How to Beat Procrastination
Summary
How do you beat procrastination, stay focused, and get more done?
Here are 3 ways that other people can help you become more productive:
- Get an accountability partner. This is the lowest level of accountability though, because having somebody else hold you accountable can work only in the short term. This kind of accountability slows down change for you because it’s an external force that pushes you to action. It means you’re not ready to take responsibility for your own business and success. Having a coach hold you accountable will only work for a short period of time…until YOU create your own habits of productivity.
- Change the level of your association. Hang out with top producers and learn from them. Position yourself to develop a relationship with them. When you commit to earning the right to be their friend, this forces you to perform at a higher level.
- Have a big dream. Want something so bad that it fuels you to do whatever it takes to have it. This burning desire is the most powerful thing that will give you the internal accountability to keep you focused and productive.
Full Transcript
How do you beat procrastination and stay focused and get more stuff done every single day, that is the topic of today’s training.
Hi there, it’s Kevin Ward, the founder of YesMasters Real Estate Success Training, helping you get more yeses and more successes in your business and in your life.
But the first thing that you gotta do, if you want more YES and more successes, you actually have to do what you’re supposed to do. And how do you overcome that nasty creature of procrastination? The stuff that distracts us, that takes us off when we’re dodging what we’re supposed to be doing. We are getting distracted. We’re drifting through the day, how do we stay on track? Well, we can have a schedule. We can have checklists and all of that kind of stuff, but one of the things that people ask me about a lot is I need somebody to hold me accountable.
I need somebody to hold me accountable. Should I get an accountability partner? Should I hire a coach for accountability? What should I do?
THREE WAYS TO GET OTHER PEOPLE TO HELP YOU BEAT PROCRASTINATION
So I want to talk about three ways that you can use someone else in this video for support to help you get more done, to help you overcome procrastination and become a more productive, powerful individual. And I’m going to go from what I consider to be the lowest level of help in terms of having somebody else to support you, from the lowest level to the highest level.
1. Get an accountability partner. Now, people go like, well, I want a coach to hold me accountable. So here’s the thing about a coach, a good coach sucks as an accountability partner, somebody who holds you accountable. And here’s the reason that is not a coach’s job. Okay?
My friend, anybody that you are responsible to can hold you accountable. And if you want to hire a great coach, hire a great coach that can help you make more money and be more successful, not somebody that forces you to do what you need to do.
So here’s the problem with accountability as having a coach, as an accountability partner, or somebody that holds you accountable is it is always an external force pushing you to do what you’re supposed to be doing. And if you still don’t want to do it, it now becomes you against the coach. So accountability is the lowest form of coaching that there is.
Why? Because high achievers are the best coach’s coach, they don’t need somebody saying, have you done what you’re supposed to do? Why haven’t you been doing it? What are you going to do? What do I have to do to get you to do it?
So if you’re looking for external accountability, my friend, external accountability is either, a couple of things. It’s either a very slow, painful way to change and typically does not work or is simply a reflection of the fact that you’re not ready to own your own business. And if you’re a real estate agent, you own your own business, you’re self employed, you’re an independent contractor, which means your failure or success is up to you.
And somebody says, well, I just need somebody to hold me accountable is saying, I don’t have enough discipline. I don’t have the diligence, I don’t have my own personal initiative or the drive to actually get out there and do what I’m supposed to do on a daily basis to get my goal.
So I’m going to give you something better than an accountability partner. Accountability partner, they’re the one that they inflict pain on you. They’re the one that, they text you or they call you and say, why aren’t you doing what you’re supposed to do? And again, the other problem with the accountability partner before I move on to the next one is, the other problem with an accountability partner is what if they flake?
Well, now the very thing that they’re supposed to help you not do, they actually encourage you to do it because you’re like, well, they’re flaking so I might as well flake. So accountability partners tend to be a lose-lose proposition over the long-term, and having a coach as an accountability partner is a temporary fix that will only work for a period of time until you create your own habits and your own productivity.
And hopefully a coach will help give you the tools to create your own habits and your own productivity. And they’re going to take you to a higher level of thinking, which is the third level of the solution, don’t worry, I’m going to get to it in a second.
2. Change your level of association. But right now, number two, the second way to use other people and leverage people to help you be more productive, more accountable to yourself and beat procrastination is changing the level of your association. And that means start hanging out with people who are high achievers. Just start hanging out with the top producers rather than the new agents. If you’re a new agent, stop hanging out with new agents, start hanging out with the top producers. Take them to lunch. I can’t afford lunch, well, then you need to start hanging out with them because they can afford to take people to lunch.
So you want to learn from them who know how to have the money to take people to lunch and have the money to do nice stuff, you want to put yourself in that position to be in those relationships. And here’s the thing, I look at it this way. If you want to be a millionaire, start hanging out with millionaires. Well, I don’t know any millionaires. Well, it’s time to start looking.
The first thing you gotta do is just like I did years ago when I was absolutely broke, I simply set the intention that I was going to find relationships and develop friendships with people that had more success than I had, that would help me raise my level of thinking and raise my level of performance. And that’s the first step, you just set the intention and then you go start looking for them.
And some of my greatest relationships today, literally I paid to get into a room where I could be around them, build a relationship with them, get to know them. And my commitment was I will earn the right to become their friend. And that commitment, here’s the thing, when you’re now in reaching for a higher level of association, or as one of my friends calls it, punching above your weight class, when you start doing that, it forces you to perform at a higher level because you’re like, if I don’t perform at a higher level, they’re not going to want to hang out with me. We won’t have anything in common, I can’t associate with them unless I raise the bar for my own performance. And so now my desire to have a higher level of association pushes me to be more productive, to be more proactive, to take more diligent action and get better results. And because I want to not only get there, but I want to be able to stay there.
3. Have a big dream. The third and I think the most powerful way to hold yourself accountable and to get you going, to get you productive, to get you to beat procrastination is having a big dream. Having something that you want that is so big, that is so powerful that it has created such a fire in you that you cannot not have it.
Now, Napoleon Hill in his book, Think and Grow Rich, he called this a burning desire. And he said, “It is the number one first step to all success is having a burning desire.” My friend, above all else, all of the accountability you need comes from inside of you. If you have a big dream, it’s like that I want so bad I will do whatever it takes to get there. Every single day you wake up it’s like, I’m going to get that. I’m going to get that.
And it doesn’t have to be a thing, it can be a level of accomplishment. It can be anything that you want so badly. I want to be the number one agent in my office. I want to have a new house. I want to be able to take my family on first-class vacations. It’s got to be something that you want so badly that you can fuel that into a burning desire. That it is bigger, that your desire for that goal is bigger than your fear of prospecting, for example. That your desire for that is bigger than your desire for procrastination, it is bigger than your distraction. When you take a professional athlete and they are pursuing a championship, they don’t have time to be distracted by social media.
Yeah, but I get stuck, I get caught into the scroll hole of social media. Well, it’s because you don’t have a dream big enough, something driving you strong enough that I don’t have time to get stuck into social media because my dreams demand that I stay in action and the fire that’s burning inside of me, my desire for it is so big. I train what I call my five mantras of success. And the number one mantra of success is to dream bigger.
If you want more success, your dreams are too small, you gotta dream bigger. You gotta have a dream so big that I don’t have time to get distracted. I don’t have time to procrastinate because my dreams mean that much to me and if I don’t do the right stuff, I’m not going to get my dreams. And I’m telling you my friend, who needs accountability?
And I just want you to think about, you look at the highest achievers on the planet. And it could be whether it’s wealth or whether it’s inventions or accomplishments or impact that they’ve made in the world or whatever it is, the highest achievers on the planet have an internal fire of a dream that they want. They didn’t need somebody going like, did you wake up? It’s when you said you were going to today, did you set your alarm? Are you getting up at 5:00 AM like you said you were going to do? Or did you do your work today or did you whatever, that doesn’t happen for the highest achievers. Nobody had to tell Kobe Bryant that he had to go practice today. Why? Because his dream to be the best was so, so drove him that nobody had to tell him not to take action. His dream created that internal accountability.
And so you can .. if you need help and everybody sometimes needs help, if somebody else is supporting them and giving them a good kick in the butt, okay. Get an accountability partner for a period of time, but my friend, the real key is cultivating and finding something in your world in your life that you want, a goal, a dream. Dream bigger, for some people that’s the work, but once you find that dream and once you find that something that it’s like, ah, and you need to go out and you need to touch that dream. You need to, as one of my mentors says, smell the leather. You need to go out, if it’s a car, it’s whatever motivates you. And it’s like, well, that’s not really … that’s so materialistic. Well, if it drives you to work hard and move your life forward, then at least use that as a temporary motivation to say, I want a new car.
Okay, good. But you can’t afford it now, you got to go out and work for it. If that will motivate you, just think of it. Remember back when you were a kid and you wanted something? I mean, like I got to have that. And how that all you could think about was getting that thing. How am I going to get that thing? How am I going to get that thing?
And I heard one guy say one time, is there any force in the world more powerful than a 12 year old who wants their first iPhone? Right? What do they do? They’re all they can think about it. And they’re going to negotiate, they’re going to figure out some way to get it. Why? Because they have a burning desire. My friend, if you want high levels of success in anything in life, it’s going to start with an internal drive, a burning desire to have something, I call that your dream. Find your dream. Fan that dream into a flame, turn it into a burning desire and go get your dream.
If this video has been helpful for you, would you make sure you give it a thumbs up, but I want to hear from you. I want to hear what you’re struggling with in terms of achieving your goals. If you’re struggling with procrastination, what’s your story? What are you struggling with? If I can help, I’ll be watching the comments to make sure that it’ll help me in terms of deciding what my next videos are going to be, but I want you to win. I’ll see you on the next video.