Transcription
[Music]
Welcome to day 15. We're exactly halfway through our 30-day program today, and I'm really excited because this is the appropriate time to really talk about procrastination and maybe even more than that, how to really condition ourselves to follow through and use our personal power. Because procrastination is like a silent killer. It keeps most of us from really achieving what we want, and yet we don't pay attention to it because it seems like such a small thing. It literally becomes a habit that keeps us from the abundance that we really want in our lives.
So, what I want to talk about in this tape is not only how to handle procrastination, but a step beyond that: how to create absolute, consistent action towards the goals that you've now set. So, let's start with talking about the power of rituals and what success conditioning really is. Let's just reinforce this idea within ourselves. I believe that most of us in life are controlled by one thing: our own personal rituals. What do I mean by that? I mean that throughout our life, we've gotten caught up in some specific habits, and that those habits now are literally controlling and directing our lives, whether we're consciously aware of it or not.
There's a quote you've probably heard. It says, "Sow a thought, reap an action. Sow an action, reap a habit. Sow a set of habits, reap a character. Sow a character, and you reap your destiny." What I want us to do today is to really take a good look at what are some of the consistent thought patterns that we have right now that are creating habits and therefore character and destiny. And if we don't like some of these habits, rather than just being at the effect of them anymore, once we identify what they are, what are some simple ways to condition ourselves to create new habits? Habits that will automatically pull us towards the goals that we desire most? That's what we want to do.
Now, let me ask you a question. Do you have some rituals that you're aware of consciously that you know are holding you back a bit? For example, do you have any emotions that you experience on a regular basis that maybe are less than resourceful? Do you get angry on a regular basis? Or is your emotional pattern to get frustrated or to get depressed? The question I have for you is, when you have these emotions, and you know you have them on an ongoing basis, are they affecting the quality of your life? Are they affecting your daily actions? Are they affecting, therefore, ultimately your destiny, the direction of your life, and the ultimate destination that you're headed for?
The answer to those questions, I believe, is yes. And the question is, though, what are you doing daily to feel angry, or to feel frustrated, or to feel left out, or to feel alone, or to feel depressed? See, these things don't just happen. Depression is not the result of a virus. In order to feel bad, you've got to work at it. It takes effort. And we talked about earlier that you have to take on a certain body posture. You also have to do certain things in your head. You've got to look at the world in a certain way.
But what I want you to realize is, if you're feeling any emotion, positive or negative, on a consistent basis, it's not only affecting your life, but it's the result of a ritual. You've got ritual ways of looking at the world, ritual things that you do. If you think of a ritual, really, what is it? It's like a ceremony. It's something that you do over and over again. It's almost like a code that your brain runs by. For example, if you think about it, we've got all kinds of rituals that we think of in a positive way. Things like holidays, for example, Thanksgiving or Christmas, having everybody get together. It's a ritual. We love it, and it's part of our life. It, it structures our life.
But what most people are not aware of are the internal rituals that create limiting emotion. So, what are some of the emotions that you experience on a regular basis that create pain in your life, that create limitations? Because every single one of those emotions that you experience on a regular basis, for you to have them on a regular basis means they're habitual emotions. For you to have habitual emotions, there are certain habits that you've developed. You've developed a ritual of looking at the world, ritual ways of talking to yourself, ritual ways of moving your body that allow you and cause you to feel this way on an ongoing basis.
So, let's discover what your rituals are. Because you may have picked those rituals up from a tribe you no longer belong to. Maybe it's time for you to create some new ones here. Maybe you're part of a stronger tribe, one you picked instead of one you just fell into or were born into. So, let's take a look. Pull out your success journal, if you would, now. If it's not nearby, at least pull out a piece of paper. And what I want you to do right now is I want you to write down at least five emotions that you experience habitually, meaning on an ongoing basis, maybe once or twice or three times a week average. Something that happens more than once, but you can count on it. In other words, next week, yeah, you'll probably feel that at least once or twice during the week, and it's a negative emotion. In other words, emotion that denigrates your experience or makes you feel unhappy or frustrated.
Or let's take some examples. What are five negative emotions you experience on a regular basis? I'll give you some samples. How about words like emotions like frustration, anger, resentment? Or you could take more internal ones like feeling overwhelmed or sad or depressed. What are some of the negative emotions? Disappointment. What are some of those that maybe you feel on a fairly strong, ongoing basis? Jot them down right now. Don't turn me off. I'm still watching you. Make sure you're writing this down. If you're just sitting there thinking, "Well, I guess that's okay," but ideally, write them down. Come up with at least five. Five limiting emotions: depression, frustration, anger, overwhelm, sadness. What other ones are there out there? Despair, being discouraged.
Now, as soon as you get these five down, jot them down quickly. What I want you to begin to do is think about, okay, in order to feel these emotions, what do you have to do? One at a time. What do you have to believe? What do you have to do inside your head? I'm going to give an example. If you're consistently disappointed in life, why might that be? What are the rituals that you've set up for yourself that create disappointment? Well, one of those is having expectations of exactly how you want things to be in advance, and then obviously having to deal with other people in your world and having them do things a little differently than you expect. Does that set you up for disappointment? Or having a perfection frame that says, "This is exactly how it has to be, and if it's anything different than this, then I'm going to be disappointed"? Or having unrealistic expectations in the first place about how quickly something can be done. For example, all those things are ways, they're rituals that you have, they're habits of approaching your life and your world that set you up for disappointment.
In addition, to be disappointed, you have to believe that you can't change anything. In other words, disappointment is an emotion that I personally rarely experience. And the reason is, to be disappointed, I have to feel like there's no way I can change something. Now, I get frustrated. That's my favorite one because frustrated, to me, says it's still possible to get the job done. It's still possible to accomplish, but it hasn't happened yet. And that makes me frustrated because I know it could happen. It hasn't happened yet. I know we can still turn this thing around, but why hasn't it? That's called frustration. So, I have a different ritual than disappointment. To be disappointed, you'd have to think that something you wanted didn't happen, and it's not going to. It's over. Do you follow me?
So, I want you to begin to analyze how you set up these rituals. Why? Because once you understand how you do something, then you can turn it around and change it. I mean, traditionally, for example, somebody comes to me in therapy, a lot of times, or someone comes up to me in a seminar, and they'll say to me, "Well, Mr. Robbins, you know, I'm just so depressed." And I'll say, "That's excellent. How do you do that?" Usually, they look at me like I'm crazy and go, "What are you talking about?" I said, "How have you pulled that off? How have you accomplished this state?" They said, "What do you mean?" "Now, if I accomplished it?" I said, "Well, it takes effort. It's not easy to get depressed. That's a pretty intense emotion. I mean, you must be working on this one for years to develop the kinds of habits and rituals that allow you to be able to consistently go into that state with very little effort."
And usually, what this does is break their pattern rather radically. But then we begin to really analyze it, and they find out there are specific things. I say, "What's the first, if I want to be as depressed as you, how would I go about it? You know, teach me the ritual. What's step one?" "Oh, I should look down." "Is that it?" "Okay. And then what? Step two?" "Oh, breathe real shallow. Let my face get a little frown on it, or drag." "Now, okay, I see. Drool just a little bit on the side of my mouth. Okay, excellent. And what else?" "Oh, make ugly pictures in my head of the worst possible scenarios." "Oh, and then drop my tonality down to, uh, okay." "Oh, yeah, let me try that. Oh, yeah, now I'm feeling pretty lousy too. Yeah, it seems to work. I now know your ritual. I'm almost as good as you are. Give me some practice."
Now, at this point, usually I've got them laughing pretty strong, and what we've done is interrupted their state. But the point is, we've also pointed out there is a ritual going on here, and that ritual is done over and over again. In order to get depressed. You know what's exciting? You also have great rituals. You develop to create all the positive emotions you have. The problem is, people come to me all the time and I say, "Tony, all I want in life is peace of mind. If I could just have that, my whole life would be so wonderful." Well, they say things to me like, "Well, gosh, if I could just feel happy, just, you know, once or twice a day, gosh, my life would be wonderful." And I said, "Great. I have the answers. I'll show you how to do it right now. All we've got to do is find out how you've done it in the past, show you how to do it, and you can do it every time. Just discover your own rituals."
They look at me kind of dumbfounded. Their mouth kind of hangs open. I said, "Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt peace of mind, even for a moment?" A person says, "Well, not very often." "Well, have you ever had one of those moments in your whole life? You know, one of those real zingers called peace of mind?" And the person will usually think for a moment, say, "Well, yeah." I say, "Great. What did you do back then? Let's go back to those moments. What did you do? With your body and your mind, specifically? What'd you do first? What'd you do second?" And I got them through it, and all of a sudden, they find out what they did. "Well, I began to breathe like this instead of like this. I tilted my head like this. Actually, uh, I began to talk to myself in this tone of voice, and I had this tempo, and I began to feel really relaxed and really good inside. And I just focused on everything in life, really is perfect. It may not seem like it at the moment, but it always will be. I tell myself, 'This too shall pass,' and I just, I just feel really good."
I said, "Well, how do you feel right now?" They go, "Well, pretty good." I said, "Well, do you have peace of mind right now?" "Well, gosh, actually, I do." "So, write that down." They go, "What?" I said, "Write that down. You now have the recipe for peace of mind. You have your ritual. Now, all you've got to do is install it and condition yourself so that this ritual gets triggered automatically." In other words, think about it. Don't you have things in your world that trigger you to start running your ritual? I mean, look, December 25th comes by, and what happens? You change everything. Suddenly, you become a nice person. Suddenly, you start treating people well. You start smiling at strangers, actually initiating conversations. You know, and then, of course, days like April 15th come along, in which case you seem to respond differently to strangers. As you're pulling up to the post office, fighting your way to get to the mailbox, and all of a sudden, those same people you smiled at around December 25th, you're looking at them like they're dirt. "How dare they move in front of me at this time?"
Isn't it amazing how we develop different rituals based upon stimuli in our environment? What is that? It's called conditioning. We have environmental things that trigger us, and we call those anchors, and they trigger us to run some of our little rituals, to trigger some of our regular little emotions. So, what would be ideal if we want lifelong success and more happiness and more joy and more passion and more fun and more money and closer friendships and a chance to make a difference in the world, or other such subtle changes? Would be for us to actually get clear on how we run our own brains. For us to not only get clear on it, but discover the rituals that are burnt out and old and antiquated and discard them. And we know how to discard them. We've talked about that. We've got to first get ourselves to link up that these rituals create much more pain than pleasure. Too much pain, so much pain that we feel in our gut, and our brain will do anything to quit this ritual, to break it up. Two, once we have that leverage, what do we need to do? Just interrupt the pattern.
So, if you're one of those people that, for example, has this ritual called, "Every time you see your spouse, you manage to develop a spirited debate." And what you might want to do is interrupt that pattern. And there are lots of ways to do that. One way to do that is, next time that that pattern starts to happen, do what I talked about earlier in these tapes. Reach up and grab your nose. To yourself. Now, people think you're on drugs. It doesn't matter. At least interrupt your own pattern. You might be going to think you're a turkey or weird, but what will happen is you won't be arguing. And if you do it enough times, it's like that record we talked about. If I take a record and I scratch it and scratch it and scratch it and scratch it, and you try and play it again, it'll never play the same way. So, that's all we've got to do. We've got to interrupt our ritual patterns. And then, of course, we've got to create a new pattern in its place. Because in order to create new results, we've got to first interrupt our old result, our old pattern. That's the process. You know how to do it. We're going to guide you through it through some specific techniques we've developed. I think you'll find it a lot of fun.
But you've already defined now five negative emotions you have on an ongoing basis. What I want you to do right now is I want you to stop the tape and I want you to take approximately five to ten minutes and I want you to actually define what are the rituals associated to them. In other words, I want you to pretend you're getting a recipe. So, if the emotion was, let's say, frustration, what's your recipe for frustration? Okay, so you go, "Okay, what's the first thing I do if I really wanted to get frustrated or if I've gotten frustrated in the past? How did I do it? What was step one?" "Well, step one is I decided on this major goal, and I made it incredibly important that it happened now or it had happened at a certain time." "Okay. Step two, I began to make pictures in my mind about how it absolutely had to be." "Step three, I had to see it not happening as quickly as I wanted it to." "Step four, I had to see other things get in the way of my accomplishing it that were beyond my control. They were making me angry." "And step five, I had to see that it was still possible, but wasn't getting done."
"Okay, so now I know how to get frustrated. If I wanted to do it right now, I could do it with anything. Okay, first, create the pressure in myself about something has to be done, and just guide myself through it." I'm not just being humorous here. I want you to see what your rituals are so you can begin to interrupt the pattern. Step one is awareness. Does that make sense? So, please turn off the tape right now. Stop the tape and go ahead and write these down. And you might be saying, "Well, I'm in the car. Is it possible that for five minutes you could pull over right now and do this?" Of course, it's not. But if you could pull over and do it now, you've got five minutes. Go for it.
Welcome back. So, I've got a question for you. What did you learn? What did you find out about yourself and some of your habits and rituals? And I'm curious, when you wrote down these steps, first of all, did you really do it or just give up? Did you go, "Oh God, this is too complicated. I'll just turn the tape back on"? Or did you not even turn it off to start with, and you're still listening to me? If that's true, turn the tape off and do this exercise. Do you understand me? Otherwise, it's going to be imitating Sam Kinison, and you're going to wish you'd turned the tape off.
Okay, now, if you did do your exercise, no problem. What I want to know is, number one, what did you learn? Now, I know this isn't necessarily easy, but it is worth doing. What did you learn about yourself? If you hung in there and you went step by step and really rehearsed, you know, went over in your head and pretended that you were trying to get somebody to portray you as an actor and take you through the steps so they could get in the same state, what did you learn about what you do? First of all, I hope you learned that you are the creator. That you're the one that's sourcing this emotion in your body, and you're doing it with some very specific actions. In other words, you don't get any result in your body or your mind without some action preceding it.
You know, there's a great book that I hope you'll pick up if you haven't already read it. You probably have, but it's a book called "As a Man Thinketh." And I want to read you a quote out of it because I just love it. This book is fabulous. It really reinforces what we're talking about here. It says, "Man is made or unmade by himself. In the armory of thought, he forges the weapons by which he destroys himself. He also fashions the tools with which he builds for himself heavenly mansions of joy, strength, and peace. By the right choice and true application of thought, man ascends to divine perfection. By the abuse and wrong application of thought, he descends below the level of the beast. Between these two are all the grades of character, and man is their maker and master."
Of all the beautiful truths pertaining to the soul, none is more gladdening or fruitful of divine promise and confidence than this: but man is the master of thought, the molder of character, and the maker and shaper of condition, environment, and destiny. My message to you is simple. I want you to take these kinds of inspirational thoughts and make them practical and real. For years, I read hundreds and hundreds of books that inspired me, and I got all emotional, but I didn't do anything with it. That's what this bizarre style of talking to you is all about. I want to make sure that you don't just get an idea, but that you use it. If all you did is get one idea and you apply it, now you have some power. And the power is in understanding how our own minds work. Not just knowing that we're in control. That is step one. Knowing that we're the shapers of our own destiny and character and the life that we feel and experience daily. But also knowing how.
See, I don't want to just know why. Questions like, "Why does this happen to me?" I want to know, "How do I do this? How do I make it happen?" And I want you to discover that as well. Does this make sense? So, if you didn't do the exercise thoroughly, do it some more, in more detail. Let's go to the second step, though. I want you now to have some fun. And the fun is, I want you to now, in your success journal, write down five positive emotions that you experience on an ongoing basis. In other words, five emotions that if I picked any week out of the hat, you probably experienced this positive emotion at least once or twice a week. In other words, what are some of your habitual, empowering emotions? Okay? And we want to find out what are the rituals behind them.
So, what are some of those emotions? Maybe love? Maybe generosity? Maybe the feelings of contribution? Maybe feeling powerful or effective or competent or successful or happy or joyous or sympathetic or connected? I don't know. Obviously, I seem to have more of these in the old list. These flow a little easier because these are more of the emotions that flow for me. But what are they for you? What are some of those empowering emotions you feel every single week? Grateful? Whatever it is, jot them down now. Stop the tape, and you've got two steps to this exercise. Step one is, come up with five empowering emotions you experience on an ongoing basis that enhance your life. Step two is, describe how do you do this step by step so that you don't just have to count on someday these things happening. Once you know how you do it, let's say motivation. You feel motivated sometimes. Well, I want you to find out what do you do to get motivated. If I was going to be you, and you're going to teach me to be as motivated as you are, what would you have me do? Step one, step two, step three. What would I do with my body? What would I have to picture in my mind? How would I picture it? What would I say to myself? Guide me through it by grading a set of instructions or a recipe book for this thing called motivation, a recipe book for this emotion called seductive. See, if you've ever felt seductive, maybe you ought to find out what you did to get yourself to feel that way. That way, tonight, when you get with the person you love most, hey, wham-o, you pull out your recipe book and you go, "Hey, I got the seduction ritual. Let me try this out on you." Have some fun. That's what life's about. Turn the tape off now. Write in your success journal five empowering emotions. How do you make them happen? Take some time, at least five minutes. Go for it.
Welcome back. And I hope this really is a welcome back because you better have turned this tape off and done this exercise, otherwise I will come find you. Okay? Now, if I seem too obnoxious, I apologize. I'm just trying to have some fun. Back to our story. What are five emotions that you have on a regular basis that are really empowering? What were they? And the question is, what did you learn? What did you find out by making this list? Again, did you discover, for example, that there's a consistent set of gestures or motions or ways of looking at the world that all these emotions have in common? I don't know if you noticed that or not. You may have, you may not have. Did you happen to notice, by any chance, what the triggers were that created these positive emotions? In other words, what were some of the anchors in your environment that fired these off? If not, you might want to put some thought into that.
Because one of the things I want you to begin to pay attention to, and what we're going to work on tomorrow, is how to create environmental stimuli. There's a nice big word for us. In other words, anchors, triggers in our environment that will automatically cause us to fire off these positive rituals. In other words, what are some things we can set up in our environment that'll make us feel good on an ongoing basis? We've been taught for years that "Winston tastes good like a..." and we say, "Cigarette should." Even though we know it's not true, and even though it's been off the air for 14 years, as we've already stated, we've already learned to trigger by certain expressions on people's faces, certain emotions in our body. Didn't your mother or father have a certain look they could give you that the minute you saw it, instantly you'd have what we call a ritual change, where you would immediately fire off inside of yourself a set of pictures, feelings, and emotions that didn't feel so hot?
So, the bottom line is, there are already anchors in our environment. And tomorrow, what we're going to focus on is how to create anchors. But for right now, I want you to discover what are firing off these rituals. So, what we've done so far is this: One, we've identified the fact that our consistent emotions basically shape our character and destiny. Two, we've identified that these emotions that we have on a regular basis are not the result of happenstance, but are the result of specific actions we take on a regular basis. In other words, habits or rituals that we do over and over again in order to feel these emotions. No, you can't just all of a sudden get an emotion. You have to do something. And if you have that emotion a lot, you have to do that situation over and over again, and it has become a ritual. Three, we've identified what are five of the most limiting rituals you run on yourself. What are five of the things you do over and over again in order to create some of these negative emotions? And now that you know what they are, you can identify them. So, if you start to get depressed, you go, "Oh, I'm running my depression ritual again." And then you can decide, "Do I want to be depressed, or would I rather run a ritual called learning, or a ritual called excitement, or a way of running my brain, or a ritual that will create for me a sense of drive and motivation?" You literally will have the choice to pick these out. And now you can literally identify it.
See, a lot of people go, "I am depressed." That's pretty exciting. So, I thought you were Tony Robbins. I thought your name was somebody else. But now you're telling me this is who you are. Now, what you mean is, "Right now, I am running my depression ritual." There's a big difference, isn't there? See, if you start holding that you are depression, or you are angry, or you are something, that's your whole world. I hope you're a lot more than any singular emotion you might feel in a particular moment. We don't want to take emotions and turn them into our identity. Does that make sense? Because that's when you really begin to destroy your own self-image and disempower you. It's the quickest way to destroy your ability to use personal power is to identify yourself with a set of limiting emotions. And that's what a lot of people do. "I am a failure." One of the biggest gross generalizations we can make. What you might say is, "My present rituals are not giving me the results I want," or "I'm running a ritual on myself right now that makes me feel bad, and I call that feeling bad failure." See, change that process, and that's what we've done.
Step three. Fourth thing we've done on this tape is have you identify what are your positive rituals? What are the positive emotions you experience on a regular basis, and how do you do that? So that now you can do what I've already alluded to. At any moment in time, if you want to feel absolutely loved, all you have to do is fire off those certain actions, sit a certain way, breathe a certain way, make the pictures in your head, talk to yourself a certain way, whatever it is you do that causes you to feel loved. Now, I know I've gone through this rapidly, and I know it may not be as simple for you to do initially as I say. And the only reason is because you're brand new at it. Hey, how good were you at driving a stick shift the first time you did that? Yeah, you went, "Ugh, grind," and you went, "And I'm supposed to watch the road too? What are you crazy?" But you know what? You didn't give up. You didn't go, "Oh God, this isn't worth it. I'll just never drive. I'll keep riding my bike, right, or my horse." No. What you did is you kept at it. And so this tape is worthy, or this practice is worthy of going over and over again.
Let me just tell you one thing: Our own beliefs or expectations about an exercise or anything else in life controls our ability. So, if when I gave you the exercise, you said, "Oh, this is too difficult," or "This is too complicated," or "I can't really do that," then you're right. So, I really ask you to give yourself the benefit of this tape by going and doing it again, maybe. And even if you did it well, maybe refining the process. But come from the place of, "Hey, listen, in order for me to feel certain, I have to do certain things. Let me think of a time when I felt that way. Let me go back in state, put myself back in the experience, really be there as if it was happening. Let me see what I do first, second, third, fourth, to the best of my memory, to the best of my ability." That's what I'm asking you to do.
And lastly, to wrap this day up, what I want you to remember is that this package is about how to move ourselves beyond procrastination into our really unlimited power. And the only way we're going to do that is realize that procrastination itself is nothing but a ritual as well, isn't that true? I mean, think about it. Procrastination. In order to procrastinate, you have to look at the world a certain way. You have to think about how taking action will be more painful than not taking action. You have to look at things in a very certain way. You have to use your body in a certain way. You have to say things like, "Do I have to do this?" And there are lots of ways to deal with procrastination. I'm going to show you some ways to condition yourself. But the easiest way to deal with procrastination, I believe, is just put it off. Start procrastinating later on. I mean, that's... they say, "I'll procrastinate on Friday. Right now, I'm busy. I have to go to work. I have to produce this result."
Now, if you're already good at procrastinating, then you'll have no problem doing this. You already know how to do this. So, whatever you used to procrastinate with, that process, use it to put off procrastinating. You go, "This guy's gone off the deep end." No, I haven't. I'm serious. Have some fun with it. You know, let your mind get a little tantalized with this. See what have you started having fun with your own brain? What if you started looking at the fact and noticing and telling yourself, "Hey, I'm in charge here"? What a concept. That I can actually find out how I do things instead of being on my subconscious automatic pilot, and I can take control and steer this baby in the direction I really want it to go. That's what I'm offering you the opportunity to do. That's what today is really about.
So, take control of that. And specifically with procrastination, just remember, if you procrastinate, why are you procrastinating? Fear. Fear that what's going to happen will be more painful than not doing anything. It's that simple. So, all we have to do is condition ourselves to feel that if we don't follow through, that is, if we procrastinate, it'll be 10 times more painful than if we just get the darn thing done right now. All you have to do is condition that in. How do we condition in? Just think of all the consequences of not taking action. In other words, in order to procrastinate, what you do is think of all the consequences of, "God, if I go do this, it means I'm going to have to do this. I'll have to do that. Not to stop what I'm doing here, and gosh, you know, I have to probably do that thing too. And somebody might say this. And what if it doesn't work?" And so you look at all the negative consequences of taking the action, and that creates pain. Do you agree with me? Is that how your brain usually works?
Well, all you've got to do is reverse the process. Think of a time when you could have procrastinated, but didn't. Why didn't you? It's because you thought by taking this action, I'll get all this pleasure. So, you focused on the positive results you could get by following through, and you made them compelling. You made them real enough to you that you really wanted those results. You said, "God, by doing this, I could get this to happen, and this person will be happy, and I can make a difference here, and this will happen, that'll affect me in this way. Oh, that's fabulous. And if I don't do it, it'll cost me here. And if I didn't do it, it'll cost me there." So, use pleasure and pain. And that's all you've got to do.
So, you can do it consciously. But I also want to show you a way to have this happen automatically, so you don't have to sit down every time and go, "Okay, if I don't do this, what's the pain I'm going to experience? And if I do do it, what's the pleasure I can?" That's fine. But I'm also going to show you a way to develop a new ritual where you automatically blow through procrastination. We're going to do that tomorrow. For today, though, your only assignment is this: I want you now to take procrastination, since we're going to talk about it in the next day, and we're going to talk about how to condition ourselves so that we blow through it consistently. But I want you to take this procrastination and find out how does it work for you. In other words, I've given you the overview of how you procrastinate, but what do you usually do to procrastinate? Do you like, somebody says something, and you go, "God, do I have to do this?" Like, how do you start it off? And that was the way I did it, by the way. I used to use the word "have to." I say, "I have to do this. I have to do that." And it made me feel really lousy. "I have to do this. I have to do all these things." And my wife, Becky, really gave me a good education. She goes, "Honey, you don't have to do anything. I mean, if anybody doesn't have to do anything, you don't have to. You've earned the right. You have to do a thing? You've organized your life in a way that if you didn't want to, you wouldn't have to do anything." Think about that. Well, yeah, I guess that's hers. "Go." So, what you're doing is you're choosing to do it, right?" I said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're right. It doesn't bother me to be corrected by you." She said, "Honey, the bottom line is, you have a choice. You know, if you're doing these things because you choose to do them, I mean, isn't that true?" I said, "Yes, it's true. I love to be reminded of the stuff I teach other people. It's good to have somebody there that you care about who they like needle you in a nice way because they care and remind you of the things that you already know." So, let me be that little needler for you here as well. Remember, if you say to yourself, "I have to do this," your brain may immediately go, "I'm not doing it," because "have to" feels like pain for a lot of people. Does that make sense?
So, instead of "have to," say, "Hey, I choose to do this," or "I get to do this," or "I want to do this." And that's the one I use most often now. Instead of, "I have to, I gotta, I have to do all these things." I said, "God, I want to do all these things today." How does that feel? Does that feel different than, "I have to do all these things all today"? "I want to do all these things today." I'll tell you what it does for me in a heartbeat. It takes me from a state where my brain's in resistance, saying, "I don't have to do anything. I'm not going to go through all that pain," to, "Oh, I want to do it all." That means it presupposes to me that there's going to be pleasure in my following through.
So, how do you handle procrastination? One, find out how you presently create the state or the ritual of procrastination. Two, make sure that you ask yourself two new questions: If I don't do this, what's going to be the ultimate price I'm going to have to pay? What are all the areas that I'm going to pay a major price? What will it cost me if I don't do this? And really feel the consequences. Three, ask yourself the question, "If I really did this, and I'd already accomplished it, how would I feel? If I'd already gotten this done, who would it benefit? How would my life be better? How much more joy would I have if I had already done this?" Right? And then four, develop the habit of saying, "I want to do things" instead of "I have to." You'd be surprised what these four little steps will do for you. And of course, the last step, step five, is even if you don't feel like doing it, develop the physical habit that when you start to feel this thing called procrastination, you physically move your body to break through. In other words, you gesture, you move, and just say, "I'm going to do it." You use your body as the leverage to change states. That's all I want you to think of for now.
So, again, I've circled around here. So, let me come back. Your assignment's simple. Review what we've done already. Review your five negative emotions, how you create them, and think about what are some pattern interrupts you could create for yourself. Maybe one of them is feeling, um, totally starved. So, maybe there's something you want to do there. In order to feel starved, you listen to a radio show that says, "Aren't you hungry? Aren't you hungry? Aren't you hungry for Burger King or something fun like that?" And you notice that's the first step. So, what do you do? You come up with a pattern interrupt for it. So, now, when you hear, "Aren't you hungry?" and you notice you're about to go, "Yes, I am," instead, you say, "No, I'm not. You're not going to manipulate me. No, I'm not. You're not going to manipulate me. I'm going to exercise instead." In other words, create something to interrupt the pattern. Does that make sense? And be creative and outrageous. Have some fun.
So, your assignment is: Review your negative emotions. Develop a different pattern interrupt for each one, something you could do to interrupt that negative pattern, to get out of the ritual. And two, review your positive emotions and think about, "Gosh, how could you trigger those more often?" And where, where in your life and when in your life would you be willing to put yourself in a great state on an ongoing basis? And then, thirdly, take a look across the nation and chunk that one down. Okay? In your success journal, write down in procrastination, what do you do? Step one, step two, step three to get yourself in that place. And again, develop a way to break in there. And I've given you several tools.
Okay, have we had a good day here? You better be saying yes. Okay? Or you better figure out what rituals you do to cheat yourself from ultimate joy of visiting with me on a daily basis. Okay? I'll see you tomorrow. And tomorrow, we're going to talk about success conditioning: how to get ourselves to consistently feel the way we want. We've talked about it a little bit before, but we're going to do it in depth now. We're going to teach you how to do some anchoring and how to condition yourself so that once you identify a new ritual, you can make it last without any conscious effort. In other words, you can install the rituals that support your life. Till then, have fun today and live with passion.
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