Episode 53 – Overcome Procrastination Using These 2 Easy Methods

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:24    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth about marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host, Tudor. And today I’m going to do an episode on the topic procrastination and overcoming resistance when you have to do work, because I’ve noticed that a lot of you guys struggle with this, and it’s something that occurs very frequently and it happens with many people, even though in my opinion, it’s one of the biggest reasons why you cannot achieve the success that you, this when you procrastinate. You’re wasting time. The way I think about things in business, and I’ve come to this mindset over many years, but in business success is the result of one thing. And one thing only, and if you just get this one thing, right, then everything else is going to work out.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:22    And this one thing is time management. And I know that can sound trite. And I don’t just mean creating lists and prioritizing stuff on lists. That’s not what I mean by time management. Rather, what I mean by time management is choosing the activities that are going to give you the highest return on your, and then focusing on those and obviously outsourcing activities that don’t give you a high return on your time and so on. And so forth. Time management for me includes delivering value and figuring out the ways that you are uniquely suited to deliver the most value through to the world, right? Because we’re getting paid for the value that we deliver. So, uh, one big part of time management is actually figuring out what are your assets? Where, what are you best positioned to deliver value with regards to, right? So everybody has to figure that out for themselves.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:18    But anyway, time management is the most important thing because time is the only a resource that we all have in equal amounts, right? So Bill Gates doesn’t have more time than I do. He just has the same time as I do in his day. So the people who become rich and become financially successful, the one difference between them and everybody else who starts just like they do meaning relatively middle class, or maybe poor. The difference between them is obviously how they invest their time and the return that they get on their time. Because once again, their time is the only differentiator amongst them. Bill Gates gets a much higher return on his time compared to, for example, what you get, right? That’s why he’s a billionaire today. You may not even be a millionaire. So that’s the big difference right there. So procrastination is very poisonous because it strikes precisely at this stops you from investing your time wisely and you go from getting maybe even a mediocre return on your time to getting a zero return on your time.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:29    You know? And once you start averaging this out over a long period of time, if you procrastinate one hour every day, right? And we take this one hour and we average it over the whole year, suddenly, now that’s oh, around 365 hours wasted with a return zero. Right? So that’s, what is that? I mean, let’s calculate 365 divided by 24 and that’s a bit more than 50 15 days, right? So if you, if you put it in perspective, if you procrastinate one hour a day, that means that in a year you lose 15 days worth of work, you know? So it makes a huge difference. It may feel like nothing, right? Because you just see a little bit of it every day. But that little bit actually represents a, a humongous amount of time that you’re going to waste in the long term. And I mean, there’s no way you can be successful if you’re wasting so much time, because there are guys out there who are working pretty much all the time and they’re all the time working on making their dreams happen and putting in the time and making a difference.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:39    So procrast destination is something that you have to overcome to be successful. And it’s a big thing, right? Don’t think that it’s a trifold and oh, I can just forget about it for some time and whatever. No, it’s something that you have to address if you want to be successful. And I’m going to tell you exactly how you can address it in episode, because I mean, I used to struggle with procrastination myself and nowadays I almost never procrastinate, at least not when it comes to business stuff and I just go forward and just get it done. And it’s important that you become able to basically adopt this mindset and who replicate this sort of success when dealing with procrastination in your own life, some other people, they also call procrastination resistance. So you resist doing the work and that’s absolutely true. That’s what actually happens.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:35    So how do you actually approach procrastination? So for me, it was really helpful to a understand where procrastination comes from because procrastination is a symptom, right? It’s not a problem. And you have to figure out where it actually comes from so that you can deal with the cause of it and solve that. And then you’re not gonna have, you’re not gonna have issues with it anymore. So looking back at my own self, right? I realized that procrastination very often is a form of avoidance. And it’s a form of avoiding something that typically in my case, produced anxiety, right? So I would procrastinate on something because it would cause me anxiety. And I didn’t want to experience that anxiety. So I would procrastinate on it. Another common cause of procrastination, which is different from anxiety is discomfort, right? So if something causes you discomfort, then you procrastinate to push that discomfort away in an attempt to basically avoid it in order to change this, what you ultimately have to do is that you have to change your relationship with both discomfort and anxiety.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:49    So instead of anxiety and discomfort being triggers that make you go into avoidance, they to instead become fuel, right? So you’re trying to, now you’re trying to do some internal alchemy with yourself and with your mindset so that you turn these things, which before were negatives into things that are going to be positive for you. And they’re going to make a big difference in your life and allow you to actually overcome procrastination and start doing what you know you have to do and make your dream dreams come true. Because the reality here guys, is that nobody is going to make your dreams come true. If you don’t do it, there’s nobody else who’s going to come in. And uh, oh, I’m going to take over your work, John, and I’m going to make it happen. Nobody’s going to do that. Nobody’s going to bring money to you.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:39    You have to go out there just like a Wolf and go out there and start hunting and get it yourself if you want it. And that’s how it works. And that’s how it’s actually just that it works, right? This is what justice means that you get what you deserve, right? So you have to earn it. How do you change this? So first of all, you have to train self. Every time you experience anxiety, or every time you experience discomfort, instead of running away from it, you have to force yourself to run towards it. And the way you do that is by learning that there is value in anxiety and there is value in discomfort, maybe not directly. So maybe there is direct value in experiencing anxiety for its own sake, but there is value in training yourself to handle anxiety, right? So the only way you can train yourself if you is, if you expose yourself to that anxiety.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:34    So once you make this realization, then you can start changing how you approach those things. And instead of approaching them with avoidance, you realize that there is something for you to gain out of it and you stop avoiding that scenario. And instead you become thankful for it and grateful that you, you are faced with anxiety provoking situations in your life because they actually strengthen you. And they allow you to work on that muscle, which resists anxiety. And the same is true, obviously for discomfort. I mean, the reason why a lot of people are fat, right, is because they cannot bear the discomfort that they need to go through in order to exercise, to work out and to do everything that they need to actually go about losing weight, right. And, um, being fit. It’s all about procrastination. So that’s one technique that I use, right?  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:30    So I reframe it and I see value in it instead of something negative. And the second technique that I found very useful when it comes to overcoming procrastination is basically to think about the real negatives that procrastination is going to cause in your life. Right? So the very real ne negatives, because often we’re not conscious about them. And you know, we discussed this at first, right? So we said that, and I showed you how, if one hour, a day, you procrastinate or you waste time, then you’ve lost 15 days of work, 15 days, meaning 24 hours around of work in a year, 15 days is, which is a significant amount. It’s half a month, you lose half a month. You just threw it away. That’s what happens when you procrastinate. And then you wonder why you have no time to go on holiday and you have no time to go to the gym.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:29    And of course you don’t have any time because you’re procrastinating and you are wasting that time, right? So you have to stop. And the other way to stop it is to become aware of these effects, ask yourself, what can I do in 15 days of nonstop work? You know, what can I do with half a month of work? And if you don’t count weekends, those 15 days, that’s almost an entire month of work. So 15 days, it’s actually three weeks of work, not counting the weekends again. So three weeks of work, you waste in a year because you’re procrastinate one hour a day. So it it’s a huge amount, right? So you have to be to realize those costs also the costs in terms of regret and not making your dreams happen, right? Because there is no way you’re going to make your dream happen.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:18    If you don’t actually consistently take action. If you don’t eliminate the habit of procrastination out of your life, right? So no successful person, procrastinates, that’s the exact opposite of being successful, successful people. They don’t do that. They’ve already trained themselves to be disciplined and to take the action they need to take in order to achieve that success. And of course, to maintain that success afterwards. So, um, this is the second way that I basically tackle procrastination. I tend to use both ways. I think that both of them are very useful. So basically on the one hand, you become aware of the consequences. On, on the other hand, you reframe the negative aspect of what’s causing you to procrastinate the cause of procrastination, and you reframe it in a positive way so that you get value out of it. So instead of the discomfort, for example, maybe it’s the discomfort of thinking.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:19    You just hate thinking because it takes effort and it’s painful for your brain, right? So that, that discomfort, the discomfort of not knowing solution to whatever issue you’re dealing with, that discomfort, you can reframe it in a, that strengthens you. So you can say that I learn to think better. I’m training my mind, or if it’s physical discomfort, I’m training my body, right? To resist more stress, to grow stronger and to become more powerful. And this is very useful. And it’s going to be very useful to you, especially if you remember that the person you are today is not the person you will be when you achieve your dreams, right? Those are two very different people. The person you are today is a lot further behind the person you are going to be by the time you achieve your dreams. So you actually have to become that person.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:15    And this is how you do it. And it’s the small stuff. Every day, that’s going to add up and is going to make a big difference in the long run. So I don’t know if you’ve read books like the power of habit or the compound effect, all those books. They pretty much make the same point that these relatively successes that you have every day, they’re going to add up to the big successes that you have in life and the people who are successful and they’re successful on a consistent basis. They’re very good at doing this. They’re very good at getting those successes to add up to something much bigger over the long haul. And the only way you can do this is if you overcome procrastination. So it all starts with you realizing that and deciding that you have to overcome it. And then of course having the tools that I communicated with you reframing that’s number one, and number two, figuring out the consequences of it, the real consequences with regards to number one, I can also add that it’s very useful to, to try to become aware of the benefits in the moment.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:18    So like for example, if you’re working out, become aware of the joy of feeling that you can lift a very heavy weight, you know, there’s a certain joy in that that’s alongside of the pain, but what tends to happen is that discomfort and the pain of doing something tends to capture all our attention. So with all these techniques, what we really are trying to do is shift attention from one thing to the other, and basically lock something outside of the awareness of your mind and bring something else in, right? So I mean, all those wordy techniques and all those reframes and blah, blah, blah, that I talked about, they actually help you shift your attention. And that’s what truly makes the difference. When you start shifting your attention from the, the negative of discomfort. Oh, it hurts. Oh, it’s so, and you start focusing instead of the positive aspect, or it feels so good to leave this heavy weight, or it feels so good to figure out a solution to this problem.  

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:20    And you start noticing these real positive that actually exist in the experience and that you are actually deleting. When you’re focusing just on the negatives, then you start only aware of the real possibilities and the real ways that you can use that experience to your advantage. And you can be a real Alchemist in your mind and transform that lead into gold and transform the negative into a positive into something that’s not a stumbling block to your success, but it’s actually going to be the very fuel that’s going to make you successful. So that’s pretty much what I wanted to share in today’s episode. I think I’ve summarized it quite briefly there at the end, let me know down in the comments or feel free to shoot me a message in this chord or on our Facebook group. Let me know what you think and otherwise until next time, remember to keep growing your businesses and providing massive value to the world. You are the reason why we’re all growing creature. Our freedom is expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you.