How to Eliminate Procrastination

Announcer: Welcome back to the FlipNerd.com REI classroom, where experts from across the real estate investing industry teach you quick lessons to take your business to the next level. And now, let’s meet today’s expert host.

Bob: Hi, this is Bob Diamond, host of the REI classroom for today for FlipNerd. Many of you probably know me, I’m an attorney and investor and have been in this field of both investing and educating for an awfully long time. A lot of my students complain about the number one thing they have a problem with is procrastination, it has so many negative connotations

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Bob: Most of us attribute procrastination to laziness, or we don’t want to be successful, somehow we’re dedicated to our own failure. Maybe we’re programmed to fail, so it’s our parents fault. All ridiculous, all a bunch of hogwash and not at all true. Procrastination is actually a positive way that we protect ourselves from failure. We protect ourselves from financial failure loss. We protect ourselves from emotional failure loss, from feeling foolish or being made to look foolish.
Procrastinating is no different than if you went up in an airplane to 6,000 feet, they open the door, they give you a parachute and they said, “Jump out”, you would procrastinate at the doorway and you would be a really smart person to procrastinate. You would be like, “I don’t know what I’m doing, where’s the rip cord, what do I do?” And you would procrastinate. Matter of fact, you would probably put your hands on the side of the door with a death grip and not jump out of that door. And that, my friend, is procrastinating. That’s where procrastinating serves a good purpose.
So, what is it about? Procrastinating is how we’re avoiding, emotionally getting warning to avoid looking foolish, to avoid losing money, to avoid losing time. So we are automatically going to be programmed to procrastinate when we’re asked to do something that we’re not confident we know how to do. That’s number one.
So, what’s that result and that fear that arises, makes they feeling that it’s going to be hard. I feel overwhelmed. So then we will automatically go into procrastination mode. That’s how it happens. We are going to eventually simply put it off as long as we can, or alternatively, just never do the task and procrastinate completely.
Here, to me, are the solutions to procrastination.
The first thing you want to do is learn how to do the thing you are being asked to do. Because when we feel that we don’t know what we’re doing we’re going to procrastinate automatically. And probably smartly, because if we don’t know what we’re doing we’re going to make mistakes and fail. You do what I call “take batting practice”. You do things that are low risk, things that are relatively simple and not complicated, and you practice in a low risk environment.
Now that could be as simple as in our business we negotiate with sellers. So, we’ll have people do role plays, where one person plays the role of a seller, the other plays the role of a buyer and we’ll just role play. It’s not even a real deal so it doesn’t matter if you win or lose. So we’ll do role plays. We’ll also negotiate for things that we don’t want. We’ll negotiate, again, just for the practice.
By practicing, you’ll build your knowledge, you’ll build your confidence, and then you can go out in the real world and do the activity. Interestingly enough, when you feel confident and you feel good about what you’re doing, you’ll readily do it without procrastinating.
Something that I think of, think about driving a car. So the first time you drove a car, probably very nervous, probably didn’t go on the highway, probably stayed on the side streets and just drove around the neighborhood. But now today, after you’ve been driving for a long time, you could get in the car and drive from Los Angeles to New York City. Other than the time involved, it wouldn’t be stressful doing the actual act of driving, even if it was 3,000 miles it wouldn’t be stressful. That’s because you’ve had practice with it and confidence over time. That’s why you won’t procrastinate.
The second way to avoid procrastination is to get an experienced coach to help you. Get someone who knows what they’re doing, who’s invested in your success, and get them to help you do it. That will help you build the confidence. The confidence will eliminate the fear, and that will automatically eliminate the procrastination.
You can also get someone else to do the activity. If it’s something complicated, something that maybe you’re not going to do very frequently but it’s still very complicated, that’s when you want to get someone else to do it. You don’t want to spend a lot of time learning something that you’re going to do with very low frequency. Get someone else to do it. That’s a perfect thing to do.
What I’d encourage you also is, forget about just pushing yourself, or kicking yourself, or beating yourself. That’s easy to do. It’s easy to kick yourself for not making the calls to sellers. It’s easy to kick yourself for not going out and making an offer and a deal. I think if you look deep inside your head and your heart you’ll find that you’re not doing it because you have fear of something. That fear of something means you need to get the learning, you need to get the practice, or you need to get someone else to do it for you, and to do that part of your business. That truly is procrastination.
Think of procrastination as a positive. Think of it as something that is keeping you from making a mistake, keeping you from falling in a financial hole or doing something. But then, turn it around and say, “What is it that I can do to overcome this fear that’s causing my procrastination?” That’s my advice, because procrastination, while it’s a positive, will absolutely kill your business. If you don’t get the tasks done in your business, that means all of them. It doesn’t mean 6 out of 10 tasks, it means 10 out of 10 tasks, then your business will go nowhere. So, keep in mind what procrastination is and deal accordingly.
This is Bob Diamond, with Diamond Law Center. Thanks for joining me for the REI Classroom, and I’ll see you next time.

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