How to Stop Procrastinating and Get Motivated

I went to a business networking meeting recently where a business advisor gave a talk on how to overcome procrastination and get things done. The audience enjoyed his entrepreneurial  Just-Focus-and-Do-It spirit. I also like the phrase, 'Procrastinate later!'

If it's that simple, why do so many people procrastinate? Is it laziness? Is it that they don't know WHAT to do? Or are there other factors - mindset for instance?

If you look at people who enjoy a lot of personal, career and business success one thing they have in common is their determination to take action. Where others are waiting for the right time and the perfect action, the mindset of the people who get the most done tends to be, 'imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time'.  Richard Branson is a great example of this - he wrote a book called,  'Screw it, Let's Do it!' A trait of successful people is that they are prepared to fail hard as well as succeed spectacularly.

It's action that brings the feedback that makes their next attempt more likely to succeed - if they are willing to learn useful things from their experience.  A study of millionaires found that the average millionaire goes bankrupt three and a half times. Few people have the determination and tenacity to ride that roller coaster of failure and success. For the ones that do, it's their willingness to review what they did, measure their results, record the lessons learned and change what they are doing that helps them hone their success formula. Few people have been trained or brought up to have that objectivity and discipline. What most people learn after a 'failure' is something useless - don't try again.

A short cut to success is to get a personal, career or business coach to advise, mentor and train you. Someone who has the skills, experience and knowledge to help you reach your goals, the supportive objectivity to help you stand back and assess and who will help you stay motivated to take the next steps. A coach can help you sort out the 20% of action you need to take that will get you 80% of your results. One entrepreneur said, 'Life is too short for me to learn everything I need to know from my mistakes. That's why I have a coach.'

Many people give up when just one more try would bring them the results they are looking for. For instance, research shows that it often takes three to seven times before people are convinced that an idea will work or that a product or service is worth buying, yet many sales people, professionals, managaers, life partners, parents and friends lose the sale or opportunity to influence because they give up after the first or second try.  Even fewer people have the confidence to withstand the doubts and criticism of those around them and their own even louder inner critic, when it goes wrong.

This is where a life, career or business coach can help too. They help you take a step back and assess things objectively and help you remain courageous and motivated to keep going. They also have the skill to help you develop more ways to get what you want and the mindset to achieve it. For instancce, you can make more sales, convince people of your point of view and achieve your outcomes more often if you know more ways to communicate with different kinds of people and develop a flexible approach. A life, career or business coach can also help you silence your inner critic - especially an NLP trained coach - and get quality information from your intuition. This is where a life, career or business coach can give you more than someone who just tells you what to do.

Richard Branson and many other people we would consider successful also choose a good team to help them do the things they are not good at or interested in doing. To do that, you first need to know what you are good at. That is where a personality profile can give you shortcuts to the awareness you need. My clients find that the valuable and insightful feedback they get from the FACET5 personality profiling system I use accelerates their personal, career and business success. They get a clear understanding of their strengths and areas for development. They get great clues as to why they procrastinate and what they need to do to take action. One client realised why he procrastinated over people oriented tasks such as networking, presenting his business, meeting new friends and women and dealing with difficult team members. Another discovered why she was putting the wrong sized tasks on her 'To Do' lists. They also realised what kind of people they needed to have around them in their business and personal lives to succeed and experience the rewards they were looking for.

So some keys to getting your 'To Do' lists done are: find out WHAT to do, write lists, find the 20% of tasks that give you the 80% of your results and do them first, delegate to the right people, find out what your strengths are and play to them, measure your results, be flexible about how to achieve your goals, get a life, career or business coach to help you take shortcuts to success and learn positive and useful things from your experience.

I wish you every success in your personal, career and business life, Madeleine

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Madeleine Morgan runs inspiring, motivating, thought provoking, practical and effective private and public career and business coaching and training programmes in Cambridge and in-house programmes in the UK. She coaches over the telephone, Skype and face-to-face.