Elaine Testimonial

My clients almost always blow me away with the results they achieve. Elaine is jumping out of her skin with enthusiasm, going for goals she never believed possible. Watch, listen and ACT NOW!

 Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS to SuccessFULL Living!”

Extraordinary Results for Professional and Personal Freedom

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Tips to Stop Procrastination

You Already Know WHAT To Do

Procrastination isn’t so much a matter of poor organization as it is a psychological block:

Trust me, procrastination is not a time-management problem. It’s a complex problem involving personality, situations and motivation.

Here are three psychologically sound tips to help procrastinators overcome this problem.

1. Just get started. Don’t waste time over-planning and over-thinking; research shows that once you actually begin a task, your perceptions of that task change. And making even a little progress boosts your well-being, which in turn gives you more motivation to work.

2. Suck it up. It is a distastesful task? It is difficult? Would you rather be doing something — anything! — else? Tough. You need to just plunge in and deal with it. It’s a  hard-nosed approach but necessary with procrastinators, who tend to avoid dealing with the negative emotions associated with unpleasant tasks.

Don’t Give in

Don’t “give in to feeling good” such that you focus on short-term mood repair. Keep your focus on long-term progress on your goal.

Brutal Honesty

3. Be honest with yourself. Stop the self-deception. You might argue that you’ll feel more like doing it tomorrow, that you work better under pressure, or that it can wait. As Pychyl notes, you won’t, you don’t, and it can’t. Instead of giving in, recognize these thoughts as red flags that signal your desire to procrastinate and go back to tips 1 and 2.

Action First, Feelings Follow

One can liken procrastinators to 3-year-old’s who don’t want to do something, arguing, “I don’t feel like it. I need to feel better in order to act. First, I need to feel better.” Wrong, he says; in fact, your feelings will follow your behaviors, so progress on that task will actually improve your mood.

While tips aren’t a sure-fire recipe for success — after all, tips are only useful if you follow them — I think these three could really make a dent in your procrastination habit.

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444

Neural Maps

Neural Maps

In terms of productivity, developing new attitudes, behaviours and habits are not only desirable, they are essential.

They are necessary because without them you won’t be able to function effectively. Most routine things you do are done on “autopilot”, like driving your car, cleaning your teeth, doing your job etc.

As a human being you (along with everyone else) constantly:

•    Make connections in your brain

•    Divide things into pair of opposites (such as good, bad, right wrong)

•    Look for coincidences

•    Compare & contrast

•    Differentiate

•    Make meaning out of the connections you make

What you are doing is making new neural pathways in your brain and strengthening existing ones. These maps show up in areas such as skills, habits, opinions and beliefs.

Sadly, as I see it, most people seem to live their whole lives unconsciously, totally conditioned by family, peers, marketers, advertisers and propaganda. They don’t have an original thought; everything they think is thrown up habitually by their subconscious minds, some of it dysfunctional.

Does Intelligence Matter?

But no matter how much you improve the processing power of your “human computer” there is still the matter of the “data set” with which it views the world.

Put another way, the data on your “human hard drive” determines to a large extent how you interpret “new data.”

Or simpler still: depending on your experience of life up to this point, how you react to new experiences can differ radically.

For example, a man having been rejected by a woman may perceive that moment as humorous or devastating.

A woman may perceive the apparent sexual advances of a man as threatening or flattering.

A speaker may perceive laughter as his audience laughing with him – or at him.

Why?

Same stimuli + different perceptual instruments + unique neural map = different data”

“Neural map” refers to our best understanding of neuroscience to date: neural networking.

The human mind can be viewed as a complex network of data and connections between those data. (Warning: colossal understatement follows.)

In relation to your well-being, the data matters and the connections matter.

These connections are a complex web of different sensations, feelings and beliefs and actions.

Which neural maps may be hindering your productivity?

Why not create new, more empowering ones?

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Congruence and Productivity

What is an Emotion?

This is the sixth post and last post on how success and productivity can be stymied by emotional reactiveness.

It is said that emotions are the body’s reaction to a thought. Fair enough.

It follows then to say that if there was no bodily reaction to an event or thought then there would not be an emotion.

In a sense, all you would be left with is an opinion, a viewpoint.

In her book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert puts forward a strong argument that not only do thoughts trigger feelings by the release of chemicals in the brain, but the opposite is also true. Feelings affect thoughts. Just think of a time you were sick. The chemicals communicate in both directions, from brain to body and body to brain.

Who is Driving The Bus?

She has the view (which I share) that the subconscious mind IS the body because that is where the emotional memories are stored.

Whether we like to admit it or not, our subconscious minds run the show.

If we consciously aim for a goal that subconsciously we believe we do not deserve or are not worthy of, then the subconscious will win. It wins because it uses feelings to get its own way.

You are not aware of the real reasons, all you know is you don’t feel good and that is enough to stop you. Of course, gut feelings can be and often are beneficial as well.

All I am suggesting is that you take a look. It may well change your life.

Get Congruent

People who learn to steer their subconscious mind so it is pointing in the same direction as their conscious mind are far more likely to achieve their goals than those who do not.

We call this congruence.

My job as a performance coach is to enable my clients to be as congruent as possible so that self sabotage and other self limiting behaviours are minimised.

Simple isn’t it?

It is okay to write or say this, but it is not so easy to stop the feelings coming up when things aren’t going so well.

Or is it? My job is to help you do that.

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How to Reduce Stress

What Causes Stress?

We’ve all heard of common solutions to relieving stress. Things like meditation, breathing, diet, exercise and positive thinking all come readily to mind.

Bridging the gap between our western attitude to life focussed on material wealth and an eastern or traditional approach to life centred on our beingness for me is a real key.

Our society today promotes the myth that striving to be more, producing more and having more will ultimately solve our problems and make us happy.

Anything less we are led to believe makes us a failure. Add to that the information overload we all suffer from, it’s no wonder many people suffer from stress, depression, frustration and addictions.

A quick look at health statistics, mental and physical will readily confirm these assertions.

What is Success?

So how do you measure this thing called success? I think before we can measure it we need to define it. It means different things to different people. One of my favourite definitions is:

Progressive Realisation of Worthwhile Pre-Determined Personal Goals.

Coming from this perspective, the enjoyment is in what you do on the way to the achieving of the goal. In a way, the actual goal becomes secondary to the unspoken real goal which is self actualisation.

How do you know when you’ve made it? We are conditioned, it appears, to always view ourselves as somehow inadequate, not quite making the grade, and so we continue to strive to improve ourselves, to work even harder in order to get better results, accumulate wealth, material possessions or even enlightenment.

It’s struggle that we are sure to lose. But every day we repeat the same pattern, unconsciously striving for whatever it is we think will make us complete.

The reality is, you’ll never make it, you ARE it. You just aren’t aware of it yet.

Be Happy Anyway

It’s a big trap most fall into and in this respect we are like Sisyphus who, in ancient Greek mythology, was doomed forever in Hades to push a rock up a hill. He would nearly make it to the top when the effort would overtake him so he and the rock would roll all the way down to the bottom. He’d then have to start the whole futile exercise over again, with inevitably the same result.

It is all too easy to get caught up in and overwhelmed by the demands we put on ourselves that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that “Things” don’t make us happy.

Now, please understand there is absolutely nothing wrong with setting goals for anything. We , as human beings thrive on it. It’s the dysfunctional subconscious patterns, habits and beliefs that distort the whole process.

Why not be fundamentally happy anyway, BEFORE and DURING your quest, rather than putting unrealistic and impossible to meet conditions on yourself and those around you? Your sense of self worth stays with you regardless of what happens.

If you liked this article, why not share it via your favourite social media site by clicking on one of the links below?

Committed to YOUR Personal Productivity,

James is a productivity coach specializing in working with people who are procrastinators and those who want results quickly. His ability to get brilliant results with his clients is quite amazing…

“Fast Tracking YOUR SUCCESS… SuccessFULL Living!”

To Find Out the “5 Secrets of REALLY Successful People” go to…

The Productivity Coach

P: 0421 210 444