Procrastinators Beware!
Procrastination some may say is the antithesis of Productivity. Some like to lean on the word as if it were an acceptable crutch to adopt. The reasons for procrastination are many…
· Underlying beliefs that we hold
· Fear of the outcome
· Overwhelming size of a task
· Sheer Laziness
A lot of people hate sales; they shudder at the thought of trying to sell something to someone. This is generally due to some belief that they hold about the sales process and it may or may not be something they are aware of.
A colleague of mine told me about a client of his who asked him to coach an employee who was performing very badly in sales. After speaking to the guy for less than an hour he found out that the guy had the following belief “Selling is bad!” Unfortunately this is not a good belief to hold if you are a sales person or expected to make sales as part of your job description!
He worked with him to try and find a benefit in what he was selling to his clients and by the end of his coaching he believed he was helping people by selling them his product and no longer had any problems trying to sell. It is possible to change someone’s beliefs but firstly you must identify what the beliefs are.
Many times we fear the outcome of an event and this is why we avoid doing it, so ask yourself what is the worst that can happen and you will realise that even if the worst were to happen it is probably not as bad as not performing the task at all.
When a task is a Elephant of a task we often delay taking on the project as we can feel overwhelmed by its size, the easiest way to tackle it is to break it down into bite size chunks. Create phases or milestones for each chunk and schedule the first task to be done.
The most important thing to remember is to make sure you are getting the important stuff done, we can never hope to complete all the tasks we have waiting for us therefore it’s essential that we procrastinate on the unimportant stuff and get the important stuff done.
And the laziness but I’m afraid I can do nothing about but one piece of advice, don’t complain about having a big workload because nobody will listen!
Good Luck