Let's Kick Procrastination
Host: Isaac Mashman · March 13, 2020 · Episode 18 · 11 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
What's going on, everyone? You're now listening to episode 18 of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the podcast whose goal is to help you chase your vision and chase your dreams in life by providing you with real knowledge and real action steps that you can take and implement into your day-to-day life, so you can be the very best version of yourself. Now, guys, the core principle behind my podcast is the encouragement of growth and the encouragement of action. Chase is an action word. There are so many people out there who are telling you what to do, telling you all these different things that you should be doing, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but very few people are actually giving you real-life examples of how to go out and achieve what it is you want to achieve in life.
I believe that at the core of all of this is self-improvement. The core is growing yourself. I feel like the more you grow and the better you become as an individual, the more every other area of your life will evolve and get better as well. So with that being said, I'm going to jump into today's episode, and today I'm going to be discussing procrastination, something that I know every single one of you has battled with at one time in the past. To start it off, I'll use the example of: what is procrastination? Procrastination is pushing off something that you know you should be doing. I remember multiple times back in high school, I'd have an essay that was assigned to me literally a month in advance, or two or three weeks in advance.
Rather than doing my research and doing what I needed to do way ahead of time, I would wait until the night before to finally write up the essay, or I'd wait until a couple of days before. I remember multiple occasions where I had some free periods before that one class, and I would just sit there and blast my music and write out this essay in a matter of an hour. My grades never really suffered, but my stress level definitely increased. I know many, many friends who did the same exact thing, and it was sacrificing their grades. It was sacrificing the quality of work that they could have produced.
By rushing something, the quality was affected. That is a very minute example, but a lot of the habits that we establish back in high school or back in middle school, all the way back to elementary school, stick with us moving into adulthood.
Now that I'm an adult (obviously, I've been an adult for a couple years now), I'm just starting to have and develop this awareness of, okay, well, I used to do the same exact thing back then, and it's followed me into my adult life. Just because you did it at one point doesn't mean you should continue doing that same exact thing. So procrastination in and of itself is a very negative, I guess you could say, state of mind to get trapped in, because you get trapped in this mind state of, okay, it is okay if I push this off. It is okay if I do this tomorrow.
Or you start reasoning with yourself. You say these different things: okay, well, I'll do this tomorrow, or I'll do this in a minute, or I want to watch one more YouTube video, or I want to play one more game, or I want to do this before I do that. In reality, you know that you genuinely need to do that one thing that you keep pushing off, but the reason that you're not doing it is, I guess you could say, laziness. There could always be a multitude of different reasons why you could be pushing it off and procrastinating. It could be the fear of getting it done, or the fear of rejection.
Let's say you need to make some sales. You need to make some phone calls in your business, and you're just afraid that people are going to tell you no.
So you want to procrastinate so you can push off that fear, push off the "okay, I'm going to tell you no" on this phone call. What if that is your biggest fear? Obviously, if it's your fear, you don't want to go through that, because you're afraid of it. But if you go with the attitude of, all right, well, I don't care what happens, because I know that whatever happens is going to serve a purpose in my life, and then you go after it and do it, then you'll be operating a little bit better and a little bit more efficiently. Procrastination is something that, especially in the business world, or especially in the way of, hey, I want to be great, I want to be the very best guitarist, or I want to be a movie actor, or I want to be the very best bartender, whatever your aspiration is, whatever your dream is, procrastination will not help you achieve that.
Procrastination is something that you need to combat, and you need to be able to control it, because if not, you're not going to be in control of your life. You always are in control of your life, but what I mean by that is your state of mind and your viewpoint towards life and your paradigms and your habits will be controlling you. Your subconscious mind and your way of thinking and your way of living and acting will be more in control than your conscious mind. That is why it's so important to establish habits that promote productivity and habits that promote success. You see, we are products of our conscious mind and we are products of our habits. See, what happens is you do something consciously and then after a period of time, that conscious habit becomes a subconscious way of living.
That subconscious way of living transmutes over to you feeling a certain way or acting a certain way, and then you get those results that you may or may not like. We are products of what we think. We are products of the control that we have over ourselves, and exercising self-control and self-discipline is not an easy task, especially when we live in a society where we are oftentimes controlled by cell phones or controlled by the media, or where we give that self-control to other people to make decisions for us. As for action steps that we can take on a daily basis in order to really be better and combat procrastination, start small.
Oftentimes, I'm the one who's going to tell you to start really, really big, to think super big. I'll always stand by that, but in this particular case, it is better if you start with a small action.
So if you say that you need to get up at a certain time in the morning, then get up at that time. Don't hit that snooze. If you tell yourself that you need to mow the grass today and the weather is beautiful, go out and mow that grass. If you say that you need to go and message 10 prospects, don't say, oh, I'll wait for tomorrow. No, just make the effort. Tell yourself, okay, I'm going to do this action step, and after this action is completed, I will, let's say, reward myself with 15 minutes of free time or 15 minutes of relaxation or R and R or something like that.
Do things in a smaller manner. Then as those things get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, you will have already established that habit. You will have reprogrammed your mind and your way of acting and your way of thinking, so you will no longer be procrastinating. There will be times where you slip up. I don't want you to think that once you overcome procrastination, you'll never be faced with procrastination again, because if I told you that, I would be lying to you. We are only human, face it, guys. We are human beings. We are going to be in a continuous cycle and a continuous battle with ourselves and with our habits and with how we should be behaving.
But it's about having that understanding that we will never be perfect, but we can at least strive to be, and that keeps us in the race and keeps us going with that mindset of growth. At the principle of everything, you should be growing every single day. If you're not growing, you're dying. I use the example of a rock in a stream. The rock in a riverbed doesn't appear to be moving, but over years and years and years, with that constant flow of water, that rock is going to be getting eroded. The strong rock is going to get smoothed off by the pressure of the water.
Eventually that rock will just fade away and go away downstream. See, a lot of people might not live in a mindset of growth, but they'll live in a mindset of being stagnant. Okay, so I'm not growing, but I'm here.
That's fine, I'm not going backwards, [right]? Wrong, because you are going backwards. You see, we have to be in this continuous process of growth, this continuous process of, okay, well, what can I do better today? What can I do to be better today? How do I want to be in the future? Start asking yourself these questions, and I feel like a very good way to get to that point is by overcoming procrastination. Think of it. If you know that you should be doing self-development by reading books, let's say you want to read a book teaching you how to be a better marketer or how to be a better singer or something like that, and you need to study. If you are in this habit, in this cycle of procrastination, do you think you will ever pick up that book?
No, you'll just be pushing it off and pushing it off and pushing it off. Let's say you need to pick up the guitar and you need to start playing. If you procrastinate, you're never going to pick up that guitar, and how do you expect to ever improve if you never start in the first place? So guys, if I could leave you with one thing today, it is to start mastering yourself and to establish a rhythm of self-discipline so you can be better, so you can start getting your life on track and start taking control of yourself, taking back control of your energy, your mind, and your actions away from everything else in life and all these other distractions, and just be focused on the moment and focused on what you need to do in order to achieve what it is you want in life.
Guys, that concludes today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. I'm really excited for this rebrand, the new vision that we've got with this podcast. Make sure you're following Chase the Vision podcast on Instagram and following me at Isaac Mashman on all social media platforms. I am going to ask you for a fee. I'm not going to be doing a bunch of sponsorships or anything like that, but the fee for this podcast is, if you got any ounce of value, I would love for you to share this with one friend in real life. I'm not talking through social media. I'm not talking through a tweet.
I definitely appreciate those, but I'm talking about telling someone in your physical life, whether that's your mom, your best friend, someone in your circle, or your business partner. Tell them about this podcast, tell them about Chase the Vision podcast, so we can get this growing, guys.
I have a very big vision for where I want to take this. Why do you think I called it Chase the Vision? See what I'm saying? So anyways, guys, keep crushing it, and always chase your vision and always chase your dream. Until next time, be safe and be blessed.