There is a cure for procrastination, but it does not involve affirmation or summoning your willpower. International speaker and coach Wendy Hart discusses this procrastination cure as she joins Jen Du Plessis on the show. Wendy is the creator of “The Procrastination Cure: A Complete System that Compels You to Follow Through (and Make More Money!),” a system that uses brain science to help people beat procrastination. With over two decades of experience in sales and psychology, she uses various tools and techniques in her coaching work, working with clients ranging from pro golfers to entrepreneurs and small business owners. Listen as she explains the science behind our brain’s tendency to get imprisoned in fear and talks about some simple ways to get it to feel safer and perform at its best.

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The Procrastination Cure With Wendy Hart

I am excited because I have a wonderful guest by the name of Wendy Hart. Wendy, you’re beautiful and I appreciate you coming on the show. You are beautiful inside as I’m learning as well but I want to share with everybody a little bit about you. Wendy is an international speaker and coach. She’s the Creator of the Procrastination-Cure. It’s a complete system that compels you to follow through and make more money. One of the things I thought was neat is that she’s the coach for golfers and entrepreneurs and business owners to help reduce anxiety and overwhelm to increase their sales performance, which is key for what we want to talk about. Wendy, welcome to our show.

Thanks, Jen. It’s so nice to be with you again. We had the privilege to meet at a conference. We connected and had this simpatico. It’s great to be here and share this science with your audience.

We’re going to get a little scientific, but we’re also going to get a little technical because we want both sides of this. I know one of the things that you focused on is Procrastination-Cure using NLP, which is an acronym for Neuro-linguistic Programming.

That’s the science of excellence. Most of the people that are super achievers in the world have all had coaches along the way like Olympians and many of them have used the brain science. That’s one technique that comes at it from a different direction.

I’ve been exposed as a speaker with my coaches and things like that. There’s a lot that’s out there. What I would like to start off with is I know you have a passion for a lot of topics, but what brought you to this particular topic?

Necessity is the mother of invention because I was the most profoundly stuck person that you’ve ever met. You had an interesting upbringing. I had an upbringing that was too colorful even for the Jerry Springer Show for people that are Americans reading this. It was too nuts for reality television. I had very brilliant and attractive parents who were also very mentally ill. They were abusive to a degree that’s hard to describe. My brother and I grew up with nervous systems that were attuned. They were programs to be in survival all the time. I was afraid I was going to die all the time. This is from a young age and your swimming and chemistry. I had procrastination overwhelm and self-esteem lower than dirt. I had a startle response like the moon. I would jump into the air, and so it was hard to function. Thankfully, when I was a little kid, I remember thinking, “If I ever make it out of this house, I am going to discover what the hell lets people thrive and be happy, and then I’m going to tell everybody that will listen.”

Thankfully, I got a scholarship to college. By the time I was in college, while other kids were going to parties, I was in the library reading psych abstracts trying to figure out how I could handle my nightmares and all that stuff. I went on this crazy quest for decades. Everybody else is dating and Wendy’s reading. The gift was I had a particular curiosity and drive. I had an ability to cherry-pick because I went through stuff that people don’t have to like studying. I studied brain chemistry and I had lots of therapy, which was great, and neuroscience, hypnosis, and every personal development program, you name it. I read like I got my life out of books, as you can see. I cherry pick because nothing worked, but these little bits put together became a new original recipe.

It started after college. I was working as a singer and dancer in Chicago. I wanted to go to Broadway and I wanted to heal so I wouldn’t age out of all of that. I was desperate but I got over my stage fright with this recipe, brain chemistry and sneaky brain hacks. I ended up teaching. I was a natural teacher. I taught 300 different singers in Chicago how to do it, but we were poor. That’s a population that has no money. It worked to get rid of anxiety and overwhelm and have people follow through. I’m like, “Where else could it go?” I don’t golf but I said, “This would help golfers not clutch on the course.” I called around and said, “Who knows somebody?” A friend of a friend said, “I know a guy who tried twenty years and can’t break 90. He has had three lessons a week for twenty years and a dozen phone calls, he was scratched on the phone.” I never met him. It was the same brain science, and then his course pro broke a 35-year record in the PGA with five phone calls with me. It was nutty. That was working and that’s how I got into sales because I started coaching golfers.

[bctt tweet=”When you can’t get yourself to do anything, it’s because your brain associates it with danger.” via=”no”]

I still coach golfers and get crazy results with them, but people that golf for fun, a lot of them have businesses. They were entrepreneurial and they would say, “I dropped nine strokes already, but I’m selling better, can you help my team?” I’m like, “Yeah.” It then became the call reluctance cure. It was the stage fright care, and then it was your best mental golf, and then it was the call reluctance care. That was good, but then I stumbled upon a woman who was an ex-Tony Robbins trainer and she had a collection. She had a group of several thousand of home-based business women. I didn’t know that I’d liked them and I fell in love with coaching them because they were very coachable, but the point is when people are entrepreneurial, when you’re running your own business, there’s no one to be accountable to. You’re not punching a clock. You’ve got to do it on your own.

I found that particularly when people had a home office and they were trying to juggle, they’re being pulled by family members and their anchors, and there are all these things, it’s so easy to get distracted. People would not follow through and they would go to shame. That’s how it got the name, the Procrastination-Cure but the truth is this could equally be called the overwhelm cure or the great reducer of anxiety. The same brain science works for that and I moved from a woman who should have been dead twenty ways from Sunday to thriving now and I get to serve clients. I’ve served thousands of people on six different continents to triple their follow through. The system is quite interesting. They’re hacks from all over the place, but they’re the opposite. I’m the opposite of Gary Vee and Tony Robbins. These are great people that I admire, but I do the backdoor. The sneaky way, not the driven willpower way.

The subtitle of my show is, Stop talking, Take action, Get results, which for me is like, “Stop it, stop talking, take action, and get results.” The challenge is always I want to stop talking, I want to get results, but I don’t know how to take the action. Maybe you know what to do, but you don’t know how to do it. What I feel from my coaching perspective is what keeps people from taking action is they don’t know how to do it. It may not be that they’re procrastinating and I know you’re going to counterbalance this and I want you to because I know there’s that’s to it. A lot of times people are numb because they’re like, “I know I need to do this but I don’t know how.”

The next step is let’s find somebody. We get so trapped into the, “I don’t know how,” they don’t even recognize the resources and tools that might be available to them. You’re going to go deeper into this and that’s what I’m curious about. What are some triggers that people could use? A hack, as you were saying. Are there triggers that people could use when they identify that they’re in that procrastination mode? I have a client who’s a perfectionist. She was everything perfect before she can take action and nothing will ever be perfect. She therefore doesn’t take action. Are there some triggers that we can identify in ourselves and some exercises we could do or some self-talk we could do that would help us get over that hump to at least start exploring what the next step might be?

There are, but I’m going to backtrack a little bit because there are a couple of things we need to cover first or people will be lost. Everything you said was completely accurate and they’re two different segments of people. You work with the people who are paralyzed because they don’t know what to do. That’s completely valid because that does free people up and it doesn’t work. There’s another slice that I find, which is maybe bigger because if people will honest to goodness tell the truth about it, most people know what to do.

I ask a lot of my clients that are like that. They know what to do. They just don’t know how to do it or they don’t take action to learn how.

If you said it was about somebody else or if you ask somebody the question, “I’m in mortgage lending and I’m stuck and I’m not calling my people back. What would somebody do who didn’t have my limits or considerations or beliefs or any of that background? If somebody wanted to win at this, what would they do?” Most people can list exactly what steps you need to take to get the results you want. Most people know what to do, but this, “Get themselves to do it,” is more of a, “Can’t get yourself to do it.” It’s not, “Won’t get yourself to do it,” and here’s why. I’m coming from the physiology side of the brain. Your explanation is all accurate, but it has a big giant presupposition in it. A presumption that I think most people had trouble. You Miss top .003% of success in the industry is brilliant at what most people are not. You have a little bit of a brain difference, I’m going to contend, even though you grew up and overcame incredible adversity. You also have a little bit of nervous system attunement difference that’s different than what most people have.

I have a lot of compassion. My first premise is procrastination is not your fault. It is nobody’s fault. Every place that people listening is feeling ashamed because the nuns, the teachers, the parents or everybody said it’s a function of you being too lazy or it’s your character issue. It is not a character issue. It all comes with that, but what if you knew the physiology? If you’ll bear with me, I want to take a minute and a half to explain what we should have gotten in eighth-grade that is creating all the confusion and the shame. Everybody right now, call up a picture of a brain in your mind’s eye. When we do that, we get one big gray squiggly something, the brain. That’s not it but with the twist, with the stem. It’s not one brain. They’re three brains stacked on top of each other, which people might know that there is something important that’s been missing.

 

We’ve got three brains. The bottom brain is the stem, reptilian. It’s the oldest but it translates every single thing you see, hear, taste, touch or feel. Everything you perceive into something to eat, something to fight with, something to run away and hide from, or something to have sex with. The scientists called these four Fs, food, fight, flight, fooling around. These are your four Fs. We keep it clean. It translates. It’s a very primitive language. The one above that, the middle brain is your limbic system, which is where all the emotions come from. That one has only two languages and it’s so primitive, pain and pleasure. “I got to get it right now.” Short-term gratification or, “Run, I could die.”

It’s the lizard brain.

Lizard is the bottom and then this is mimetic, but the limbic system is the middle brain. Your top brain, what we’re talking about right now and which I affectionately call our thinking brain is very late. It’s very new after body. This is new for humans. Because we’re smart, we’re advanced, and we’re not like cavemen, we think that that top brain is running the show. We ought to be able to get ourselves into action. We ought to be able to follow through when we know what to do because, “I’m smart, come on.” What we’re missing and what they didn’t tell us in eighth-grade, which would take so much shame and guilt away. We are 21st-century humans running around with the caveman era brain is circuitry and nobody ever gave us the operating manual. Here’s the thing. Every single thing you see, read, hear, touch, taste, smell, interact with, all that sensory information gets filtered from the bottom two brains first. It doesn’t go to your top brain first. It instantaneously goes to the bottom two.

In the middle brain, there’s an alarm that people have heard of. It’s called the amygdala. You do not need to know how to spell that or remember, but it’s an alarm and we discount it. We think it doesn’t matter anymore. When the alarm gets tripped, it sends chemicals down that make you feel stuck and foggy-brained and it’s very hard to move forward. Since the two bottom brains are the gatekeeper and sadly since everything back in caveman days, the way we’re wired is that everything unknown is dangerous. It doesn’t make logical sense. These things do not make logical sense. It cuts off. The scientists call this cortical inhibition. Back in caveman days, when the saber-toothed tiger was running at the caveman, the blood left his top rain and it went to the parts of his body so he could run fast and it happened in an instant. You don’t logic this out. It just boom. It’s this fight or flight. When this happens and the blood leaves your top brain, you can’t think straight anymore.

However smart you were this morning when you got up to make your to-do list, you don’t have it anymore because this has happened. Until you’re feeling safe and your nervous system re-regulate, you can’t think straight or get stuff done on your to-do list. A lot of people may have heard this part so far. There’s so much on the topic, but this is vitally important. The pieces that you’re missing are number one, everything unknown is considered dangerous by your brain. The difference is even our grandparent’s generation, there weren’t that many bits of information flying in. Now we have billions of bits. Our nervous system is in constant hyper-arousal. You know that impulse you have to get through the inbox of your life. You’re going to get through all your emails. It’ll never happen. We’re always going to have more coming in than we can process. There’s this feeling like this. Now there’s the difference between you, Jen, super achiever and other straight-A super achiever in the tribe but what’s the difference that you can do this thing?

A lot of it you’re born with. They say about 70% of our triggers are nervous system attunement. If you’re in the soup in your mother’s womb and when you come out, 70% of your attachment style, you took hers on. If you had an agitated, anxious mother, my mother used to jump in the air when she’d hear a telephone ring. I still don’t like the sound of those old-fashioned phones like the ringtones. She used to hold me in her arms and jump in the air. My nervous system is attuned to that, so the bottom line of this is that number one when people procrastinate, when your people are not wanting to make their sales calls, you’re little alarm in the middle and the bottom two brains have linked that to danger. It doesn’t make any logical sense or rejection, but rejection is a danger because that’s not even cultural. That’s hardwired into your biology. In caveman days, if you pissed off the head guy in the cave and you got rejected, you were out with the kids and you all died. Rejection is tied in with survival.

It’s nobody’s fault, but I’m here to say that every time your alarm gets tripped, a chemical cascade comes down through the body and it speaks to the organs in your body. This is why you get a lump of dread in the pit of your stomach or vice around your head. You have a headache or you feel like you have the weight of the world. All that and then it’s hard to move forward. Here’s a better way. You pull a string on me. I can talk about the science of this forever. For people reading right now that are thinking, “That doesn’t happen to me because I don’t feel that very much.” It’s happening all the time. It’s like a little morphine drip all day. You get up in the morning and you’re very clear. You know what you’re going to do. You make a to-do list and by 4:00, you’re saying, “What happened to this day and why didn’t I do it?”

Even things like the pile of laundry that you walked past over there, you felt bad about. That’s linked in the same way. Anything you’re procrastinating on means that the little alarm has attributed some amount of danger to that. It’s a tricky thing but the last thing is when the blood leaves the brain, sometimes people are skeptical. They’re like, “Is that true?” Think of a time that you were confident and happy. Maybe you were dancing. Maybe you were in a social situation. Maybe somebody was at an office Christmas party, whatever it is. You were looking good and on top of your game, and then some schmoe came into your space. Somebody said something rude. They came into your space and surprised you. Somebody with some cutting remark or they undercut you. When that happens, at least for the women anyway, but usually for everybody, when you’re surprised by somebody like that, you are shocked. Your jaw falls open, your shoulders shrug, but you can’t think of anything to say. That big like, “I’m the loser. I can’t think of my comeback.”

[bctt tweet=”Willpower is a top brain thing. If your top brain is locked in jail, no amount of that willpower will move you forward.” via=”no”]

“I wish I had thought about that when I was there.”

When does it pop in your head? It’s when do you go home. You’re in bed under the covers in the middle of the night. Your eyes pop open, “I know exactly what I should have said to him. I’m a bigger loser. Why couldn’t I think of it?” It’s because your brain was in jail. You couldn’t access how smart you are because that’s how fast it is. It’s like pulling your hand back from the hot stove. You don’t get to choose. All these places when we procrastinate, it’s not our fault. We are going to get to solutions. I promise, but people need to know this. Here’s that presupposition I was saying about you and why I’m different than all the Gary Vees and the Tony Robbins of the world and everything because that idea of you should do it once you know, just do it for many people.

For everybody, that’s a top brain thing. Will power is a top brain thing and if your tap brain is locked in jail temporarily, no amount of that will move you forward. The job is to get out of jail and getting out of jail is a function of being safe. You cannot logic your way out of it. You cannot learn it out of a book. You have to create enough physiologic safety and your nervous system calms down so your blood can go back up to your brain. You have to retrain that little alarm so that it figures out which is a longer term process. I mostly work in 90 days because you can’t just decide with a whip and say, “Change, damn you.” It learns through habit and safety connected with habit and changing your chemistry so it’s not like this all the time.

I’m interested in the solution and how I can change this because I’m much smarter in the middle of the night and in the morning. That’s why when people say, let me sleep on it. It’s a better decision because they’re smarter in the night. Occasionally, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and I do the Ellen DeGeneres thing, which if you’ve ever watched her stand up, she says that she’s trying to memorize things that she needs to get done. She’ll come up with songs like, “Phone, eyes, mascara.” She’ll come up with this list and she’ll start singing these songs. My song gets so long and then I go, “P I am.” I’m doing things and it gets so long that I’m like, “Screw it.” I get up and put the list down. All of a sudden, I have five times as many things as I had in my little memorization song. I need to do this and this and then I go back to bed and I sleep soundly. I can’t make phone calls in the middle of the night so I need a solution. I was the middle of the night when I’m like, “Got it.”

I like your way better than Ellen’s way. Ellen’s is funny and mnemonic works but if you’ve got a longer list, that will wake you up and create adrenaline, and then it’s better to get up, which we don’t want to do. We don’t want to get out of the warm snugly blankets, but if you can do a brain dump, then there will be a let go and then you can sleep in an easier way. The other reason you’re having things float up in the middle of the night is that it’s not so much a top brain. That’s what it is. When we go to sleep, we relinquish the controls. We’re not trying to make ourselves figure it out and understand. We released and this is the same reason that people get amazing epiphanies in the shower. You’re not focused on it. You’re soaping up and you’re not trying, then whatever problem you went to bed with, it pops into your head because your intuition, your inner knowing, and your wisdom don’t come from your top brain.

It’s from a different place. It only pops in when you feel safe and relaxed and you’re not trying. It’s very counterintuitive because all the productivity gurus have had this muscle thing like push through and muscle over it. It makes things worse, which is why I’m always saying what you’re usually doing to make yourself unstuck is usually making you more stuck. When you’ve got two parts inside, they’ve usually got many fighting, but let’s say part of you completely wants to make your sales call. You want to increase your revenue and you know what you need to do and you want to do it, and then you’ve got this other part that’s like, “I want to watch Netflix and I go drink a beer and I don’t want to do this,” and so you’re fighting them. Almost every guru will tell you, “What you need to do is beef this one up.”

The Native Americans, “Which dog are you feeding? The good dog or the lazy one?” Everybody is trying to do this to overpower this one. What nobody tells you is in this idea of fighting, the more you beef up this guy, you were silently sending this one to the gym. They will always match and all you’re doing is creating more competing chemical cascades. This direct onslaught way makes myself way not so useful. Will power works for a small number of people. You’re incredibly good at it. I have been way better at it than most people. I am here to say, it just costs you too damn much. There are other backdoor ways where you can work with your physiology. You can relax and you can train the body. As soon as your alarm figures out that something isn’t dangerous, then it’s easy to make these kinds of sales calls.

I think that people are saying, “I’m hearing you. What do I do? Is there a technique? What should I do to help me get over this?”

 

The reason I haven’t got this in a book, the reason I have it in a system that you listened to go through your unconscious mind. First of all, I couldn’t do a list at the time that we have together because I’ve got about 200 tools here. I will give actionable things here but right now people are hungry and put the filters through their top brain so it won’t stick. No transformation happens, but I’m going to first point somewhere that you’ll never forget. Let me tell you this story that will be for your unconscious mind, as well as your top brain on how we do it, where the solution is, and it’s going to help. This is a completely utterly true story. A woman is very overweight and out of shape. She’d been to a bunch of doctors and they said, “You have to get this under control or you won’t be here very long.” Her big deal is that she hates exercise and exercise is like the saber-toothed tiger to the alarm in her brain. She has tried and failed at every program. She even has a big, good quality treadmill in her house. She can’t stand to even look at it. It makes her sick.

She goes to another doctor who knows some of this brain science. He says, “We’re going to come through the back door. What do you like to do in the morning? What’s your favorite part of the morning?” Mornings matter for everybody. It’s easier to get into momentum in the morning. She said, “That’s easy. It’s my first cup of coffee and when I read the paper. That’s the best part of my day.” He said, “For the next two weeks, I want you to have your coffee and your paper while you’re standing on the treadmill, but do not turn it on” She’s like, “That’s weird,” but she’s desperate so she does it. After a couple of weeks, she goes back to the doctor. She begins to notice that she doesn’t feel sick looking at the treadmill anymore. He then says, “After you’re done with your coffee and your paper, while you’re standing there, turn it on for the lowest setting, absolutely flat for one minute and then turn it off. Go to work and celebrate because you did well.” She’s like, “This is nutty.” She does that for a week and then the next week, it’s two minutes.

Right here, when I tell this story, people think two things. They think, “It would take me 185 years to get to my goal at this rate,” or, “She’s talking about baby steps and I’ve already tried baby steps.” We’re not because baby steps are like Mount Kilimanjaro compared to what I’m talking about. We’re talking about things that are too small to count for any part of the system you can sneak in under the trip wire of the alarm. The point of the story is she took all the pressure off. She did follow the prescription and she added a minute a week. Somewhere after a couple of months, the alarm got the message. The alarm went, “Holy smokes exercise isn’t the tiger.” Her curve went straight up. It went from this straight up and she was running a mile a day. She got fit. She never stopped and it was easy.

One of the points of the story is that she didn’t need anything extra. People looking at her would have judged her and say, “She doesn’t care. She let herself go. It must not matter to her.” All of that’s nonsense and for your audience, it’s nonsense because we care deeply. As a matter of fact, the more we care, the more we got of this going on, the more we’re fighting ourselves on the inside. We feel more shame, we feel more powerlessness, and we feel more guilt. Those feelings on top of the fight create another chemical cascade that groove in your losing pattern even deeper. It just goes in a bad direction for a long time. This lady did not need more motivation. She didn’t need a bigger why. She didn’t need anything other than to retrain that alarm at her head and once she did, she had the right everything, As soon as she got that out of the way of her operating system and got that to work, everything worked.

That’s what I want people to know. Once you get the information, how people get the information when they get my whole system. I can’t do it like school because it’s top brain. I took a group over the phone of people who were profoundly stuck and embarrassed and ashamed about it. Some for business, some for personal, some for too much email, whatever and you just listened for six weeks. As they apply, they get a new chunk and they apply it and they come back and they talk about it, and you hear the breakthroughs and I find, because I do a lot of group coaching, that when people learn this through there, it goes in under the wire, their unconscious mind, your unconscious mind makes leaps, “I didn’t know it could work that way.” It maps over on the success of other people and it makes it believable. That’s how that works. That’s number one.

The other thing, an actionable thing people could do immediately, that treadmill lady story might be sideways, but you’re never going to forget it. The lady on the treadmill and we did a piece for your unconscious mind to go, “Wait a minute. There’s some other thing.” Another very useful thing for people to know is that just like if you ever had a chemistry class in school, an acid and an alkaline cancel each other out. These chemicals that come down when the alarm fires off and you feel dread or nervousness, even if it doesn’t register here, it’s happening. When you do a pat, NLP would call this a pattern interrupt. When you do something out of the ordinary, that also has a component of silliness to it. It cancels out some of that chemistry. It makes it easier to teach your organs that this isn’t a problem. It’s easier to not feel so dangerous. When it comes to making phone calls, I used to do things like specific prescriptions for people that needed to cold call. I’m like “How are calls for you? How long has it been since you’ve made them? What happens to you? Oh my God, so much dread.”

Do you have one of those bouncy balls like when you go to the gym? Those big rubber balls. They’re like $15 on Amazon. You blow it up. It’s very hard to keep the dread to the same degree. While you’re making phone calls, you’re bouncing on the ball. It’s hard because there’s silliness. Making calls is way too hard for most people, so we start smaller than that. I started this with cold calling when people had flip phones. You’d flip open the phone. You’d pretend a call while bouncing on the ball and maybe wearing a clown nose, which nobody can see or putting your kids little tutu on your head. It’s a silly calling. You’re looking at me like, “That sounds weird.” I know it sounds weird, but this is the backdoor because it’s hard for the same chemistry to happen.

I’m thinking about something else. Michael J. Majer who wrote The Seven Levels Of Communication, he’s a realtor and he’s in the industry. He wrote the foreword to my book. He has a little system to get you to do things and I’m thinking about that. I don’t know the exact number that’s on it, but on a piece of paper and he provided it in his book. You have the words, “Do it now,” repeated 70 times, let’s say. I don’t know how many and I don’t know why he chose the number he did, but literally, you sit there and before you do something you don’t want to do, you go, “Do it now,” and you repeat that 70 times. It’s hilarious and I know the pattern for it. It’s the funniest thing because when you get down to the last one, you reach over, you pick up your phone, and you make the call.

[bctt tweet=”Confidence comes from taking action, not from sitting around being perfect until you’re ready.” via=”no”]

It’s a very NLP thing you’ve done right there. We call that an anchor. An anchor is any stimulus that produces a predictable response. Some of them just happen like if you walk through the mall and you smell the cologne of your first boyfriend and you feel something. That’s an anchor you did not implant, but you can implant them too. “Do it now,” and if you’re checking it off like, “Complete,” as you’re going. That works infinitely better than the self-talk way. I like self-talk but it can only be part of a complete system. This backfires too. People that are sitting home doing affirmations and wondering why it doesn’t work and why they feel worse about it, because it’s a top brain thing and your top brains in jail and it creates more of this, which is cognitive dissonance where you’re fighting yourself. If you were trying to affirm something that you do not believe, you’re making a much bigger underground fight, rather than trying to affirm, “I have $1 million in the bank or I have $100 million in the bank,” when you don’t. You’re making it way worse. You’re digging yourself into a hole. You could instead change that this much and say, “Wouldn’t it be nice if I had $100 million in the bank or $1 million in the bank?” Changing it to a question of wouldn’t it be nice, there’s a gentleness to that instead of a hunger and an attachment. 

It allows it to go through.

It sneaks in. Can you feel between the two of those, which one feels more dangerous and which one feels safer like it’s not a threat? “I have $1 million in the bank.” You’re lying. Not only you don’t but you’re lose or you can’t. It like kicks up all those negatives.

“How am I going to do that? I got all these reasons why. Who can I talk to? I don’t have the wherewithal.” All of that drips right in immediately.

It sends you down some trail that’s not helpful. For most people, it’s a whole lot of shame because what they’re missing is they think, “All these other people, Tony Robbins told me I was supposed to do that. Harv Eker told me I was supposed to do that. It must be working for everybody else. This must prove that I’m this huge loser because it must be working for everybody else.” It’s not. It’s because everybody’s coming at it from here.

I’ve been there when I first started in the business. I explained this all the time. When I’m doing a business planning class, someone said, “Write down your goals.” I wrote down $100,000. Let it be written, let it be done. It never happen. The next year someone said, “You have to tell somebody too. You tell it, you write it, and then you tell somebody.” I’d say, “I want to make $100,000. By the way, Wendy, I want to make $100,000 this year.” Let it be written, let it be said, let it be done. Nothing happens. I use that as an example of saying the same thing, if you said, “I want to make $100,000 this year, not to the extreme of the million, but I just wanted to make X amount of dollars this year.” You’re going to have all these reasons why you’re not going to make $100,000. I can’t make phone calls. I don’t do cold calling anyway. If someone’s reading and they’re like, “I can’t do phone calls or cold calls. I’m afraid to do cold calls. I’m afraid to meet with realtors. I’m afraid to stand in front of a room and teach a class. I’m afraid to do all these things. What if the client doesn’t like me? What if my rates are too high?” Now you don’t make $100,000.

What I’m up to because of where I came from. I’m up to a bigger game than this procrastination thing but this is the door where people find me or the clutter that they have or their inability to come through. I have got this magic way to re-train your alarm. What I’m more interested in is the shame falling away and the self-judgment falling away. You can’t force yourself to do that either. Trying to make yourself not judge yourself causes yourself to judge yourself for the judging. One of the incredible benefits that happen when people learn how to re-train their alarm is that then you’re getting into action. Then your action bears fruit, which is exactly like your book because nothing happens by thinking about it. I tend to be a science nerd with some woo-woo, but I don’t believe in the sit on a pillow and affirm it and it will come. You have to have your feet wet and you have to take action. Confidence comes from taking action, not sitting around being perfect until you’re ready. It’s the opposite of that. It’s throwing some stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks and doing this some more and not needing to be perfect.

That also increases your emotional intelligence as well because now you’re able to do some problem solving. You’re seeing some things. We know that there’s a direct correlation with emotional intelligence over total intellect in your ability to make more money.

 

Completely and when you’re doing that and you’re more emotionally intelligent, you’re meeting your market and that’s where all the things happen. That’s where the sales happen. Nothing happens when you’re sitting back being prepared, but what if you could find a way that you could feel safe to meet your market easier and not needing to be perfect? That’s another way to try and be safe. I’m reminded of this great story I had. When I lead large group calls, I always start with who had a win because it raises the energy that inspires anybody. One day this woman came in and she said, “I got a win. We’ve had X number of dollars increase in the business this week.” It was quite a bump. I don’t remember the number but it was a lot.

I’m like, “That’s great. How did that happen?” She said, “I made phone calls. It was great.” “How many did you make?” “About 60 a day.” I’m like, “60 a day?” She’d been in my program for a month and she’d been making no phone calls. I’m like, “Let’s rewind. What was it like last month?” She said, “I hadn’t made calls to anybody for anything in many months. I hate the phone so much. I wouldn’t even get on the phone to invite people to a dinner party. I sent an email. I hate the phone.” I’m like, “What allowed that to happen?” She said, “I don’t know. I did your thing. I bounced on a ball and I wore a stupid calling hat. I made pretend phone calls for a couple of weeks, and then one day it didn’t seem like any big deal. I started to dial and I made ten, and the next day I made twenty, and then it was 60.” It was staggering because one of the things we do, which is also an NLP thing.

We’ve all been taught no pain, no gain and what happens is the weird brain adaptation we have. The brain is always sorting for what’s dangerous and what might be a threat. As soon as something feels like it’s solved, it goes, “Next.” It looks for the next danger and it forgot that that last thing ever was a problem. As we were talking, she wasn’t even registering. It felt like, “It’s a good deal that I made all this money and make 60 calls a day,” because even though it had been a lifelong thing, as soon as it was fixed and the alarm didn’t see it as dangerous anymore, it’s just the new normal. It’s also very important to own your wins and underline it.

Otherwise, your unconscious mind doesn’t get the message that you cross the finish line that you wanted. It’ll sometimes go back and recreate the problem again. There’s another guy I had from Belgium. He was so cute because he’d been so stuck in his business for so long and I let them make up. I give suggestions and stuff, but when they’re adding this silliness in and starting the day with a silly action or marrying that with the thing they’d been dreading. In Belgium, they call swimming trunks, swimming pants. He would get up in the morning and he would pull his swimming pants out of the drawer and put them upside down with the elastic band on his head and start his day. Any expert you talk to, that shouldn’t make a difference, but it did. He’s been stuck for so long, but the point is that these are very counter intuitive things that shifted.

What I love about what you’ve explained is how easy it is. First of all, thank you for not using technical terms. I love the thought process of the first, second, and third level. I know that just knowing that will increase the awareness of everybody. I know it will for me. I will probably think of the treadmill at some point, but I know that anything that I’m doing, I’m going to be saying, “Did that just get trapped?” Think of physically how I’m feeling doing something. Did that just get trapped and didn’t allow me to move forward. I think that reticular activator will continue to grow and manifest. Whether someone does anything about it is going to be the real key thing. For most of the people, call reluctance is one thing. I do think it goes across a broad spectrum, but not as many people do cold calling in the mortgage industry.

More about the conversion factor of loans is that you’ve already met with somebody, even for a realtor and this is for everybody, but you met with someone, they didn’t make the decision right there or they need to think about it or they say, “This sounds good. I’ll get back to you.” Now the call reluctance hops in because you don’t want to feel like a past, “I don’t want to bother them. I don’t want to feel like a past.” I always tell everybody, remember it’s not a sales call, it’s a service call. You have a service that they need and so think of it as a service call because you’re there to help and serve. I think that this is also an issue that people need to get over and it’s the same thing. They didn’t take it the first time, so they’re probably not going to take it now. I probably don’t want to call them because I don’t want them to say no and reject me and all that stuff. If that’s you, you need Wendy.

We can solve it because here’s the thing as I’ve been pointing to through our time here. When the brain and the nervous system feels safe, you’re suddenly your smartest. You don’t have the resistance that you had. You can do anything like the lady running a mile a day, like when it feels safe in there. The trick is how to make it safe. When you’ve had a meeting with somebody and they didn’t buy now, which is most of the time. It’s not that we don’t expect them to buy on the first one call close, but that is the place that people don’t follow through. That’s close to the money activity. What’s closest to your money?

It drives me crazy. You and I were talking before that people come to me and say, “Anymore leads, anymore relationships,” but it may not be that. Maybe you have everything you need. If we can get you to do more follow up and follow through and avoid whatever it is that’s blocking for you, wherever that’s deeply rooted in what it means for you, then very quickly, your income can increase overnight.

[bctt tweet=”It’s when the brain feels safe that you’re at your smartest.” via=”no”]

You can’t even know the stories, but it is. It’s all about re-training so it doesn’t feel dangerous. The best thing which I have not said and I need to say. Nobody here needs to know how or why their trigger got installed because yours are different than mine, Jen, and everybody. They’re a little bit different. Most people have some junk about money because you inherited whatever your parents ran their beliefs and programming around money. That’s what you were born in. You and I both know about overcoming that, but that’s what your sort of set point is. This is not like therapy, thank goodness. It’s not like you need to go back and identify why I don’t want to do laundry or why I don’t want to make calls.

What is my limiting belief about money? Am I sabotaging myself because I’ve got some limiting belief about money?

I do run a program on that and there are people that go deeper that explode, but for this movement to not converting. You’ve gone 98% of the way. You’ve had the conversation. Your stuff is ready. You’ve got a way for people to pay you. You know what you’re doing, but you don’t want to make that follow up call and see why they haven’t. Part of it is this energy of safety or danger and it can move just from learning the Procrastination-Cure. If you’re in a place where the money is lacking and you feel hungry, there’s that hungry energy to make the sale, then it puts too much pressure on you. You worry more about what they’ll think. If people can imagine they could for a moment stand on a ladder in your mind’s eye and look down on two versions of yourself talking to these follow-up phone calls. On the one hand, there’s the person who’s super attached to the outcome. There’s a hunger in it.

In the other one, the person is not attached. You’d love a sale, but you know you’ve got so many in the pipeline. You’ve got so many people to talk to. It’s not going to make or break your month no matter what this person says. If you feel into those two people, you’ll notice that the one that’s hungry and attached is scared. The one that’s unattached is not scared. Prospects are like dogs. They can feel what we’re vibing. What this training does, what the system does because it’s what I had to do because I was scared of everything. I couldn’t leave my house after dark for years. My nervous system shouldn’t have been able to be here and I’m here to say, no matter how bad it is for you, it can be different because I re-trained it using methods like this. When your little alarm is not triggered by everything or your little alarm gets retooled to go, “That’s safe,” then it takes it off the table as a threatening activity. All of a sudden, you find yourself talking to everybody and striking up conversations.

You become a magnet for all those things that you were, at one point, repelling. Wendy, it’s been a pleasure having you here. I thank you for those. If you’re reading this, I encourage you to get in touch with Wendy and see how you can break through this in a matter of 90 days. That’s your choice. You can do nothing and continue to fight this for years and years or you could do something. Stop talking, take action, and get results. The action here is to explore. It’s an exploratory conversation. Wendy, what is the best way for everyone to get in touch with you? I know you have a gift for everybody as well. What’s your best method for people to move forward with this?

The best way is to get a taste of it is we have got a special gift for your people. The place to get that gift is to go to Procrastination-Cure.com/JDP. That way you’ll hear the first module of the Procrastination-Cure. Plus another gift that we have, which is valued at $150. That’s about how the brain re-trains culturally, where we’re picking up at certain times of the year the thoughts, feelings, stress and emotions of the people around us and how to not do that, and then maximize your momentum during those times of the year. Those are for your audience and that would be the best way. I have got a contact form for people that want to know more. There’s a way to get the cure ridiculously easy to have and inexpensive. You do you don’t even need to carve out hours to listen to it. You download 60 or 70-minute calls to your phone and then listen for five minutes when you’re stuck in traffic or in line at the grocery store. It will go into your unconscious easily.

Thank you for that gift. I appreciate it. If they want to get in touch with you and they want to bypass the free gifts, where can they go?

There’s WendyHartCoaching.com but you could go to the Procrastination-Cure in the contact sheet. For the golfers, you could go to YourBestMentalGolf.com. That’s the easy way.

 

I don’t care about business, but tee my golf game. I don’t want to make more money, but I want to fix my golf game. That’s crazy. That’s okay if that’s the worst. I encourage you if you’re reading, please share this. I always ask you to share this forward and share this show with people, but if you know someone who’s procrastinating and having this struggle, because I know someone who’s overweight and doesn’t want to lose weight because she has a bad experience when she was thin. She’s got this wall that maybe it’s safer for her to be heavy. If you know someone like that, then definitely share Wendy’s information.

They don’t even have to read the entire blog, just send the information to them. Wendy, thank you so much for sharing all of this wonderful information. It’s very technical, but I was very engaged throughout the whole thing. This is one of my longest episode, but I’m not going to chop it up and I hope that everyone else was able to read through the very end to make the change in their lives. I’m going to do it because I’m going to go through and figure out what I have, because I know I have some procrastination in areas. I think we all do. I can’t wait to explode some things with myself too. Thank you very much for your time. It was an absolute pleasure.

It was lovely to be able to be share with your audience. Thank you.

We’ll see you at our next event together and thank you so much for taking the time. We’ll catch you next time.

 

Important Links

• Procrastination-Cure
• The Seven Levels Of Communication
• WendyHartCoaching.com
• www.TheTopProducerCode.com
• https://Procrastination-Cure.com/jdp
• Procrastination-Cure.com
• Facebook.com/CoachWendyHart
• YourBestMentalGolf.com

 

About Wendy Hart

Wendy Hart is an International Speaker and Coach and the creator of “The Procrastination Cure: A Complete System that Compels You to Follow Through (and Make More Money!)”

Wendy’s promise is to “increase your follow-through by 3 times or more, in 3 months or less, using less than half of the effort you were using before!”

She has over 20 years of experience in human behavior, sales and psychology. Using little-known tools and cutting-edge brain science, she has developed this unique system that has people end procrastination fast, and for good.

Wendy has coached thousands of clients, everything from Pro Golfers to Entrepreneurs and small business owners, and has helped them to reduce anxiety and overwhelm, increase their sales or performance, and get past whatever barriers were causing them to be drained or stuck.

When they learn how to get out of the “freeze or dread response” and follow through without effort or will power, success becomes easy.

Also, Wendy’s small business owners have seen their business activity increase by as much as 300% to 1000%, in as little as 90 days or less. Even call reluctance is greatly reduced or eliminated entirely.

Wendy was trained at the prestigious Coaches Training Institute. She is a Practitioner of NLP and TPM (Thought Pattern Management,) and IFS (Internal Family Systems Model of Psychotherapy.) She uses a combination of 18 different psychological, neuroscience and energy modalities in her work with clients.

A member of the International Coaches Federation and the International Association of Coaches, Wendy is also a former Board Member of the National Speakers Association, Northern CA Chapter.

 

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