Layla (0:00)

Oftentimes when we're working on something exciting, it's good for us in the short term but not leading to our long term goal. And oftentimes when we're dealing with for, it's good for us in the long term, but in the short term it's not very incentivized. How do you create an unshakable business? I crossed $100 million in net worth by the age of 28. Now I'm growing acquisition.com into a billion dollar portfolio. In this podcast, I share the lessons I've learned in scaling big businesses and helping our portfolio companies do the same. Buckle up and let's build. Today I'm going to help you understand the three main reasons why you procrastinate and what you can do about it. At the end, I'm actually going to jump into real conversations with people from my audience live to talk about how to stop procrastinating. Getting yourself to do something when you don't want to do it is a skill in itself. The reason that you procrastinate is because you lack skill. Not because there's something wrong with you. Not because there's something wrong with the thing you need to do at hand, but because you're lacking fundamental skills of managing yourself. Because, let's be honest, you've probably put it in your calendar, you probably put it on your to do list, probably avoided it, didn't do it, thought about how much you didn't want to do it, thought about you could do something else instead, thought about how you should do something else instead and then done something else instead. Procrastination isn't any practical problem. It is an emotional problem. My friend Dr. Kashi introduced me to this and he calls it the three headed monster of procrastination. So let's dive into them. So the first of the three headed monster is anxiety. So for me, I don't know about you, but anxiety is almost 200% of the reason I don't do things. And I can tell you personally this is one I have probably dealt with the most. And so what it means is that the thought of doing something or the action of starting to do the thing makes you feel anxious and so then you avoid doing the thing. This actually was really relevant for me because about three years ago now I'd never made a piece of content in my life. I had accumulated a net worth of a hundred million dollars. I think we'd done at that.130 million in sales and I still felt terrified to make content about business. I would draft up the YouTube videos, I would write the tweets, and then every time it came to actually hitting posts, I would just stop. My fear of posting content got stronger and stronger. My anxiety continued to elevate. My brain was saying all these different things. It was like, one, this is not your job, Layla. You don't need to post content. Just go, like, run the business like you've been doing. People are going to talk. It's going to be really uncomfortable. Who wants to listen to a woman talk about business? The reason I wasn't making content wasn't because of those thoughts, but it was because of the anxiety that came with those thoughts. So to get out of the discomfort, I avoided doing the thing. I have learned to ask myself a series of questions to help myself remember the long term benefits of doing things that provoke anxiety in the short term. The first one I ask myself is, is this going to make my life easier or harder in the long term if I do it today? And most of the time when I think about it, I'm like, it's going to make my life easier if I do it today. Not long ago, when someone asked me to speak on stage in front of 5,000 people, and I was like, oh, my God, I'm so busy. I have so much to do. But then I was like, will this make my life easier or hard harder? And I was like, well, does future Layla do presentations in front of thousands and thousands of people? Yeah, she does. If I do it now, it's going to make it easier for me in the future, because the next time someone comes to me, maybe it's a group of 20,000 people, it's going to feel even harder to say yes. The second question I asked myself, is Layla gaining the skill of speaking in front of thousands of people a good thing? Well, yes. I see tons of benefits to that. Then you have to figure out, what committed action am I going to take from here on out. In the beginning, when I would try to do something new, I would just sit there and I would just stare. Huge amount of the anxiety came from feeling like I didn't know if I was doing it right. The reason that we want help, help. When we're starting anything, we want more certainty. We want our brains to settle down and say, like, I think I know what might happen. So I went to somebody who I knew that was good at it, and that happens to be my husband, Alex. And so I said, can you share your framework with me? And for the first six months of making content from that day forward, I used his framework to make the content. So what it helped me do was actually get started. A lot of the times the things that cause us anxiety are things that we think that we have to take this giant leap. Now when I've learned that if I develop a framework that breaks a large task down into small steps, I'm much more likely to be able to do it. One, it's easier to work on over a longer period of time if you just sit down and you just say like, start the presentation. You have to go from zero to entire presentation, done and presenting in like a day. But the reality is if you break it down to small steps and you're able to work on each step thoroughly, then you're going to also desensitize yourself to the situation and then also most likely be more prepared for it. The way I like to do that is I like to chunk time that I dedicate towards the thing. I'm going to make space for the thing. The second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to break it down into small steps. And then the third thing I'm going to do is I'm going to always anticipate that things will go wrong, things might change, or other things are going to get in the way, or an emergency might pop up during a time you're supposed to work on something. I provide myself with way more buffer time when I'm doing something that provokes anxiety that I haven't been able to do before. And so what that looks like is I will always, for example, when I'm making a presentation that's causing anxiety, I'll make sure that I have it done two weeks ahead of time. Because I know that if I really don't like something in the presentation, two weeks is plenty of time for me to change it before I have to go on stage. The second of the three headed monster of why people don't get done is rebelliousness. Some people, I'll say myself, some people don't respond well to authority or to others telling them what to do. When somebody says go left, some people just want to go right. So it's funny because a lot of the times, you know, we feel like I'm doing the opposite because I want to do what I want to do. It's like, well, maybe what's best for you is also what's what they suggested. And there's nothing wrong with that. An example of this for me that really made it was that during COVID I owned a company called gymlaunch. And our entire customer base was all gym owners. At that time, people weren't allowed to be in person working out. And so we had to pivot and teach gyms how to fulfill their contractual obligations to their customers online. And when we did that pivot, so many of the gyms just wouldn't do it. I remember talking to a select group of them and realizing on the call that they simply didn't want to do it because it felt imposed upon them. It didn't feel like it was their choice. By rebelling, we like to think that, oh, I'm showing this person they have no influence over me. But they do have influence. In fact, they have influence over you to go in the opposite direction. So if this resonates for you, ask yourself this question, does putting off this task help or hurt me in terms of getting to my goal? At the end of the day, you cannot control every thought that runs through your mind. You cannot control every feeling that gets provoked, but you can control how you behave. But just understanding that you have an aversion to authority. And when somebody in an authoritative situation asks you to do something, whether it benefits you or not, you like to reject it. And guess what, that's okay. We just need to accept it and then make ourselves aware enough of it that we can feel gross about it and still act in our benefit no matter what. And it's the same recurring theme as you see with anxiety, which is like, you can still do the thing while having that feeling present that you don't like. You can still act in accordance with your goals, even while feeling like, I don't like that I'm doing what this person wants me to do. The third head of the three headed monster is boredom. So what this means is that the task that you're working on, you don't feel excited about, meaning you're not getting reinforcement from it. You feel bored, your mind wanders, you want to avoid doing the thing because it's not exciting, it doesn't provide you with enough feedback. This is fairly typical, especially in companies. You'll see, like lots of people want to take on new projects, right? But they can't even stick with getting their daily tasks done because the new projects are more exciting and more stimulating than the tasks that they need to do on a daily basis. I think this is really relevant for business owners in sales. So a lot of times people ask, why is it that this salesperson can't transition to being a sales manager? Well, let's think about how much feedback a Salesperson's getting, you know, every day they're closing sales, they're seeing money in an account, they're getting great job, amazing, good work. There's a very fast feedback cycle and there's a lot of it. And then when you move into being a sales manager, I think it's much less of a hard skills discrepancy and more of a soft sales discrepancy, which is learning how to delay reward and gratification. So you move into a job where suddenly you don't make money, except for on a quarterly basis, where you get bonus off of what other people sell. Suddenly nobody's telling you every day that you've done a good job. Suddenly you're only talking to your team. You're not talking to customers anymore. Think about all of what you lose when you. When you leave sales and go to a sales management role. That's why you'll probably hear whenever you have a salesman that has to get back in the saddle, they're like, man, it feels good to be back in the saddle. It's like, well, what feels good? What feels good is that you're missing all those rewards you were getting a lot of times. The reason I think people can't move up is because what they're currently doing is actually more rewarding than continuing to move up in the company. Things that are very important and pay really well, like doing financial analysis, learning how to build a pipeline, properly fitting a CRM, you know, getting a company audit ready, all incredibly valuable. But also slow feedback loops and not a lot of reinforcement from other. It's the same reason why people have a hard time losing weight, which is because the things that you do to lose and keep off the weight are boring. Drink more water, eat more protein, eat less calories, walk and work out, that's not exciting. But if you do a fad diet where you basically starve yourself, you're eating these weird nutrients, these interesting vitamins. They're telling you to do a water cleanse of this. It's exciting. There's movement, there's feedback. The reason I would say more people succeed when they have a coach, for example, is because they're getting feedback, they're getting reinforcement. Same when people do it with their friends. Feedback and reinforcement, right? Versus if you're doing it alone, you don't have a coach, you're not measuring anything. You know, you just create this situation in which your environment is working against you, and so people end up quitting. Now, in that situation, I think there's a lot More you can do to make it more exciting so that you do get faster feedback and you don't have to do that. But a lot of people like, over a long enough time horizon, it makes sense with people's lives that they don't have a coat 24 7, and they're not constantly working out with their friends. So if you feel like you're not able to achieve your goals because you're procrastinating them due to boredom, the first question I would ask myself is, is this the best thing for me to be working on in the short term and long term? Oftentimes when we're working on something exciting, it's good for us in the short term, but not leading to our long term goal. And oftentimes when we're dealing with boredom, it's good for us in the long term, but in the short term, it's not very incentivized. And so what I like to say is, cool. Okay, is this aligned with the long term? Yes. Then what can we do to make it more exciting in the short term? Which leads to the second question I asked. How do I give myself more intermittent reinforcement to keep myself engaged on this task? Intermittent reinforcement is creating shorter feedback loops. So, for example, somebody who's trying to lose weight, in a year, maybe you've lost £20, but what do you do to keep yourself engaged while you lose 0.5 pounds? One pound? Not even a pound. This week, can we recruit two of your friends to come to the gym with you? Can we do at home workouts where you invite your friends and you put a little garage set up together? I think the best person that you can get to help reinforce you so that you can get yourself to stick to good habits is a spouse. You know, ask them to high five you every time you go to the gym. Ask them to tell you, great job every time you eat something healthy. So, for example, while Alex was writing his book A Hundred Million Dollar Leads, he was writing it for two years. Nobody was reading it. Nobody was seeing the work he was doing. He's working six hours a day, every day on this book. And it felt punishing because there was no reward. He's not seeing anybody read it. He's not getting any feedback. So I made a conscious effort to try and support him, encourage him, leave him little notes, tell him how proud I was of him every day, and tie it to his long term goal. I was like, I'm so proud of you for working on that book six hours a day, every day this week. Because you're going to write an amazing book that's going to change people's lives every day. Trying to reinforce myself to him that what he was working on was good, it was good quality, it was a great book and it was going to lead to his long term goal. I think the strongest sources of reinforcement that we can have are the people around us. So recruit the people around you to help you while you're trying to achieve your long term goals and you'll be much more likely to stick with it. Creating more engaging situations in the in between is how you create that reinforcement. So if it is in line with your long term goals, then finding ways to make it more reinforcing in the short term. This is why, for example, companies have short term and long term compensation. It's like we're paying people, they're getting a paycheck every week and then we're also going to give them a long term goal or maybe we're going to tie them in with the success of the company. Now I'm going to go ahead and bring in people from my audience live to talk to them about procrastination. Hey guys, if you already don't know by now, I am actually Fairly Active on LinkedIn. I may go so far as to say it's actually become my favorite platform. So if you'd like to connect with me, just send me a request or hit follow and shout out those who've been sharing my posts and tagging others. What's up Evan?