“Today’s the day! Time to sit down and hammer out that project I’ve been needing to get done for the last month…
But first, let me get a cup of coffee and pick a playlist to get my mind right. Ok. I know I already have this started in excel, but I kinda want to make it in powerpoint instead. Let me transfer that file over. Oh, wow look at all these new effects they added- I wonder what they all do?! Dang, I need a coffee refill….”
If this routine sounds familiar, don’t fret- procrastinating is part of being human.
It’s also precisely why in today’s episode, I’m diving deep into what procrastination really is, what it looks like (in all of its various manifestations), and a variety of simple strategies to overcome it so it doesn’t create additional stress and impede your ability to make real progress.
Some specific points covered include:
- How can I tell if I’m procrastinating? (1:20)
- The difference between procrastinating and intentional delay (3:20)
- The 6 most common reasons we procrastinate (5:30)
- 10 strategies to manage your task avoidance (20:50)
Referenced Resources:
- AoC Newsletter: Stay in the know about our latest content, services, and events!
- Mighty Network: Collaborate with other like-minded professionals and access our library of resources!
- How To Overcome Imposter Phenomenon – FREE RESOURCE
- Instagram @aocoaching @coach_brettb
- My New Book – Get all the latest updates on my upcoming book!
As I talked about in today’s episode, one of the most effective ways to identify and manage any tendencies that may be holding you back is to seek guidance or training from someone who cares about you and your goals. It’s not a bad thing to ask for help. On the contrary, it’s necessary if you want to avoid developing blindspots or underachieving. At Art of Coaching, we provide 1:1 Mentoring for anyone looking for someone to lean on, act as a devil’s advocate, or just run ideas and decisions by. We have a wide variety of professionals in many different locations and walks of life available to provide you guidance and training specific to your needs. Apply for our 1:1 Mentorship Program today!
We’re proud to say that this episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I started taking athletic greens because frankly, I wanted to see what the hype was about. I saw this stuff everywhere. And I also know that I constantly fall short when it comes to my daily nutrient intake. Whether that’s because I’m traveling, or simply because things get hectic and my kid is at home sick and I’m trying to run between meetings and other appointments, it’s just a great way to cover all of my bases. For less than $3 a day, it’s a small micro habit with huge benefits. For a free one year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase, go to athleticgreens.com/coach today!
TRANSCRIPT
Brett Bartholomew 00:01
Hello again, welcome back to another episode of the podcast.
Now, quick disclaimer, you may notice if you’ve listened for a while that my voice sounds a little bit more raw, if that was possible, I already sound like somebody that gargle glass for a living. We’re just coming off a three day facilitator training at art of coaching, where we take a bunch of people through just about everything, regarding our systems and our business, as we continue to scale our workshops, and what we do across the world. So full transparency, it is 11:48pm. At the time of this recording, coming out three days, three days of coaching, but I wanted to get this to you because we are dedicated to bringing you guys tremendous value every week. And we’re gonna get right into this and which is ironic, but necessary, especially given the theme of this episode, which is procrastination. Now I’ve done an episode in the past. And I talked about the benefits of procrastination.
So this episode is going to be mainly focused about the root causes of procrastination, what you can do to manage it. And we’re gonna get into that a little bit. Right now, I’m also going to link some episodes that we’ve done in the past to help you with those things. Because spoiler alert, many of you, as you can imagine, use procrastination as an excuse. And I’m not saying it’s not valid, because you talk about perfectionism. And we have done deep dives on things like perfectionism, imposter phenomenon, all of that. And they’re always linked. So please make sure you go to the show notes. We don’t really do the whole four hour podcast thing here. And not every single podcast can repeat everything else we’ve done for common sense reasons. So let’s focus on this.
Now, why did I want to do this many reasons. But one, I’ve been working with a client. And they’re true, they’re incredibly smart, brilliant. That’s not an issue at all. But they continue to kind of go through this cycle of, I need to figure out what to do. Okay, now I know what to do, then they don’t really do it, but they do all these tangential things. And I’m not saying those things aren’t important around that what we call yak shaving, we didn’t invent the term, you can look that up. And we’ll link that as well. But yak shaving is when you set out to do one thing, like change a light bulb, so you go out to get the light bulb, and then all of a sudden, you find out that the door you open to get the light bulb in that cabinet. It’s sweet. Okay, well, now you’re trying to fix the squeaking door cabinet. And then you realize, oh, man, I don’t have WD 40. Or what I need to fix the squeak or the right tool. So now I’m going to the grocery store, and then you’re at the grocery store, where you’re trying to get the tool, or the hardware store and you do something else. Next thing, you know, hours or a day or a week has passed by. And you still didn’t get to the main thing, because you just went off on a tangent and got sidetracked, right, so a lot of really intelligent, really talented, really smart people.
All of you listening, many of you listening, you let these things get in your way, because you don’t just sit down and do the work. And so this individual, they know their stuff. They get worked up, how can I? How can I make sure it comes across the way that I want? And how can I make sure that people don’t perceive it as this, and then eventually they do nothing. So they rationalize doing something else. And all of a sudden, it’s four, six weeks down the road, and they haven’t made any progress on the main thing. So just want to touch on this because we all know that person, we’ve all been that person.
Brett Bartholomew 03:20
Let’s go through root causes first? Well, I think it actually might be helpful to define them first, especially because there’s a term that many of you likely haven’t heard of, that can get confused with procrastination. So if we want to look at procrastination more objectively, it can be thought of as the act of delaying or postponing tasks or actions, despite knowing that doing so is going to have negative consequences. Right, you’re putting it off. Now you can find 20 different definitions, empirically, but you’re putting this thing off, you know, it’s going to cause you some kind of pain later, distress later. Now, there’s also something called intentional delay. And this isn’t just semantics, I’ll talk to you a little bit about this.
Intentional delay refers to consciously deciding to postpone or a task or an action for strategic reasons, right? So you consciously postpone something with procrastination as well. Not always for strategic reasons, though, you’ll make yourself believe that it’s usually due to hedonic reasons, things that are pretty base, either we want to do something else or we’re scared of something.
Intentional delay is for strategic reasons. And you might do that because you’re waiting for more information or better timing. On the case like tonight, I could have done this podcast about two hours ago. But we finished around five, had dinner, had to get our kids to bed, I needed some time to unwind. And I just thought, Okay, I know I could go in there a little bit earlier. But I don’t want to be you know, Rush and I don’t want to be in this sympathetic state. I need to come down from these three days of teaching with my colleagues. If I’m going to be able to deliver this and a little bit more relaxed message to you. That was intentional delay.
There are other things you’ll do intentionally, simply because it might align with a product launch. Or it might align with some kind of information you’re putting out on your newsletter or anything like that. But the bottom line is, that it is strategic. And don’t delude yourself. Certain people will procrastinate, and they’ll make themselves believe it’s an intentional delay, you need to understand that. So there are strategic reasons. And then there are more hedonic reasons, but either way, you’re delaying it, despite knowing the consequences. So let’s look at these root causes. And of course, they’re going to vary person to person. So please don’t be that individual. That’s like all this doesn’t relate to every single thing I’ve ever dealt with in my life, of course, right? These are just me giving you some things so that if you’re kind of going through this, and you need a kick in the pants, and you’re trying to figure out why am I in a funk, why am I doing this, you can find some light. Alright, so there are some common factors.
Brett Bartholomew 05:54
One, as you can imagine, is fear of failure. It’s just the biggest one, most people procrastinate because they’re freaked out that they’re not going to succeed at the task, or they’re going to be judged negatively by others, right, this ties into imposter phenomenon. They feel like they’re going to be found out, this thing isn’t going to be as good as, as everybody else thinks it should be. And it’s going to be compared to everybody else. Now. I mean, imagine if I sat here worried that my podcast is going to be compared to every other person’s podcasts, despite the fact that they have different resources, they have different this that like, even if I tried going that route, and I followed other people’s podcasts, and then I give up, what makes me unique, is there can be a million podcasts or a million of whatever, you do have the same kind, but certain people are going to gravitate to you. And certain people aren’t going to like you know, the other folks no matter how popular they are, or you know how in depth they’re caught. There’s not a perfect thing you have to remember, and I’ve talked about this before. We’re all unique to a degree, but there are 8 billion people in the world. If you literally think that nobody’s going to appreciate your stuff, you’re just not addressing this rationally.
Fear can make it really difficult to start completed tasks. And it often leads to a lot of avoidance temper lair, and that avoidance you, you’ll feel like alright, well, this temporarily reduces my anxiety associated with potential failure, and you’ll make yourself busy. You know, and we and we’ve talked about this on our newsletter, shout out to artofcoaching.com/begin. People love to use busyness as a status symbol. People do that often because of idleness aversion, because of procrastination. It’s like they can’t relax, they can’t be okay with just doing nothing, or they can’t be okay with the idea of progress. They build all these things up in their head, and then nothing gets done. And then that anxiety just grows and perpetuates. Because as they get older and time gets shorter, the would have should have could have just build up. Right. So perfectionism, you’ve heard me mention a lot. And we’ll link the episode at the bottom to this. But I think I struggled to have a lot of compassion with this beyond a point. People it’s like this answer that just becomes a lazy odds. Perfectionism. What’s your number one weakness? Oh, it’s perfectionism. Well, what do you struggle with odds, perfectionism.
Brett Bartholomew 08:09
I mean, beyond that point, we all know that perfection doesn’t exist. So it’s kind of like, just get on with it. That’s fine, if you’re going to use that for for a while. And, and there are certain things where, of course are going to put more attention to detail than others, because you can’t give everything 110%. But at some point, you have to be like, is this bar I mean, where in life? Literally, do we see examples where people just release perfect stuff? We don’t. We see new products released by companies like Apple, you see software updates, you see beta versions of this you see up you order anything off Amazon? They’re gonna say a newer version is available. What is this perfectionism thing?
You gotta get going with a minimally viable product, you’ve got to decide what things you’re willing to sacrifice, and you need to realize that, like, time moves on, nobody’s judging you just off one thing. Well, let me rephrase that some people are, but they’re gonna judge anyway. Not everything you do is going to be for everybody. And, you know, just taking it outside of tasks, whether it’s content you’re worried about, or opening a business or taking a new job, whatever. Let’s imagine the most scandalous news story in the world came out about you today. I don’t care if you’re a person that has anything to hide or not. Just imagine that I did the worst thing, tweets, release, whatever, you know what, people are going to get spun up about that. And they’re going to remember it for a while. And it’s going to be on the internet forever, whatever. But then, there’s so many other people and so many other things that are going to happen in the world, that the amount of people that remember five weeks, five months, five years from then it’s just going to be so small.
So what are you so worried about, about putting out something imperfect for the majority of people aren’t going to remember the flaws? And some people might appreciate you for them. We know that we appreciate thinking the person you love, or somebody you love. You likely love many of their flaws. That’s what makes them special or unique to them. And I’m not trying to get late. You sorry, and I’m not trying to get like overly philosophical here. I’m just trying to bring you back down to earth, like enough with the perfectionism stuff. It’s a weak excuse, you know, it got to get over that.
Brett Bartholomew 10:11
Lack of motivation. Sometimes we just don’t want to do the task. It’s not personally meaningful, you feel like you’re not going to receive adequate rewards or recognition. This is the reason most people don’t even continue doing something. I’ve stated to you guys before, that even though we’re a grassroots organization, we have a pretty high-ranking successful podcast because of folks like you tuning in, right? You tune in. But if I was sitting here, just waiting for your recognition all the time, I’d be miserable. Because we don’t you know, it’s not like our inbox gets flooded with, “Oh, my God, that episode! I’ve listened to all 200 plus of your episodes are all amazing.” And let me tell you, we don’t get feedback on the large majority of things we do.
It’s a lot of outputs, it’s a lot of outputs. And we’ve got to keep going. And we can’t sit here and be dependent on social rewards and constant recognition. A lot of times that stuff comes delayed, right, even though people like to look at Friedrich Nietzsche, he wasn’t appreciated during his time. Countless authors, and musicians, weren’t appreciated during their time, they were appreciated later, that shouldn’t stop you from doing the work, if it’s an adequate rewards thing, if it’s a lack of motivation, not much to say here other than you know, I’m not gonna give you a bunch of magic tricks. That’s, that’s for another episode, you just got to realize that, if you like about 80%, of what you do within your day job, that’s a blessing, right?
You’re not gonna like everything about what you do. So some of that is you’ve just got to, again, give yourself a little kick in the pants and be like, alright, this isn’t that meaningful. But it’s part of the process. And I think maybe that’s, that’s what you could look at, right? It’s part of the process, we’ll get more into solutions in a minute. So let’s go back through, get them being guilty of saying, Hey, I’m gonna give you common root causes, without Solutions, and I’m going into it, then that’s another example. I could procrastinate this, I’m like, Alright, I could outline this. We could go through root causes, pop up up a bar, then go through solutions, or, well, I’ve already on the root cause we might as well talk about solutions.
But people need repetition, don’t they? It’s good for them to hear, you know, the same root cause, again, may maybe need to digest it. And there’s no one right answer. Some of you prefer one way. Some of you prefer the other way. I’m just got to, I’ve got to put it out and gotta go. poor time management, listened to Episode 190 of our podcast 190. That is all about why it feels like you never have enough time. And people that show up time management usually procrastinate because they either underestimate or overestimate the amount of time and effort required for a task. And it’s so under estimating like, you don’t get started soon enough, or you’re a little bit overconfident.
And you think, “Okay, I have all my notes lined up, all I got to do is this, this, this.” Maybe you’re underestimating the amount of technical difficulties or you’re not remembering how quickly Oh, my kid got sick. Or I can think about this writing a book right now, sometimes I think a chapter is gonna be particularly particularly easy. And I get into it, and the chapter, my writing takes me somewhere unexpected. And the next thing you know, I’m like, Oh, I thought this was gonna be an easy chapter, I followed something I found that was pretty interesting. But now I’m stuck in this quagmire, because I don’t know how to get out of it. So I always have to remember, hey, even if you’re absolutely confident you can get this done in the week, you might as well plan for three times as much time, right?
Conversely, there’s certain things we’re going to overestimate. There just is, my wife and I were talking about this the other day, she is not somebody that’s inherently comfortable in front of a camera or doing a lot of live content. But we have a private community, a mighty networks community, you can go to artofcoaching.com/community Check it out, where myself, Bekah, Ali, Liz, our staff in totality will drop certain things that we don’t drop other other places in terms of content, educational content, personal content, whatever. Well, for her, sometimes she can get all worked up. And she’s very process oriented. And it’s one of the beautiful things about her. In many respects. I love that deeply about her. She puts a tremendous amount of time and effort and attention into certain lists. And you know, she’s, for many reasons. She’s a great mother. And she’s a great colleague, and she’s a great partner because of those things. But other times she gets all worked up thinking about what people are going to expect of her.
And she overestimates how hard it’s going to be and I just have to say, Liz, people are not expecting me to blow your minds all the time I get that you want to show up with quality, you will trust your heart. You don’t need to go through all these deep outlines. You don’t need to go through all these deep things, certain tasks fine. And spoiler alert, that’s a potential solution. Some of you just need to divide you need to look at your tasks. And you say which ones really require as much effort as I think and which ones Am I okay letting go a little bit right so you that Fine, if you feel overwhelmed and unsure of where to start, you need to remember, nobody knows.
Brett Bartholomew 15:05
Nobody knows. There was never just this grand thing that existed in life that told everybody where to start. Because people just started somewhere, it was an absolute mess or disaster, and then they grew from there. That’s how it works. Another root cause decision paralysis. Now you’re starting to see how these are interrelated, we make the mistake of thinking they’re all distinctly different. They’re not they’re interrelated. If you have an inability to make decisions, and that could be where do I want to move? What do I want to eat? Which video do I want to put out? I’m thinking about writing three books, which one’s most viable, right, you’re gonna feel overwhelmed by these choices, or the consequences of making the wrong choice.
Or the one client who wanted to write multiple books, there was simple, we have a book proposal template, and it helps them kind of get clear and put information in terms of hey, what’s the main thing you want people to walk away with? What are the three key themes that walks them through a lot of other questions, I say, take this proposal template, try to fill it out for each of your two book ideas, you’re gonna find or three, you know, depending on the day, you’re gonna find that one of them is going to be a little bit easier than the other one to fill out. Not easy, but a little bit easier to fill out than the other, it’s got to become self evident, it’s got to become a little more clear where you need to go. Right, that’s there. If you want help with other decisions, maybe you’re not somebody that’s worried about content, but it’s big life decisions, check out episodes 191. I’ll say that, again, 191, and 219, that is going to help you get ideas out of your head if it’s creative, or like I said, if it’s life decisions, and you need kind of a decision making matrix and something to kind of get things down on paper and brain dump, and you want it to be a little bit more organized. Episode 191 is going to be great for that. Right.
So hopefully, you feel like you’ve got some things to check out already got a little bit of homework. Let’s go into another one. Sometimes it’s just low self efficacy. And this very much ties into the imposter phenomenon, which of course, is linked again, and you can go to artofcoaching.com/imposter. Don’t be one of those listeners, that’s heard me talk about that free resource like 20 times and you haven’t done it yet. Get your butt to artofcoaching.com/imposter now, but people with low self efficacy or imposter phenomenon syndrome, all the things tend to doubt their ability to even complete the task or that they should, you know that they’d be worthy of doing it or people would see but mainly this is just like, can I complete it? I don’t know that I can do and how many people say I’d like to write a book, but I could never do it. I’d like to go speak more in front of crowds, but I couldn’t possibly do it. And for the ones that are honest, and not just using some supplication based impression management tactic, right to talk themselves down so they appear more likable.
Brett Bartholomew 17:51
You know, you’re also never going to know if you’re really able to do it. If you don’t even start, you’re gonna find a lot of bookshelves. And I’ve studied the lives of a lot of authors as I’ve worked through my own stuff. And I don’t think I ever read about one of them, not even Stephen King, it’s like, yeah, I knew I was born to do it from the top. So if you doubt your ability to complete a task, and you make this task so impossible, you know, well, yeah, that’s just gonna be a feed forward loop into that low self efficacy. Quit thinking that you always are going to lack the necessary skills, the necessary knowledge, or the resources to complete it effectively just start.
And I think that’s another thing, just sidebar, you know, this wasn’t on my notes of things that I wanted to cover with you. Sometimes I wonder, and really, you have to remember I talked to a wide range of people, okay, so why this might not resonate with you and might resonate with somebody, you know, we have this quote, and we said often don’t, don’t expect the truth from people that lie to themselves. There are a lot of people that say they want to do things, and really they don’t, they want to be known for doing those things. And, and this doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or anything like that. Of course, we all want recognition. There’s all things in our life that we’d like to just kind of punch the easy button and have that credibility or be known as that person.
But you can’t be the adjective without doing the verb. You know, you can’t be seen as great or, like world class or whatever. Without doing the verb, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it. And people think they can’t complete the task effectively just kind of have to ask how serious Am I about this? Because you might feel like I’ve got to write a book. Well, you don’t need to start with a damn book. Maybe start a newsletter, maybe start a blog post, maybe just start writing some things down in general, maybe everyday, try writing 500 words. You don’t want to do 500 words, great, do 200 words, but get in the groove. Give yourself a chance to get a little bit of flow. All right.
Brett Bartholomew 19:49
task aversion. Task aversion is just like listening, this goes into that motivation all connected. If it’s boring, difficult, unemployed, unpleasant. Well, you’re not going to Do it. Like there’s nothing more boring to me sometimes and sitting down and writing, of course, I’d rather get up and verbally express myself. But if I can sit down, and oh, here we go, I’m gonna get made fun of this, I’ll light a candle, I usually do some like peppermint or eucalyptus, something that’s just kind of like, lively opens up my nasal packet passages, kind of just gives a little bit of a spark to the room, I’ll listen to music. I’ll change it up. I’ll do gameofthrones radio, I’ll do Hans Zimmer radio, I’ll do kind of that. I don’t know if you guys have ever been to like a hotel or a pool. And there’s kind of that low-key chill, EDM. Not like this stuff, the here, dude, you know, just boom, boom, boom, just some steady, I’ll find something that kind of gets my physiology going. And you can refer to music and candles and things like that within the environment as atmospherics. So if you don’t like doing the thing, and there’s no way around it, try to at least change something about that environment. All right. So try to give you some things here that are not just all just set, you know, SMART goals, make sure they’re manageable and realistic, and all that.
So let’s say you’re like, “Well, I just want some more solutions.” All right, let’s go through a couple more just bite sized solutions. And I’m counting you, I’m counting on you to take notes, you need to have some accountability here. So you make sure that you’re going to artofcoaching.com/reflections. That’s artofcoaching.com/reflections. You can take notes, there, you can see some of the pieces that we’re mentioning, we don’t do all the work for you. But we’ll have some things there. If you’re like I’m driving, dude, I’m not going to remember this. But remember, I’m going to give you a couple for each root cause I’m not going to walk you through 1000 examples. You need to internalize this. You can’t say, “Hey, Brett, I procrastinate and I got this problem or whatever, just tell me what to do”, and not internalize it on your own. That’s ridiculous, you got to think about it, just pause.
So these are going to range from very simple to things that maybe you haven’t thought about to things that maybe you forgot. So let’s go back to fear of failure. One, just reframe it as a learning opportunity, you know, that focus on growth and progress rather than perfection. I’m not going to say anymore. That’s just not realistic. You have to set to you have to set those realistic expectations. Just break it into smaller, achievable goals or lateral goals. For the example of you don’t need to start with writing a book, you don’t need to start with like the biggest thing, sir, was something along those lines. Even writing the book, I’m on like the fifth time rewriting the preface of my book, I’ve rewritten chapter one, a couple of different that you’re going to rewrite all this stuff anyway, get the crappy first draft out when myself and Robert Greene from the 48 Laws of Power on a podcast, he talked about off camera.
He was like, “Listen, if people saw my first draft, they would almost be like is that guy as an author?” You just gotta go. Make that messy first draft. Make it give yourself a little self compassion, a knowledge, everybody’s gonna make mistakes, and the people that are for you are going to be part of that too. Okay, so think about that there be very, very clear and we’re just being realistic about those pieces, you’d have to reframe it.
Brett Bartholomew 20:08
And for those of you once again, perfectionism 259, episode 259 Go to that. But we have to get out of this 110% mindset and start adopting a little bit and yeah, I’m gonna say this, some things just gotta be good enough. You have to have good enough Mindset by focusing on alright, I met I overcame the first obstacle, I have the crappy first draft. What am I going to do? What am I going to do? And you have to be very, very careful of using the same excuses all but I got kids. And I got this and I got it. Yeah. So to a lot of other people. The differences is they’re just finding a way to compound interest their way through it. And you can time management on busy did it okay, we’ll set a timer for 10 minutes try to do something.
Well, that’s not going to matter. Sure. My buddy Ron McKeefery and I were talking one time, when he was working on his book. He was so time poor, so time poor for myriad reasons. And he was like, You know what, I would literally open up my voice memos on my phone, I would talk into that voice memo. And I would transcribe it later. And then I’d have to edit it. But that would help me make progress on my book. You had a long, boring drive to work, open up the voice memo and just rant. You can clean up the items as stutter stammers all that on the way there. And the better thing is, if you set time limits, like tonight, I’d like to get to bed. Right? So I have no intention on this going, you know, another 45 minutes.
And that time limit, that constraint is great, because it’s like, “Oh, I bet I know you got a million stories.” I know there’s a lot of things you want to do. But man, just get on with it. Get on with it go and if people have questions, they can always touch base. So that’s a great example. Just shrink your time limit, put a little bit more pressure on yourself. That helps you focus on that big picture and prioritize the thing that will always have the most significant impact is consistency. And I’ll make sure and explain that in this sense, right? Imagine, I go back to the beginning and I say, I’m not going to do and I almost thought about I’m not going to do the episode I’m perfect, or oh my gosh, procrastination because I’m not gonna be able to go as deep as I want.
I know what people expect of me and, and all these things. If I sit there, and I get so worked up about that, I don’t even see how you guys respond to that. I don’t know, if I don’t do it at all. Now I miss out on logging another episode, getting that locked in getting that out in the world. And if I don’t do that, that that ruins the consistency. So I lost my train of thought there for a minute. But what I was trying to say around consistency, and I apologize, long three days, it happens to me too, right? What if I just said, oh, people are going to tune out now oh my god, no, I could sit here and obsess about the perfect procrastination episode. Or, instead of just doing that, and not ever getting it out, I guess I’m gonna do step one.
See what kind of people what folks are struggling with, give them some things to grasp on do to help and stay consistent. That consistent us dropping in Episode week after week after week after week, delivers value, it builds goodwill, it builds that audience. And that’s what you want to do. So like the perfect episode isn’t going to make up for a lack of consistency is what I was trying to say. Right, and these things are gonna happen to you, they’re gonna happen to me, you’re gonna have latency periods, your mind is going to be fried, keep going. Don’t give up on those things.
Brett Bartholomew 26:33
Lack of motivation. We talked about making these things smaller, give yourself a reward. Everybody loves to quote Jerry Seinfeld and say, you know, this guy, or they like to reference him. He always talks about how he writes a joke a week, I mean, even or a joke a day. Even now he’s a billionaire, he writes a joke every single day. Look it up. It’s a famous routine that he has. But he’s also notorious for saying that he’s really good about rewarding himself. Listen, writing for 30 to 60 minutes is incredibly hard. Let’s not make it like it’s not.
You’re taking ideas, that nobody has much concept of, at least in the way that you think. You’re trying to work through them and package them and put them out into the world. In a medium that you can always express yourself, clearly reward yourself. It doesn’t matter if it’s painting, speaking, working or whatever. Get up, whether that’s a walk around the block, whatever that is. I could literally give you a million examples. I want to be careful because on one of the podcasts is just like, yeah, like I’ve had a drink, I’ll do this. Some people might have something sweet, it doesn’t matter. Just figure out what that reward is for you. I’m not gonna tell you what mine is. Gotta keep you guessing on some of those things. But I’m really looking forward to it after this. I will do it immediately before I go to bed, for sure.
So you establish that I would just say reward yourself. That’s okay. Right? You have to think about those pieces. Let’s say I gave you a whole episode on time management. I’m not going to go any more there decision paralysis. Well, all right, you can do something simple, like evaluating the pros and cons. That’s fine. Right? And that goes into making time limits as well. To prevent overthinking, you’re going to out strategize yourself, you’re going to become your own opponent, you’re just going to continue to whirl yourself up in this. And also remember, and it’s tough to know exactly what examples I will touch base with you.
But in this example of my client, I said, “Hey, you don’t have to write just one book. That’s gonna have everything. You can write another book.” You know, not many people want to write or read some 600 Page manifesto. Yeah, this is not how that works. The conscious coaching for me, my first book was a conversation starter. That wasn’t all my gosh, here’s everything I know about this topic. And it’s everything I know. It’s the one thing for everything you should do. No, not at all. Things that couldn’t fit in there, when to our online courses, things that couldn’t fit in there, or any of these things collectively are things that were new, and I learned and I adapted came to our live events. All these things are evolutions, none of the things I teach, like if you come to our live courses, I’m not I’m not teaching you stuff from my first book, conscious coaching. This is all evolved tremendously. So I don’t have to worry about sitting here and procrastinating about oh, it’s got to be the one resource. I learned a long time ago that can happen. I learned the long term because even if you made it, then you’re gonna get right back into that. Well now I gotta figure out how to perfectly market that one resource and you’re gonna be how do you market this and you’re just gonna go nuts. For those of you that are busy little bees.
Brett Bartholomew 29:40
You can use the Eisenhower matrix. If you don’t know what that is. Check our social media out. It’s online at art of coaching or @CoachBrettB. I’ll put the link for that below. We’ll also put that on the podcast reflections. So artofcoaching.com/reflections use the Eisenhower matrix, it is massively helpful. It’ll help you learn what to do, what to delegate, and what to get rid of. And just having that on paper can be really, really, really helpful.
So decision paralysis, lack of motivation, time management, a lot of these things time, low self efficacy we touched on earlier, just get started. Break it, it’s a lot easier for me to be like, oh, yeah, I can knock out the newsletter for next week. Even though that stuff is hard, and it’s got its own difficulties, especially depending on what we’re talking about. I’ve been doing a free newsletter, since 2017. At this point, I can do it. I can get on here and do a podcast without having an incredibly detailed outline, or any kind of teleprompter in front of me, or anything like that. Because I just make myself do this stuff again, and again, and again. I make myself internalize this stuff. I go, and it’s just reflexive. It’s a skill. I’m also okay with imperfection. As you saw earlier, there’s, there’s latency in this episode. There’s, there’s disfluencies and we don’t have somebody that edits out every single one. Our guy Lance helps a lot but you know, he is not going to be able to take out every pause, every sniff, whatever, to a point, if he doesn’t do that, that’s offensive, you want to quit listening. But it’s also like I’m a real human being. So do you people recognize that?
If you also just have low self-efficacy, seek guidance. We have our mentoring program for a reason. Go to artofcoaching.com/mentoring. We do one-to-one virtual mentoring on just about anything we hear not just for strength coaches, anything like that. So many people worry so much like, are you? Well, what if I’m having a personal issue? What if it’s a work issue? Well, that’s when people seek out mentors. Ideally, you should have a mentor all the time. It’s great to have somebody that you can lean on a devil’s advocate, somebody you can run ideas by and all that’s protected with us. We signed mutual NDAs nobody’s gonna say anything. But so often people wait till things are bad. And that’s sad. We have a society where people, they’re like, oh, things are bad now. And now I want help. But then they feel ashamed. If they’re going to get help, you don’t need to feel ashamed.
We’ve all been there. You need to feel ashamed if you actively don’t seek guidance or training that can help you become have increased self efficacy. So if you’re really struggling with that, go to Artofcoaching.com/mentoring. We have people all over the world, from the lovely Dan Forbes in the UK, Matt Morrison and Ali Kershner and so many other assets internationally, we’re always building our team. And they have so many different backgrounds that it doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer from Quebec, there’s going to be somebody that relates to you. We have a consistent framework to be able to do that.
Task aversion can fit into time management as well, the Pomodoro Technique is very helpful, just a fancy word for a time management task inversion method, where it just you chunk these things up in short focus moments. Alright, I’m going to do this for 30 minutes, and then I’m going to stop. Then I’m going to do this for 30 minutes, we talked about rewarding yourself, we talked about changing your environment. It Ain’t Rocket Science, folks. It ain’t it kind of just got to get going. You really have to get going. And it’s funny, I’ve seen stuff, people will, they’ll package these solutions in a lot of ways. Oh, you should try temptation, bumble bundling, right? Combining activity with a task you’ve been putting off, right? Maybe. And that’s fine. If you like listening to a podcast, if you’re doing household chores and everything, but I wouldn’t really suggest that you try to write the first draft of your book or your business plan while watching a TV show. Now, that’s fine. If you’re doing some basic idea dumps on a legal pad or your computer, but probably not the most meaningful thing. You know, it’s the multitasking is a myth. It is it’s a myth.
Something that is not a myth is public commitment. You know that I have a new book coming out in 2024. That’s gonna be really embarrassing for me. If I get it done, you might be like, Dude, I don’t care if you get it done, while I’m committing to it. And I do it with my staff as well. You know, I’ll say, Hey, we’re gonna try this and 2023 We’re going to try this and 2024 I’m going to try to get this done. And some of those things break and we’re not able to do them. But you know, it’s like, “Hey, I’m putting that out there. I feel confident in this.” This is what we’re going to try. So try that commitment. Some of you are hiding and you’re hedging. Stop. Get out there though. You have a whole world of people who would love to root for the antihero inside you. That’s it. Nobody wants I gotta be careful. Nobody wants a world full of Superman and Superwomen and these people that are perfect, that’s not relatable. So do you have enough to work on here? You have enough to think about, you have enough to internalize. Now ask yourself, what excuses matter so much to you? That you’re willing to let them make you miserable over the long term? What self doubts what things Do you think are so just like ego deflating identity crumbling, that you’re willing to potentially go to your grave without saying, hey, you know what? This I gave it a go. Because there’s a lot of song lyrics and a lot of books out there and a lot of people that are like, you know, I try my best and try to grow every day. I mean, all right, well then get going. Let me see that growth. Let me see you put out the imperfect first draft, the imperfect thing, quit worrying about, but there are so many ideas, it’s all going to come out in the wash, get going. It’s all going to come out in the wash. You can have sequels, you can have imperfections. We’re all waiting for you. We’re all rooting for you. Please make sure to go to art of coaching.com/reflections art of coaching.com/mentoring.
Share this with a friend. Share it with five. Every week we try to bring you value. We don’t get paid to do this podcast. We’re trying to give you that value straight up. Because you know, we hope that you give us an opportunity to build this trust. You see, man, they’re free. Sounds pretty good. They put some time into that. If you feel like that great. Come invest in us as well. We’re not perfect, but we will do everything in our power to not let you down. And even if we do that, yes, what will make it right, just like you will do if you get started on everything that you’re putting off today. As usual for myself and the rest of the Art of coaching team. Thank you so much for listening. We’ll talk to you soon.
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