236. How to Stop Procrastinating and Achieve your Goals with Brian Tracy

236. How to Stop Procrastinating and Achieve Your Goals with Brian Tracy

Timestamp:

00:00 Introduction: Overcoming Overwhelm and Procrastination

00:15 Brian Tracy's Strategy: Eat That Frog

00:38 Meet Brian Tracy

01:15 The Concept of Eating the Frog

01:27 The Origins of Eat That Frog

02:15 The Success of Eat That Frog

02:32 Benefits of Tackling Big Tasks First

04:11 Understanding Procrastination

05:04 Developing the Habit of Eating Your Frog

05:20 The Power of Environment in Habit Formation

06:43 The Final Hack: Visualization

07:38 Challenge and Conclusion

Ash Roy and Brian Tracy's Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):

 Brian Tracy:

Something happens between the head and the hand that is almost a miracle.

Ash Roy

Have you been paralyzed by procrastination?

What if I told you about a simple strategy that Brian Tracy shared with me?

Brian Tracy
The first thing you do in the morning is you eat a live frog.

Ash Roy

A strategy that could transform your life.  In this video, productivity expert Brian Tracy reveals a secret to tackling your most daunting tasks.

Brian Tracy

You'll have the satisfaction of knowing that, that's probably the worst thing that could happen to you all day long.

Ash Roy

And today Brian's here to share with you a concept that has the power to skyrocket your productivity. And supercharge your success. The concept is called eat that frog. Strange term, right? I thought so too. So I asked Brian, how'd he come up with this idea? Could you explain to our listeners what you mean when you say eat that frog and why it's important to all of us?

Brian Tracy

Many years ago, I came across a story from Mark Twain. He'd written a couple of books on frogs. He said, what I learned is if the first thing you do in the morning is you eat a live frog, you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that that's probably the worst thing. It could happen to you all day long. . And then he said there are two corollaries to this law.

One is that if you have two live frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first. . And, and then his second recommendation was if you have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long. When I was writing my book on time management, I've got a call from my publisher and I had a book called 21 Great Ways to Double Your Sales and, double Your Time Off.

And I rewrote the whole book as. Eat that frog. 21 great ways to stop procrastinating and get more things done faster. Ash, I tell you, it must have hit a nerve because we thought it would sell a few thousand copies. And it started to sell and sell and sell and sell. We have now sold almost 3 million copies in 51 languages.

It is the best selling book on time management in the history of the world.

Ash Roy

So keep watching to learn how to beat procrastination and achieve your goals faster than you ever thought possible as Brian and I walk you through exactly how to identify your biggest and most challenging tasks and achieve them.

When you complete a challenging task early in the day, your brain releases endorphins and these make you feel positive, creative, and confident. This means you make better choices about other tasks and you do less busy work. You do things that are impactful, not just things that feel like progress, but aren't actually helping you to make progress.

And that's one of the most common ways I've seen entrepreneurs and other business owners sabotage themselves without even realizing it. When you've completed the biggest task first, you have momentum on your side. Of course, this isn't always easy. If it was. The thing is, we all face resistance. It's tempting to look away from the things that are challenging, but by developing the discipline to eat that frog first thing in the morning, you put a stop to procrastination once and for all, because you've developed the habit of making yourself do things that you don't always want to do.

You do things because they need to be done regardless of how you feel. When you start to do the thing that.  It often gets a lot easier, because here's the interesting thing about procrastination. A lot of us associate procrastination with not finishing things, but actually I found that the most subversive and damaging kind of procrastination is not starting things.

Getting started on this video was one of the more challenging things for me. But now that I've started it, I feel a lot more motivated. And as you can see, I'm a lot more animated because I made a start. Thing is, I didn't feel this way about 30 minutes ago when I first started recording this video. Okay, so why do we procrastinate?

I've done a lot of thinking about this and quite a bit of research, and I found there are three main reasons. 1. Lack of clarity around next steps. 2. Fear of taking action. or not having a bias towards taking action and 3. engaging in busy work, activity that helps you feel like you're doing something, but doesn't really move the needle in your business or your life.

Here's an interesting insight. Clarity comes from taking action, not the other way around. So if you have a challenging task that you don't want to tackle because it feels overwhelming, then develop clarity around what the next step is. And make a start, break the task down into as many components as reasonably possible and just make a start.

You'll be amazed by how much confidence you get by just making that start and that momentum will carry you forward more than you had thought possible before you started. Okay, so how do you make eating your frog a daily habit, not just a one time feat? The key is to have a clear system that helps you stay focused and motivated.

And a great way to do that is to set up an environment that incentivizes you to succeed. I spoke to James Clear on my podcast about the importance of setting up a good environment and how it plays a part in developing great habits. Here's James.

James Clear

You know, a lot of people feel like they watch too much television, but if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face?

They all face the TV. So it's like, what is this room designed to get you to do? And I think the, the overarching point here is that many of our behaviors and habits, while they are non conscious or we do them like more or less automatically, they're often a response to the environment that we're surrounded by.

And so if you're seeing food all the time on Instagram, you feel like eating. If you. Walk into the living room and the couches and chairs all face the television. You feel like turning on the TV. You can take control of this process by redesigning your environment, both the physical environment and the digital one.

Ash Roy

But here's the thing, even with all these strategies and techniques, there will still be days when your motivation wanes, when the pull of procrastination is overwhelming, and that's why I want to share one final step that I believe will make all the difference in helping you to eat your frog every morning.

It's a simple but amazingly effective hack that most people tend to overlook and when you hear what this hack is you'll be surprised at how powerful it can be in keeping you on track and fired up no matter what challenges come your way. So what is this surprisingly simple but powerful hack you ask? 

Visualization. You see, us humans, we are visual creatures. According to the University of Rochester, more than 50 percent of the cerebral cortex, or our brains, is dedicated to visual processing. When we visualize ourselves achieving our goals, even in our own minds, it has an enormously positive impact on our self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to achieve our goals.

I'm sure you've seen Olympic athletes visualize themselves winning the race just before they're about to sprint or jump into the swimming pool. This kind of mental rehearsal activates the same regions of your brain involved in actually performing the tasks, priming you for success and helping you to stay focused despite challenges.

By consistently  visualizing yourself as a person who is a winner. It eats their frogs with gusto and achieves great things. You gradually reshape your self image and build remarkable confidence in your abilities. So here's my challenge to you, figure out what your frog is for today or tomorrow. If you're watching this in the evening and visualize yourself achieving that task.

First thing, leave a comment below telling me what your frog is. And if you do so within 48 hours of this video being published, I promise you I will respond. You can ask me any question you like, and I'll help you to the best of my ability. I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for watching and please like and subscribe this video and do share it with somebody else if you think they'll find it useful.

Thank you for your support.