Procrastinating? Here's what you can do

Use this motivational technique to stop putting off that project or task

It’s Motivational Monday, and I thought we could talk about a specific technique that you can use to help you complete tasks big and small.

Edited transcript:

Here is a motivational technique you can use to do the thing that you've been putting off doing.

Everybody thinks motivation is this feel-good feeling that you're inspired to act in this grand manner, and everything is awesome. However, sometimes it looks very different from that. And I want to talk to you about those times and what you can do in that moment.

Rocky, of course, is a great, inspirational movie, and everybody remembers the ending where he went the distance. And people remember the moment where he gets to the top of the stairs after failing all those times.

The moment people don't remember or don't reenact in their mind is, I think one of the most important parts of the movie. It’s the moment just before he starts to train for the fight—that first moment.

They show him waking up in the dark in his cruddy apartment alone, and he cracks those raw eggs into the cup, drinks those eggs, and that is his breakfast.

And he goes off alone, running through very unglamorous streets. Then, very quickly, we go into a montage, and a Henry Mancini score starts to play.

Because, even in a movie where we don't have to do the work, the work is tough to even watch.

That is how hard it is.

And I think people forget that the winning is won in that moment.

At some point in your life, you are going to have to wake up alone in the dark, and you are going to have to do the work. And what do you do then?

There are a couple of things that you can do to motivate yourself. One of the techniques is from a book called Rethinking Positive Thinking, and it's a very simple acronym called WOOP, which stands for Wish Outcome Obstacle Plan.

What that means is there's a wish that you want to do.

If you're Rocky, you want to wake up, and you want to do that roadwork, okay? And the outcome you're looking for is you want to go the distance. You want to go the distance. You want to prove to yourself that there is, that you're more than you thought you were.

You want to reach for something bigger for yourself. You want to build the esteem in your life so that you can be worthy of love, so you can get Adrian at the end, because it is a love story, I tell you it's a love story. So that is the outcome.

So when you think of your wish, you visualize the outcome. Now, a lot of people stop there, and that is where positive visualization goes wrong. In the book, she says that there is no actual correlation between visualizing success. As a matter of fact, sometimes it does the exact opposite.

They did studies in the book that they cited about people who visualized losing weight, and they imagined it being effortless, and they saw themselves thin and it didn't work. It actually, they were less likely to lose the weight. But the people who imagined that it was going to be hard work and them visualizing and imagining, imagining them stepping up to the place.

And overcoming that obstacle of it being hard. And then if they did one step further, if they imagined exactly one of those obstacles and they created a plan for how they were going to overcome that obstacle, they were able to do it. So instead of just visualizing success, what you want to do is you want to visualize what the success is.

Then you want to visualize and feel how good it will be to have that success. Then you want to imagine what is likely to be the obstacle and then create a plan for that. And so when you visualize it, you visualize the whole thing through. And that is why it is so much more rewarding.

People forget the part where Rocky tried to run up those steps several times, okay? But he failed. It was the last time that he got up there that made it such a big victory. It's that, uh, if you're a writer, you know, it's a try fail cycle. Try fail cycle, right?

Well, if you're the hero in the movie of your life and you want to write that novel, okay, I want you to remember and feel what it's going to be like when people read that book and the amazing reviews you're going to get. Okay, I want you to feel that.

I want you to envision that, okay? And your wish is that you're going to write today. Okay, what is the obstacle? Well, the obstacle is something always comes up. So maybe the plan for that obstacle is that you're going to set a time. You're going to use assist. I use Flow Club (Free two-week trial)*.

Flow.Club It's a body doubling thing where I set an appointment on the screen, uh, with strangers from around the world. And we all say for the session, some of them are half hour, an hour, 90 minutes, 2 hours, 3 hours even. In this session, I am going to do this.

I'm going to outline, I'm going to edit, I'm going to whatever these three steps, I'm going to do these four chores that I've been meaning to do. Whatever it is, I write it down on this little list. Every time I check a little bit off, confetti falls from the screen.

Little dopamine hit there. And at the end, we all check in with each other to see how we did. That is my plan for doing what it is I need to do. I've externalized the accountability. Your plan could be, I'm going to set a timer and I'm going to do, you know, a pomodoro, or your plan could be, I'm going to meet a friend at the cafe and we're going to do it together, it can be anything.

But imagine that obstacle and find a real, tangible, easy, simple plan to get you to do it. Woopmylife.org is a website that has like a little form you can fill out and you can literally do this visualization in under a minute.

*Their standard free trial is one week, but when you use a link from another Flow.Club Member, you get two weeks free to try it.