(Marie? In a second. Hold on, I'm busy. Ah, Marie are you ready? We have to shoot the
next video. What's it about? Procrastination, Q & A. F**k that, I'm busy!)
It's time for another Q & A Tuesday. Should we try that again? It's Q & A Tuesday! It's
Q & A Tuesday.
Q: Okay so we have a great question for today's Q & A Tuesday and I think it's something that
all of us deal with. How do you deal with procrastinations? So this is from someone
who writes in... I have no idea how to pronounce her name, so let's give this a try, Mijanou?
Mi-Jan-ooh??! Meejanow? "Meej." We're going to call you Meej and this is what she writes:
She writes: "How do you avoid procrastination and get a sense of urgency in the good sense
so that you take action now?"
A: Okay, so I actually have a two-part answer to this question and the first thing I want
to talk about is the overarching reason why all of us fight this nasty thing called procrastination.
And, I learned about this first from a author who I so admire, his name is Steven Pressfield
and he wrote an amazing book called The War of Art. If you haven't gotten it, you should
get it! We'll do a book review on that sometime soon.
Anyway, Steven talks about this idea called The Lizard Brain. So this Lizard Brain, all
it's concerned about is survival and the lizard brain wants to keep you hidden. It wants to
keep you safe. So it really stops us from doing things, from putting ourselves out there
that could be scary and it just basically makes us procrastinate. Now the thing that
you have to do is feel that fear. Feel that resistance, that resistance that actually
Steven Pressfield talks about that's attributed to the lizard brain, and just keep going anyway.
Another favorite author of mine, his name is Seth Godin. If you haven't heard of him,
definitely check him out and, he says all we need to do is ship. We need to ship our
things constantly. So what does that mean? That means writing your blog. That means produce
your music. That means create your videos. You have to create some momentum so you can
kind of push past that lizard brain and get your things going and get it out there.
There's no secret recipe, unfortunately, there's no secret sauce to moving past it besides
one of my favorite things to do is called "just do it!" Jezzdooet... So I'll talk to
you about what I do when it comes to getting over procrastination and that's this; tip
number one, this is what I do and it's called social accountability. So what does mean?
It means that I like to embarrass myself past procrastination. So I tell everybody and her
sister about what I'm going to do so that they can publically, socially hold me accountable.
So this way if I tell my girlfriend, "You know, I'm going to shoot these new videos
and you're going to see them next week." If she doesn't see them, she's going to call
me out on it and I'm going to be pretty embarrassed. So I like to use that social accountability
to get me to move past procrastination and get some sh*t done. The second thing that
I do is I schedule it.
So I often like to say, "If you don't schedule it, it's not real." And, a very wise friend
of mine and her name is Michelle Vargas, she was saying, "You know, if you don't want to
schedule it. You probably don't want to do it." And, I think that that's a very good
kind of inside tip for yourself because if you're not willing to put it on the calendar,
you're probably not willing to do it.
So that's all I got for you when it comes to procrastination. Again, it's a nasty thing
that all of us deal with but if pay attention to your lizard brain, I guarantee it if you
know it's there you can overcome it and then if you're anything like me, you can put some
public declarations out there. Get the things in your calendar and you can move past it.
So thank you so much for watching today. Hope you found it useful. If you like it, go ahead
and like it! Leave a comment below and if you want more great stuff, come and see us
at marieforleo.com. Thanks and I'll see you next time!
(Michelle, I'm fu**ing busy!)