Procrastination! Wow such an obstacle for so many people. How to stop procrastinating is a million dollar question for many people, especially those seeking network marketing success. Let me “read” you a quote from Walt Disney. “The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing”! Pretty simple huh? So why is it so many of us have such a difficult time just getting started? If learning how to stop procrastinating were that simple, we would all be setting the world on fire but sadly, many of us are sitting on our duff believing we are making progress because we are planning to make progress.
An example I have used before is planning a car trip. Let’s say we want to drive from San Diego to New York. Let’s make it simple. We have all the maps, we have downloaded the weather along the route and we are researching construction zones. And we tell ourselves we are just making sure the weather will be good for the entire trip and there are no major detours or road construction. Ha! LOL! Good luck!
Think we will ever get in the car and actually drive? Highly unlikely! Often we are waiting for everything to be right before we start. It doesn’t work that way. Life is imperfect and so are all our plans. We can never have a perfect plan and so if we wait for the stars to be aligned and Jupiter aligned with Mars, we will simply give ourselves an excuse for never getting off the couch.
So what is the real issue! Fear! We are afraid to start. We are afraid something might go wrong that we can’t deal with. We are afraid of what someone else might think. We are afraid of what our relatives in New York will be like when we get there. Learning how to stop procrastinating means learning how to overcome fear.
In our network marketing business, the procrastination frequently involves picking up the telephone and calling a prospect to invite them to a presentation. It usually involves fear of rejection. When the prospect tells us “No” they are not interested, for some reason it drives terror into our heart. Why? If you are a waiter (or waitress) serving coffee and the customer tells you, “No Thanks, no more coffee for me” do you feel rejected? Then why feel rejected when a potential client tells you, “No, I am not interested in your business”?
The client is not rejecting you, they are simply saying “no” to your opportunity and often times, “no” really means “not now” so what’s there to be afraid of? If we want to learn how to stop procrastinating, we need to overcome this fear of rejection from our client.
The underlying reason for the fear is we have an agenda. We “need” the sale. We want to “get em”, “sign em up” So my thought is, if we drop the agenda, we loosen the reins of fear. So how about approaching our potential client with no agenda? Then we reduce the fear factor. Even more powerful is, if our expectation is the client will say “no” then we are not reduced to rubble when they do (say no) and are elevated to ecstasy if they say, “Yes”. Wow what a concept!
It is often said that freedom is just on the other side of fear so let’s face the fear and do it anyway.
So, what are you afraid of today? Push through it and just start! Thank me later! Now go ahead and practice how to stop procrastinating by pushing through the fear.