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Sticky Learning Lunches
#35: Keep Putting Off Your To-Do List?
Today’s topic, Putting Off Tasks Part 2. Find out why you procrastinate, how to avoid it, and simple tips to start doing the tasks that you are putting off.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons. Just the last couple of people coming into the room now, and we’re just gonna get them in. And then we are gonna crack on because we’ve got some core content to cover. We’re gonna carry on the theme of yesterday around procrastination. We’re gonna dive even deeper into those seven excuses that, you know, these words that we use to validate why we don’t do things, and then boil those down to the core values and core fears that we display that often come up and trigger these excuses.
Nathan Simmonds:
And when you understand this and get it right down to its root cause, it’s gonna enable you to take better actions, more considered approaches to things and help to eliminate those things off your to-do list. So let’s get everyone in the room. He says, where’s my mouse on? There it is. Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning. Hello, Andrea. Good to see you again. Colin. Darren, Fabian. Thank you Gareth. Good to see you again. Gina Howard. Karen Lynn. Nice. See you Petra. Thank you for being here. Ramah and Tim, handful of more people, handful more coming in.
Nathan Simmonds:
First things first, as always, let’s get the phones on flight mode. Zero the distraction, a hundred percent attention on where you’re going today and what you are doing. And this is about investing your time in you to make you more incredible than yesterday. That’s what we came here for. So, phones off. Fresh sheet, fresh sheet, fresh thinking at the top of that page. In your notepad, you’re gonna write keepers, as I always say now, it’s about things that you hear, things that you learned today that you want to keep hold of, that you want to remember, reignite and help to kind of reimagine and reinvigorate the thinking.
Nathan Simmonds:
As you know, as you reread those notes, new ideas percolate to the surface so you can come up with new ideas, new actions and and new thoughts that are gonna help you deliver even better result. Also, making sure you’ve got a drink, it’s getting warmer over here, wherever you are, on, in, on the planet, on the globe at this point in time, making sure you’ve got a drink and you are ready for this.
Nathan Simmonds:
We are in Welcome to today’s Sticky Learning Lunch with me, Nathan Simmons, senior leadership coach and trainer for MBM, making Business Matter, the home of sticky learning. And these sessions all about helping you be the best version of you in the work that you are doing right now. And if you are returning back to the office for that return as well, we are the leadership development and soft skills provider to the grocery and manufacturing industry.
Nathan Simmonds:
And I want to give you some of the skills up here that I’ve learned in 23 years of leadership and the last nine, maybe 10 years now, of coaching leaders and developing leaders. And share some of this content with you just to help push that thinking further. Where are we today? Someone’s already told me how they’re feeling On a scale of of 10, obviously a 7.5 is pretty good. How are we feeling today? First question is, how are we feeling today? One being terrible, 10 being phenomenal. How are we feeling on a sliding scale? What’s going on for us? How are we feeling right now? Got nines. We’ve got a six. Okay, we’re gonna work on that today. You’ve got nines, nines, nines up for it. Good. Seven.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’ve got a couple of sixes. Weather has brought the score down. Oh, well let’s, let’s lift this score up. Yesterday when we talked about it, it, I also said, you know, what’s the one small action you can take today that’s gonna create impact on something that needs to be on your to-do list or that you haven’t ticked off of your to-do list. What’s that one? Small action. Let me know in the questions. What’s again, what was that one small action you said you would do yesterday to take action on that thing that you’ve been procrastinating on about? What was the one small action?
Nathan Simmonds:
I’ll wait for those coming. ’cause That’s gonna require a little bit more typing than just a number called a tax man. Nice. What did you call him? Admit I’m a procrastinator, paid up member of pa I need to ask myself though, why behind my lack of action on the same topic. Good. Called him a gi delivered bad news. If it was necessary, it was necessary. Focus on the one thing at a time. Absolutely.
Nathan Simmonds:
Your brain cannot focus on more than one thing at a time. And there are optical illusions that you know, that can show you this. Just even in the physical scientifically proven that multitasking doesn’t exist. Just do the one thing. Focus on that. Get it done phenomenally. Well move on. Good. We’ve got some stuff up there. So what are we covering now then? Yesterday we looked at the seven excuses.
Nathan Simmonds:
I’ve got ’em listed down here. I’m not gonna go through those in too much depth. The first one, it’s easy. So we don’t bother doing it. You know, we find it’s, it’s maybe beneath us or it’s just too easy to go and do something else. Now we fear failure and we’re gonna talk a bit more about fears today. So rather than actually taking action on it, we procrastinate and leave it for as late as possible in case we know. ’cause We think we might produce a substandard quality of product at the end. But then what we do is we cut ourself off at the very last minute and produce a substandard product anyway because we didn’t give ourselves enough time to do it.
Nathan Simmonds:
It’s boring, quite frankly. We’d rather do something else ’cause it’s less, it’s, that’s less interesting. Need for certainty. We’ve got down here as well. Now we, we can guarantee certain actions and certain outcomes. So we do them instead of doing the thing that might be a bit more difficult. We’ve also got here enjoy pressure. So sometimes some of us lead it to the last minute just ’cause we enjoy the thrill of being under pressure. But actually that has a detrimental impact on our health mentally and physically doing all nighters, drinking too much coffee using, doing these sorts of things. We don’t
Nathan Simmonds:
Don’t wanna take the responsibility. So we’d rather leave it for as long as possible and get someone else to make a decision so we don’t have to take that responsibility. And if we don’t like it, we can blame somebody else. And then finally, we think tomorrow it’s gonna be easier. We think the future version of us will do it easier. So we’re gonna leave it to tomorrow rather than doing it today. But then we go back to the top of the loop where it, well, maybe it’s just too easy so I won’t bother doing it. And we go back into a cycle of the seven excuses, right?
Nathan Simmonds:
That was the headlines from yesterday. If you didn’t see it, that was the kind of the catchall there. What are we gonna be covering today? Right now we’re gonna be looking at the four human needs and looking at the two fears that go alongside this. So we’ve got about 15 minutes to do this. The first need is the need for certainty. So the need for certainty is, is creating stability, creating security. I need to know where my house is. I need to know where money’s coming from to pay the bills. I need to know where food is. I need to know where my family are. I need to know that they’re supported. So these are your core certainties. Your core securities. Well, on the other side of this, we also have the need
Nathan Simmonds:
For uncertainty. And what that means is, you know, we want certain amount of novelty. We want a certain amount of different things to be happening in our lives. We want, you know, we want stimulus. We want things to be exciting occasionally. Why? Because if we go too much this way, life becomes boring. Now we, we look for security. We want everything to be just so, and we spend all our time trying to put things into compartments to make sure that we mitigate all the risks and everything. That there is no gamble. And we know, we know full well that if I do this, I get this as a result.
Nathan Simmonds:
But the challenge is that if we go too far this way, the moment that we have a curve ball come in, all the toys come out of the pram. We know that we have no flexibility. ’cause We spend all our time over here trying to balance it or make sure everything’s gonna work exactly how it’s meant to work. And the moment that something blows in from a different direction, everything goes into crisis. How many people have got people in their lives right now that absolutely have to know a hundred percent exactly what’s going on all of the time?
Nathan Simmonds:
And the moment you give them, you know, and this kind, this happens at varying times when pressure’s really high. You know, we talk about this in mental health, you know, having your stress pot, your stress tank. And when your stress tank gets full, you know, my wife can ask me for a, for a cup of tea and I will erupt, but it’s just a cup of tea.
Nathan Simmonds:
It was the same cup of tea as it was yesterday, only fresher. But because of all the other stuff going on, you know, it causes me to, to explode. But as a human need, we all need a certain amount of security if we go too far the other way. And we are living in constant uncertainty. This is where they talk about the, the, the VUCA in in, in military terms, volatile, uncertain I forget the other part of it, you know, challenging or whatever critic. Crisis situations. If we are constantly living right in this space over here, what happens is, while brains tend to go into overload again, because we don’t know what’s gonna happen, we don’t know what’s happen, that we have no stability when we’re working in this space.
Nathan Simmonds:
And when you look at the seven excuses, you know, the need for certainty, it’s too boring. The thrill of leaving it to the last minute, you can start to see how these values actually start to turn into our excuses. On the other side of this equation, you’ve got the need for significant account. Make sure I’m spelling it right. So at the top here, you’ve got the need for significance. And again, when you’re looking at kind of uncertainties, it’s, well, I’m gonna do this because I know how to do it and I know how to do it well. So I’m not gonna do the other things that may make me look bad or make me look inferior. On the other side of this though, he says,
Nathan Simmonds:
Is love and connection. Sometimes though, when we’re talking about business ideas and business thinking, what you might find is it may not be love and connection is the words that people use inside business. It may be friendship, it may be acknowledgement. When we boil it down to the human needs and the human values, this is the love and connection. So what happens is when you’re looking at these excuses, now they start to boil up into these things. What you find in kind of, lemme go step back two seconds. When you find that people go too far this way, they start to limit the love and connection they have at work.
Nathan Simmonds:
How many people here, yes or no, who have heard someone say in someone, say in their organization, in their career, I’m not here to make friends, I’m here to get a job done. Who’s heard this before? Yes. Lots. Who was that many times Hands up. Absolutely. Why? Because we want to go to this place of significance to prove that we’re good at something. Yeah, we wanna go to the significance. We do. We want to get this job done, we wanna make it efficient. And I, you know, I wanna make sure there’s certainty, so I’m gonna do it my way and if it upsets people, I don’t care.
Nathan Simmonds:
But then on the other side, you see people at work that just do absolutely their everything they’re told to do. And they would rather give everyone else the accolades or give everyone, you know, give other people significance just to make sure that they get some sort of acknowledgement or appreciation in that social group. This make sense to everyone? Everyone see how this kind of relates to the procrastination or, or starting to see how this relates? We’re gonna get a bit clearer on this in just two seconds. Good, good, good, good, good. By the way, this isn’t just business related, this is also personal related. And to your own psyche and all those sorts of things and all the relationships that we deal with on a daily basis is,
Nathan Simmonds:
So this need for certainty and uncertainty, I learned this of a gentleman called Peter Sage who was one of the trainers for Tony Robbins and Tony Robbins’ quote on this is the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the level of uncertainty that you can comfortably manage. So the more you can go over here and you know, not feel pressure, the more wonderful your life will be because things will come in from left field all the time, and that’s called life.
Nathan Simmonds:
And you’ll be able to deal with it all the time. You’re up here trying to get significance though, and you’re losing love and connections. So you are losing relationships. But all the time you go down here, a lot of people go down to love and connection and they will give up their significance. And we see this in significant relationships and partnerships in business and in life and love where people think they can’t be significant in a relationship in order to get love and connection.
Nathan Simmonds:
And what happens is, is when we’re on this, we’re on this seesaw doing this, trying to balance everything out in, in our own head space. So when you talk about, you know, the, the balances, you know, talk about work-life balance in truth, you know, it’s a misnomer. ’cause A work-life balance, anything to be balanced means that it’s not going to move. So we spend our life on these two seesaws trying to get everything to level out and just make sure everything stops. So everything can just be, you know, happy and comfortable. But in truth, nothing in nature is certain. Now there is no security you can ask. You know, you look at, you know, look at the trees, does a tree worry about which way the wind’s gonna blow?
Nathan Simmonds:
And the answer is no. It just does what it needs to do. It lets the wind blow, it grows. If the wind blows over, it’ll find another way to grow, but it’ll still carry on planting acorns. So when we have, so bringing it back into this procrastination piece, when we understand where we are on this map, in these quadrants, we can then start to understand, okay, well how are we responding? How we reacting to certain things? What words are we then using to validate the excuses we’re making about not taking certain actions? Is it ’cause I want certainty? Is it because I crave uncertainty?
Nathan Simmonds:
But then what happens is, let’s see where I’ve got room to write this on. When we get caught up in these things and we’re swinging from, you know, certainty to uncertainty and you know this need for love and connection and giving up significance, what happens is when we start to boil up and our fears start to come up. So we’ve done the four human needs and then we have the two fears. The first fear is the fear of not enough,
Nathan Simmonds:
The fear of not being rich enough, of not qualified enough. And I will get a link for you very shortly, Diane, about where you can read more about this. The fear of not enough fear of not rich enough, tall enough, black enough, white enough, whatever, rich enough intelligent enough network, you know, resourced enough. All of these things. And what we do is we, wherever we’re sitting on here, we start to make this excuse like, well I won’t do that because I’m not qualified enough. Yeah, I won’t do that. I won’t take that action because I’m not skilled enough, resourced enough in the right position, rich enough.
Nathan Simmonds:
So these excuses that we came up, came up with yesterday when we boil it down, just boils down into these two fears depending on where we sit in here. The second fear is the fear of losing love. And again, depends on your language, where you are and the business you work and, and how you think about this. Will I lose respect from that person if I go for that job and I get it? Will people think less of me that I used to work with? If I do, if I go for that job and I don’t get it, will my wife think less of me because I, I failed at the interview so I won’t do it.
Nathan Simmonds:
So there’s fear of losing love. Now we’ve got here is no need for certainty, fear of failure. We don’t wanna take the responsibility. Well if I make that choice, will my peers, will my manager think less of me? Will I lose their respect? So we start to hold ourselves back. And again, these excuses start to come up. These fears here are learned. By the way, there are only four fears in truth two we are born with and two we learn. Now the first two is the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises.
Nathan Simmonds:
And you are born with these because, you know, it would be, it would take you a long time to learn these experiences at the moment that you’re born. But evolution has has coded that into your, into your gen a genetic level, into your DNA so that when you are born, you instantly have a fear of falling, of loud noises ’cause that’s what’s gonna help you stay alive 200,000 years or so of evolution of us as a species is it’s kind of put that in there to make it easier.
Nathan Simmonds:
These two here though, we learn and these are the foundations of conditional life and we learn ’em at a very young age, anywhere between kind of two and four years old. We start to learn these habits. So we start to learn to procrastinate. As I said, procrastination is a mechanism that’s keeping you alive and it’s nature. It’s a wonderful thing when you overlay it though with some of the, the stuff that we learn here. You can start to see how your brain is, is is wired for the negative. And when you have these needs and fears incorporated, it’s very easy to get caught up into a procrastination loop, which then may enables you to come up with the excuses rather than take the action.
Nathan Simmonds:
Because Your brain is always looking for the negative. Your brain is playing tricks on you. And as I said yesterday and time and time again, your brain is playing tricks on you. So you have to learn how to play tricks on it back in order to take the action you need to take for human needs. Two fears. Hope this is useful and I’ve just dumped a load of information at you, I’m just conscious of time. We we’re kind of at the time limit Now for content, what has been useful from this in conjunction with yesterday with some of your thinking? What’s been useful so far? You know what, I’m gonna go dark. Don’t get to see all my sunny radiance.
Nathan Simmonds:
So you’ve got certainty, uncertainty, significance, love and connection. Good. The model understanding of where I am on the scale, absolutely. And you will sit depending, you know, if you look at entrepreneurs like big time entrepreneurs or you know, and they have a need for uncertainty, they love risk, you know, gambling and they also have a need for significance. So I’m gonna do this because it’s high risk and then when I succeed it’s gonna make me look good.
Nathan Simmonds:
So they tend to sit up here and other people just have this need for certainty and love and connection and actually know on a really dramatic scale. Often when you look at this need for certainty, if you look at people that are in a abusive relationships even domestic violence, they have a need for certainty and love and connection. So they give up their significance in order to get the love and connection. And then they have the same relationship with different people because they know exactly what they’re gonna get.
Nathan Simmonds:
They know if they say X, Y, and Z, they’re gonna get A, B and C. So it’s really important now just understanding where you are and it’s go. Neither is right or wrong. All humans have these needs, these four needs. How we learn to balance them and how we learn to move them though. And how we start to get a bit of understanding is something we’re gonna plug into a little bit tomorrow when we’ve got a bit more time because we’re gonna look at that and then we’re gonna look at the model that’s gonna help you take action on your procrastination.
Nathan Simmonds:
So it’s a really handy model just to see where you are and just start to flexing things up, understanding where I’m on scale, great. Liked more about the needs and fears. Good relation between positioning and fears. Yes, simple explanation of needs and fears. Splendid. I could say tomorrow what we do. ’cause As as I was saying, we have this, where we sit on here then helps us to incorporate the fear that comes up. And then we can start, you know, we’ve already started to pick at the the top level what the excuses that we’re making and the common ones we’re using in certain situations. This is starting to help you understand where it’s coming from because when these fears come up, the symptom is procrastination.
Nathan Simmonds:
When you can see the symptom, you can take action. If you go to the doctor and the doctor says, and you say to the doctor, I’ve got no symptoms, what’s he gonna prescribe you? Nothing because you haven’t got the symptoms. What youre now over the course of time, you may have realized or you’ve got used to the, the pains and sensations and your body’s adapted and you know, whatever. So you haven’t got any symptoms but actually your spine’s out of alignment. Something doesn’t, you know, it isn’t right if you compare it to other people physically, but then when you can, you know, your procrastination and the things you said you would do or wouldn’t do, that’s become a way of life.
Nathan Simmonds:
And we all do it ’cause it’s ingrained in us from a very early age. When you can start to realize though that the thing you are doing is actually the symptom, it’s the procrastination and then you can go back and take it apart. Ah, now I can see that I can do something else with it and we can, we can go in a different direction, understand the needs and look at what causes procrastination, thus start to take the first steps to overcome it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Ela, I’m hoping I’m pronouncing that right, phenomenal. Keep do. If you do that and you never, you know, never speak to me ever again, that will be a sufficient shift of the needle to help, you know, transform the work that you’re doing in the life that you’re living, living. Amazing. What questions? Because this is just, like I say, this is now we’re getting to the, the, we’re boiling this down. Now we’re starting to understand where the procrastination comes from tomorrow.
Nathan Simmonds:
We’re gonna take it apart again even further and create a framework to move beyond it. Hope this is useful. Questions. What questions have you got for me today about this? And about procrastination, about some of the stuff that’s coming up for you. What questions have you got for me? And while we’re doing that, there is gonna be a link in the chat box for tomorrow’s session.
Nathan Simmonds:
If you have not registered for tomorrow’s session, now is the time to register for tomorrow’s session. Also, if you know someone else that needs to be hearing this content that needs some support about the work they’re doing, improving what, how they’re working as a leader or in a business, send them the link. Please share this link with, you know, for tomorrow’s session with them tomorrow. And you know, let them know what you learned, share your learning, compound your learning by teaching it to somebody else and get them to come along and experience this as well. That would be super useful. Super amazing. So two things. One, register for tomorrow, two, copy the link and send it to five friends. That would be amazing.
Nathan Simmonds:
The questions are quiet. Either that or the questions are gonna be very long when they actually come through. I’m getting worried. Other thing that I wanted to let you know as well, I have finally received my first copy of the coaching cards. So I know there have been lots of copies of these, you know, packets of the grow coaching cards, the mental health coaching cards, the leadership coaching, time management, category management, all these are phenomenal assets that we’ve built these, these coaching decks to help you.
Nathan Simmonds:
I finally received mine. So those of you that have ordered, they will be on your doormat either today or tomorrow in goes crossed. They’re on their way soon. And in these decks of cards now it is a, is a series of questions that you can sit down and coach yourself or coach other people with phenomenally power. Got mine today.
Nathan Simmonds:
Great Karen, wonderful. Happy to hear. And you get a series of questions that are gonna take you through each of these models that are gonna support you being the best version of you and the work you do. And it is like having me in your office with you at a fraction of the price. So if you haven’t got your deck of cards with your questions, you’ve got the grow coaching model, you’ve got the leadership model, Eva, you’ve also got the the mental health deck. So if you want to have more robust mental health conversations with your team, there is a deck of cards that’s gonna help you do that.
Nathan Simmonds:
From my experiences of working with my own mental health, you know, suffering with workplace depression, anxiety, working with people that have PTSD and anxiety themselves it’s really important these conversations are built on experience. You know, it’s not just a series of questions. This comes with 23 years of experience, 10 years of leadership development packed into one small deck to help you do incredible work with your people.
Nathan Simmonds:
Yes phenomenon. There is also a link to procrastination. There is an article, we’ve got several articles on, on, on the, the Making Business Matter website around procrastination. So if you want more help around this, there’s some documents in there, there’s more information there as well that’s gonna support you. When I understand question coming good. When I understand where I am on the model and the name, understand the symptoms, excuses, what’s next, first step and that Colin is all about tomorrow’s session.
Nathan Simmonds:
The first step you’ve already taken, you know, through these elements is becoming aware of it and admitting it now and acknowledging it. You know, it’s not something to be ashamed about. It’s not I’m a procrastinator, I can’t make decision. No, no, no, that’s cool. You know getting lost in the emotion, know and know I am a procrastinator. It’s, it is a label.
Nathan Simmonds:
Labels of Velcro, not super glued. You can change that anytime. So what part of my brain procrastinates, ’cause it keeps me safe. Am I a procrastinator? No, I’m someone that sees that my brain does that. Therefore I can create enough space and enough distance to then put some steps in place and take action. What’s the reason yesterday that I asked you that question? You know, what’s the one smallest action you can take for the biggest possible impact?
Nathan Simmonds:
Because that then creates an answer that gives you something to focus on, to take that. How many people here wrote that action down and took action yesterday based on that one small question that I asked and I know the answer ’cause I saw several responses come through. So the first thing is, is seeing it, hearing the words that you are using, which are holding you back.
Nathan Simmonds:
So as the question that was asked me now, what are you putting your energy into that is actually holding you back? And one of those things will be procrastinating. When you can hear the excuse for what it is. Then you can say, okay, well actually what’s my, what’s my need here? Where on this model, oh is my need for certainty? Okay, well actually I need to do something that makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. I need to do something that’s gonna be a little bit uncertain because I’m gonna do something diff different.
Nathan Simmonds:
Okay? We move with that. What fear is holding me back? Ah, it’s the fear of oh, not enough and it’s coming up like this in this excuse. Ah, okay great. What can I do differently? What else could I do right now that’s gonna make a difference? What else can I do right now that’s gonna impact somebody else?
Nathan Simmonds:
Now action causes traction. The moment you take one step, you’re already compelled to take another. Yeah, you are already starting to get the the impetus to keep going, right? ’cause You’ve just broken the seal, you know, you’re just like, ah, okay, well actually that step was really easy. Oh, maybe I can take another one. What’s the next smallest action? So homework conscious bang on half past conscious of time. That thing that you said you were procrastinating about yesterday, you took one small action.
Nathan Simmonds:
I hope you took one small action on that yesterday to move it forward. Well, right now then, so what’s the next smallest action you need to take in order to get that thing done? There’s that thing that’s either on your to-do list or that thing that you took off your to-do list because it was so embarrassing, it had been there for so long. You’ve now fingers crossed, take on one small action. What’s the next smallest action you can take to, to move that forward?
Nathan Simmonds:
Thank you very much for today. Really appreciate sharing the setting notes. It’s phenomenal, it’s fun. I love sharing this content because this is, you know, this was what gets me fired up. I love giving this to other people. Tomorrow’s session, we’re gonna break down the fears. I’m gonna show you how it turns up in your life, why it turns up, and also give you a three step model that’s gonna help you to enjoy the process of having some procrastination in your life, but at the same time not getting stuck in it.
Nathan Simmonds:
Okay? It’s really important. They’re gonna help you do this. Final shout for me. Virtual classrooms. If you know two things, if you know someone else that would benefit from being in these sessions with me, get them here. Share the link with them, please tell them about these sticky learning lunches with me, Nathan Simmons.
Nathan Simmonds:
Also, if you have a team, if you have a business, if you have peers that will benefit from a session like this, a private session where we get to talk about deliver exchange ideas and I can teach some of this content and coach people through their procrastination, through their communication, through their coaching, and it’s gonna help them get a better result, then there is the link there for the virtual classrooms.
Nathan Simmonds:
This shows a full list of all the things that we do, all the ways that we can help and all the ways that we can, you know, give to you to benefit. Okay? I hope this is useful and I look forward to seeing you tomorrow. So everyone have a fantastic rest of your day. I look forward to seeing you then.
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