a little bit and do what it wants to do. And you use the pomodoro technique. You start noticing that it is a little hard at first. It gets a little bit hard if you're not used to just being focused on just one thing but your brain. You train yourself. You're like a dog, right? Dog might poop in the house the first week, two weeks, three weeks, it lives with you. And then over time, you start training it and it starts going outside. Same thing. Your brain might be unfocused, unfocused, unfocused, unfocused, unfocused. Then you start to work at this, and it becomes better at being focused and getting things done. And so that right there is five ways to stop your procrastinating, to get things done, to stop your laziness, and to actually start to move the needle in your life. So that's what I got for you for today's episode. If you love this episode, please do me a favor. Share it on your Instagram stories right now. Take a screenshot or a picture of you listening to it or a video of where you are. If you're on a walk on the treadmill, whatever it is, put on your Instagram stories and tag me in at robdial Junior R O B D I A L J R. That helps us grow and allows people to be able to see this podcast and start listening to it. They might have never known it even existed. And that's just a great way for you to help us pay it forward. So if you do that, I greatly, greatly appreciate it. And I'm gonna leave you the same way, leave you every single episode. Make it your mission to make somebody else's day better. I appreciate you, and I hope that you have an amazing day.