[Music] hi Shannon wer here and I'm really excited about today's inside strategic coach podcast because Dan you and I are going to talk about one of your most exciting and favorite topics at the moment which is procrastination so let's kick off and describe what is procrastination and who does it impact who does it affect procrastination first of all is a topic that generally is bothersome to entrepreneurs I've been coaching entrepreneurs since the 1970s it's very very bothersome but it's very secret to most entrepreneurs I find that most people when you talk about procrastination you bring it up as a topic that if they are forthcoming and they actually talk about procrastination it's probably the first time in their life they've ever had a conversation with anyone about procrastination and yet I've never met anyone in in my entire life and this isn't just entrepreneurs it's people in general that if you bring the topic up there are just vast amounts of experience that come pouring out until people can actually talk about it as generally negative experience they're kind of embarrassed by the fact that they procrastinate a lot of people believe that it's sort of a character flaw and they have a perception that they procrastinate but other people don't so they see real separation between themselves and other people first of all I have to admit hi my name is Dan and I'm a procrastinator so what we're doing right now in strategic coach starting in the 10 times program at the beginning of each Workshop now a 10 times Workshop we explore some dimension of why people procrastinate and it's been one of the most Electric New Concepts that we have introduced into coach I think in the entire 28 years that we've had the workshop program and going back throughout my coaching experience I've never had more interesting insightful transforming conversations on any topic that relates to entrepreneurial experience greater than talking about procrastination why we do it what do you do about it I mean first of all you know if you can tell the truth about why you procrastinate then it's got enormous richness it's got enormous energy to it well it's interesting because I think procrastinating is really Universal experience is something we we put off doing something we know we should do and I think that's part of a clue of how you know you're procrastinate about something so it really is something that all of us experience now you've made a comment before that people always procrastinate for intelligent reasons yeah and that's way more credit than I hear most people giving themselves about procrastinating so can you talk about that yeah well the first mindset related to this and we're going to talk about three mindsets the first one is everybody does it but everybody mostly keeps it secret so they feel very isolated second mindset is that my observation from all the conversations and I've had hundreds with different individuals is that you're always procrastinating for an intelligent reason and what I mean by that is that you know you have to move forward but there's something missing in the situation that disinclined you to take action right now so there's a tendency to postpone into the future until you get a feeling that things are right that's the intelligent part of procrastination so it's an indicator that something isn't quite right but the non-intelligent the harmful part of procrastination is there is an intelligent reason but you don't find out what the reason is you don't go deeper to find out why am I procrastinating you know it's a great question if you ask yourself why you're procrastinating the reason will come out and you'll see that there's something missing there's a deficiency and something has to be added before you'll feel the capability and confidence to move forward see that's really interesting because most people I know don't actually ask themselves that question why it's very much about well you feel badly I should and then you know I remember writing papers in University and doing everything but you know I be clean my dorm room I would organize things which I never organize things so that was unusual in of itself but I would put off everything instead of focusing on that one thing but you're right it's because I didn't quite feel the capability level or maybe I needed a text or something before I finally was deadline driven enough to make it happen so I love the fact that there actually is an intelligent reason but the not intelligent part is not really finding out why why yeah so is there a general thing that does get in the way of people not taking action is especially entrepreneurs yeah in other words in some way they're obligated to taking an action producing a result but they haven't really worked out in their mind what the real payoff if they go through and actually complete the action their mind has not created what the bigger and better result would be if they actually did go through and complete the action so they're procrastinating for a very intelligent reason they haven't really thought of what will happen after they produce the result what's the payoff the interesting thing about it is Shannon that actually when they think it through the payoff is very very significant once they're clear about that people move forward very very quickly but they haven't thought through what the payoff is they're just seeing it as kind of a burden that they've taken on and it seems to them that the the obligation it's not a commitment the commitment is actually the Breakthrough for doing it they feel an obligation that something is expected of them and usually we procrastinate most where we've obligated ourselves in such a way that other people are depending upon are actually producing a result that other people are really depend depending on getting that result but we're not actually doing it so for entrepreneurs there's very very few things if you're a really successful entrepreneur that you're just doing for yourself generally speaking in a work setting as an entrepreneur team members are depending upon something clients and customers are depending upon something you may be working with Consultants you may be working with vendors and they can't take action until you you've done something it may be as simple as a decision it may be something where you have to do part of the action so that they're in position where their abilities can click in but they can't do anything until you've done your part of it so we're feeling that pressure of other people's expectations but again that's not the thing to be looking at the thing to be looking at is what is the payoff for yourself personally if you actually f through but then what's the payoff for everybody else it's so interesting because I know that one of the greatest fears and really sources of guilt that so many entrepreneurs and team members and team leaders feel is when they're the bottleneck you know we're the one that's impeding the progress we beat ourselves up and we can't sleep and all these things happen because we know but you're saying by just by switching our thinking instead of focusing on the pain points focusing on the bigger and better payoff we can actually shift our mindset and therefore our actions about will stop procrastinating yeah and here's the thing about the payoff at your present level of capability and confidence you may not be up to yet actually producing that payoff so that's the intelligent reason is that you're not ready yet to perform at the higher level that's going to be required but if you take entrepreneurs and do a history of where their breakthroughs have come in their entrepreneurial history you know one of the things we do in the 10 times when we're projecting 10 times into the future I said I'm not going to start you off with the future here I'm going to take you back to when you were on10th revenues on10th profits of where you are right now and I want you to think of the crucial breakthroughs that you made from back then sometime in your earlier part of your entrepreneurial career and now you're here you'll see in every case the Breakthrough came when you committed yourself to something and you went through a period of anxiousness you went through a period of discomfort but then you acquired new capabilities and your confidence jumped and that all together commitment and then the courage that it takes to go through a period of anxiety fear discomfort until a new capability has developed and then your confidence level jumps and that's all four of them together prod the Breakthrough so I'm describing the for C's formula that we created in strategic coach well I really like recognizing or acknowledging the fact that when you're procrastinating it actually is because you need to do something that requires courage and growth and growth and that's not a way I've thought of I think any of my procrastinations up until now because I usually look at it from a much more negative framework the biggest procrastinations you know if I examine my own experience my biggest procrastination are always the one where I'm immediately challenged to grow I have to develop new skills I have to develop new knowledge I have to expand my role in teamwork with other people with unique abilities I'm really good at this and every time I'm challenged with a new not a request but a demand to grow it always scares me everybody says You must be really good at this now and I said the stakes are higher now the results are bigger right now the teamwork is greater the results are far bigger but I said I always go through a period of fear when I take on something that's bigger than my present capabilities and confidence I always get scared and I expect I always will get scared and that should be something that's normal to me and that there isn't going to be a time in my future when I am not confronted with something that scares me me keeps me up at night worries me and I said if I'm going to continue growing I have to build that as a normal experience that I'm going to have for anything that's bigger better newer different that's fascinating I really think that one of my beliefs as I was growing up was at some point I would not feel as nervous or as scared or all of those emotions that you've described as an adult and in fact quite the opposite is true this really is a growth process and and it's making friends with that fear and the need for courage that really results in exponential multiplier growth because I think a lot of people would be surprised to hear you say hi I'm Dan I'm a procrastinator I mean they see how much you do how much you put out how quickly you get things in motion your large degrees of teamwork and they would just think Dan procrastinate how can that be true we introduce the exercise that goes into this and so this was in 2016 this idea was introduced first of all to our own team so before I started the workshops for that quarter we had one of our three General team meetings where everybody from our team member Network which extends over eight time zones from London to Los Angeles it was the first time I had tried it out so I was nervous I was scared but I had worked out the actual exercise sheet to do this and I remember afterwards I knew I'd hit Pay Dirt with this concept because I've never had so many team members some of them who had never really engaged me in conversation you know we have 120 team members so I don't know all of them and I don't work with all of them in the normal course of my activities there's vast amount that gets done and strategic coach and i' never really worked with the people who do it and I had more people come up to me and said you know never in a million years would I imagine that Dan Sullivan procrastinates you just seem to be totally pouring out the stuff you seem confident all the time and I said nope I said there's always something I'm doing every day that stretches me there's always something I'm doing every day that challenges me and I said and I've learned to translate the anxiety discomfort and fear into new capability but you have to make the commitment to the big payoff before you can understand the stakes of why it's necessary for you to move forward even at the beginning you don't have the capability and confidence you know that by committing and being willing to go through a period of Courage you're going to actually produce the new capability and new confidence and before you start you don't know what that actually looks like so it's really taking that leap of faith you have to kind of be able to Envision it and step into it even knowing it might be totally different I'm not sure it's an Act of Faith but it's faith that an unpredictable future breakthrough will happen which you can't control and the other thing is that you can't predict exactly what it is and being willing to live your future of creating things that have at the beginning a fair amount of unpredictability to them mm that's really powerful Dan I also like how you work to make procrastination useful which is such a different way of looking at it so how can we take this raw material and actually use it for good this is fairly recent I mean as we're having this podcast you know I'm still within the half year since I really did this and I actually had a partner in this it's Dean Jackson who is a really great 10 times entrepreneur in strategic coach and Dean comes to his workshop on a Thursday and he's usually in the first Workshop of every quarter here in Toronto so the workshop is on a Thursday and we make a habit of having lunch on the Saturday and Dean's just got a very intriguing mind he's got a very very fascinating way of thinking about things and he's a great conversational partner so I just started to sketch out this idea and it had come because I've made a commitment to produce a brand new book every quarter for 100 quarters I had done it seven quarters in a row but I noticed in the middle of each quarter's process of producing the new book I go through about a week or 10 days of procrastination when I know there's things that I have to get ready for other team members in the book process because we have a team of numbers about seven or eight people whose talents are required to actually produce the brand new book every quarter and I just caught myself in this period and it was in the week before I met with Dean and I said what am I thinking about here I'm very very interested in how my mind works all my life I've been very very interesting in stepping back and I have sort of three questions you know what am I thinking about and the second one is why am I thinking about this in this way and is there actually a better way to think about this than I'm doing I had never zeroed in on procrastination before and all of a sudden it was under the microscope the spotlight was on it and I say wow I said I'm in my 70s but I can remember as a child procrastinating so consciously I've been at this at least 65 years and I said I gee I've never really sat back and taken a real detailed look at why I'm procrastinating some of the insights that I'm sharing in this podcast started to pour out and I said Gee what a fascinating subject I bet this would be a hot item for the next Workshop I wasn't any further in my thinking than that when I had my lunch and date with Dean and I just shared with him what I thought about and the one additional Insight I had come to you know if you use procrastination as your strategic tool to figure out what you should really be working on tomorrow procrastination will shine a light on probably the two or three most important things that you should be doing tomorrow and Dean just looked at me his eyes got really bright and I could see his brain working and he said have you known this all these years and you're just sharing it with me the first time because Dean will tell you he's one of the greatest procrastinators that he knows and just had a catalytic effect I mean I could see his mind transforming in front of me and very very interesting before the luncheon was over we had hatched a plan to actually do a podcast series on this and Dean's got this really amazing fast turnaround technology where he just has an 800 number and you phone the 800 number it starts recording and you can do a complete podcast and then a half hour later it's already posted as a podcast and he said why don't we start doing a podcast Series so this is on a Saturday and we did our first podcast on the Sunday and he already had the logo he already had the site up and it really struck me that on the topic of procrastination Dean was not procrastinating he was running ahead we as a team weren't procrastinating in the space of about three or four months we've actually put up six podcasts which if you go to Google you can just put in joy of procrastination each of them is an hour I just did one yesterday with Dean and we're just exploring incredible entrepreneurial Dimensions about where procrastination comes from and it's not one thing there's a lot of different dimensions of why people procrastinate I think it's an inexhaustible subject because although everybody procrastinates I think we do it in a different way and we learn from why other people procrastinate and we learn from how they think about it and all this is really really fascinating subject matter so we're getting this out and every Workshop I'm coming up with a new dimension for the exercise it definitely is true that procrastination is something that you can use quite differently which is kind of fascinating and your point about using it as a way to drive your behavior is so unusual it just it it is one of those things I can see why Dean said have you've been holding back for me on this because we haven't really ever used it it's always been something to shove to the side I think because um it's secret we keep it to ourselves uh which in in fact kind of isolates us from other people it's never actually a topic of discussion um we don't get any value out of it you know it's it's like a resource because there's a tremendous amount of experience with this there's a tremendous amount of emotion tied up with it and um the thing that I found is the we have a sense of wasted time uh we have a sense of wasted energy about it but I I've learned that it's not actually wasted it's just trapped and that in fact if you uh use procrastination as your key indicator of what is your strategically most important things to work on tomorrow I always do it in the evening Dean does it when he gets up in the morning and he has procrastination actually direct the key uh activities for the day I do it the night before because I like I'm a great believer that uh what we set our mind up to do next day our our our brain really works on it through the night when we're sleeping and I get up in the morning and I'm crystal clear about what the day is going to be that when you actually follow through you you actually go through the discomfort which is real and you you know you you commit yourself to the outcome and you get very clear about what the outcome if you follow through um a new capability and a new confidence and when you make that breakthrough Shannon all the time that you thought was wasted actually you get results incredibly quickly so there was no wasted time uh you you get a huge burst of energy when you break through on a procrastination so the energy was not wasted it was just trapped and you're of and running so what I've done for the last three or four months and what Dean Jackson has done for the last three or four months we've set up tomorrow always using the uh three biggest things that we're procrastinating on and I I have to tell you it's been the most productive quarter that I've ever had as an entrepreneur it's the it's the most creative quarter I've ever had as you know the coach in strategic coach so I I really feel that we've really tapped into something very powerful and you know the original definition of an entrepreneur is taking resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level of productivity this is a French Economist um before they were Economist by the name of Jean Baptist say it was 1804 and he says entrepreneurs are individuals who take uh you know low producing resources and make them high producing well you can do that every day with yourself by simply taking your procrastinations which in their procrastination form are are resources but with very low productivity and then on you them you immediately take that resource to a higher level of productivity so I I look forward to the rest of my life where each of my tomorrows is really set up with the three biggest procrastinations that I identify uh tonight and then tomorrow I take action on them and uh it just produces enormous um creativity and the other thing is that um it's vastly expanded my use of teamwork with other people because one of the things that makes you procrastinate is you think that it's 100% yours to do and I find in my company that's not true uh I'm the person who makes it up but other people make it real and still other people make it recur but I in my mind I was taking on all three roles and I'm not a make it real person and I'm not a make it uh recur person I'm strictly a make it up person but other people can't make things real and other people can't make things recur until I've actually made it up and put it in a form that they can actually use their unique ability to extend it further so what is really interesting to me about this is that your your goal is not to stop procrastinating although I'm sure from the outside it looks like you've stopped procastinating if it's that productive for you but really just to make better and faster use of those procrastinations every single day that is such a radically different way of approaching procrastination yeah I would say that the only way to truly stop procrastination is uh stop having any personal Ambitions about a bigger and better future um and the reason is I think that procrastination is actually uh triggered by having a vision of a result that's bigger and better in the future that would be extraordinarily positive for you but uh you won't get there without growing and it's the chenge to grow that's actually stopping you that's fantastic so procrastination is a result of growth and it's done for highly intelligent reasons and we use it to be incredibly strategic about how to plan our next day yes and uh here's a here's a little tip it was kind of interesting when we were finished our lunch I had a limousine pick us up and we were going to the same destination it was about a 10 15 minute limousine drive and I got in the car with a driver that I know his name is Peter and I said to Peter Peter do you procrastinate he says I could write the book on procrastination and we had this discussion for about 5 10 minutes about procrastination and uh just a it's a theory right now because I really haven't tested it out uh but I said I bet any stranger that you meet if you want to break the ice and talk to the strer is simply ask the person I'm a procrastinator and I procrastinate a lot and I just wondered if you procrastinate too and I believe that you would break the ice so fast and people would want to talk see I think people would really like to talk about this but because the conventional way uh first of all you're taught in school you're taught in work situations you're taught in every situation it's it's it's really you should be embarrassed and ashamed for your procrastinations and it's kind of a character fla and i' I've seen motivation books that really position procrastination as a bad thing I've seen platform motivational speakers talk about that you know it's your enemy you're you're being an enemy to yourself uh and I said this this doesn't solve the problem at all this just drives people further into secrecy it just drives people further into um isolation and they're trapped they're trapped with the lost time they're trapped with the sense of lost energy and uh and I said this is not entrepreneurial this is a not an intelligent way of dealing with something which can be extraordinarily strategically powerful for the rest of your life great thank you so much Dan I love our dialogue about procrastination and I just love that it can be such a useful thing and not something to be ashamed of or feel guilty about anymore so thank you for that my pleasure sh