You’ve probably already discovered that getting stuck on something is a part of this business. Sort of comes with the territory.
Sometimes, it’s procrastination. (Hey, you’re not alone - some surveys suggest that 85%-95% of people have problems associated with procrastination. So let go of the guilt!)
Sometimes, it’s not knowing what to do, or whether you’re going to be able to accomplish it - meaning, you don’t feel like you have the necessary skill.
And sometimes, it’s just the lack of motivation.
I get it. If you put in an hour, or two, or four, every day building your online business, but you haven’t seen any results for a month, or a year, or even several years, it is pretty hard to get yourself to take action.
If you’ve tried to solve this, you probably know…
Brute force doesn’t work!
If you just try to work through these issues, forcing yourself to work, and taking on more and more stuff… you’ll just burn yourself out.
Watching rah-rah motivational videos will just help you do it faster, that’s it.
The good news is, there’s something you can do right now to get yourself unstuck and get yourself going with unprecedented speed toward your goals and business success.
Let’s dig in.
For starters, let’s accept the fact that…
Balance is a MYTH!
You’ll hear middle and upper management wax poetic about work-life balance. They mean well… but they’re so far off the mark that it’s not even funny.
It implies that work is bad, and life is good.
Well… Work is not the opposite of life. It’s a part of life - just like your family, friends, hobbies, and your side hustle, if you have one.
There’s nothing to balance.
Instead, what you do in every single area of your life - including your work and your business aspirations, is you go hard.
(We’ll dive deeper into how exactly you can pull that off if you’ve been feeling burned out for years on end).
What I mean is, when you work, you work hard. When you’re with your family or friends, you go hard, too - meaning, you’re 100% there, with unrelenting focus. When you’re engaged in a hobby, you’re 100% there, too.
Now, this is kind of obvious. Of course, very few people do it, but still… pretty obvious.
The main question is… how do you pull it off?
How do you go hard at anything when there’s so much of everything?
Say YES by saying NO.
Every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to a dozen other things.
If you say yes to 4 hours of Netflix in the evening, you say no to calling your parents, reading, building your email list, spending meaningful time with your spouse and kids, finishing a degree, and so on.
(There’s nothing wrong with Netflix per se… it’s just that most people watch too much TV instead of bettering their lives. The average U.S. consumer spent almost 4 hours daily watching TV in 2017… and I suspect the number has grown now.)
It works the other way around, too.
When you summon the courage to say no…
You create space and energy to say YES to things that matter to you.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
But the most important thing…
Take a piece of paper and a pen and write down what’s the next one thing you can do to move forward in all the areas of your life.
For example, if your financial goal is to make a million dollars in three years, and you’ve decided that you need to build an email list to be able to do that, probably the one thing that you can do right now (if you haven’t already) is to create a lead magnet. That’s it. Until you’ve done that, there’s no point in doing anything else.
Or, if your health goal is to lose 20 lbs in the next 90 days, the one thing you need to do could be to sit down and figure out what you’re going to eat - what you’re going to say yes to and what you’re going to say no to - to achieve that goal.
Then it’s just a matter of execution.
Now, if you find yourself procrastinating still…
There could be deeper issues. We’re all vulnerable to those. There could be deep-rooted psychological reasons why you’re sabotaging your health goals, for example.
I’m no psychologist.
To me, there has been no better approach than to start small and take on things that I know I can do and build on that.
I hope that’ll work for you too.
To your success,
Paul Hanson |
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