Overcoming Procrastination using the Subconscious mind to create your Future Self

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Overcoming procrastination using the subconscious mind to create your future self

Are you currently or on a recurring basis struggling or having struggles with procrastination and motivation in your endeavors to generate online or passive income? Raising my hand, I am. I have an ultimate vision but struggle executing the steps even when I have them laid out. If you’re in that position or new to the online business world keep reading.

Now, I have a high paying job in the physical world, or at least some might think so. But I know that I can do and contribute much more and as I noted (in previous posts) have personal aspirations and motivation to be a successful business owner.

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income is the poster child of successfully engaging crisis to produce a plus million dollar ‘online’ business. Others have chosen to create a crisis by quitting their jobs to pursue ‘online’ business success. I neither need nor want the stress of a crisis to drive me to curate a thriving online business. So, what’s my and I am sure other likeminded individuals’ motivation to develop consistency in action and overcome procrastination that so easily sets in when there is no crisis?

The book Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz describes the subconscious mind as a “goal-striving ‘servo-mechanism’”. This Creative Mechanism within all of us is impersonal, “It will work automatically and impersonally to achieve goals of success and happiness, or unhappiness and failure, depending on the goals that you yourself set for it”. That is an incredibly powerful statement that in a real sense says that our present state thinking about ourselves literally creates our future self for good, detriment or stagnation. Think about that.

When I was young I used to think of this phenomenon as taking that (a) step down an unknown path and that with each successive step you identify to others as an individual having a particular level of motivation and that those encounters with others on this new path would lead you to new path branches ultimately leading to your goal. More succinctly and by way of example, as a child I knew I wanted to go to college by age 11; I let others (peers, teachers, and adults around me) know that was my goal and then demonstrated my commitment by getting good grades (I became a college student in my subconscious at age 11). Those good grades led to opportunities in ‘honors’ classes and put me in touch with other peers, teachers, and adults outside of my immediate circle; they then saw a kid with whom they could confidently invest their time and energy and further pushed me on towards my goal. And of course, I eventually ended up starting and completing University with three degrees after all was said and done. The key message is establishing that positive self-image of your future self and then signaling your intent.

The process of signaling, putting in the work to generate income (getting good grades using the school analogy) leads to potential encounters with other like-minded individuals who then recognize potential and become mentors and colleagues who are willing to invest (time, wisdom and even money) in your efforts. This ever-expanding network and path will lead to opportunities for success and will ultimately create your future destiny. This is not to say that there won’t be setbacks and missteps on the journey; it’s part of the process of learning. But it’s learning new skills, habits and techniques in the entrepreneurial realm as opposed to a workplace realm if that’s where you are currently. Once your brain has the target (new mental image of yourself) fixed it will direct you towards your goal with ever-increasing precision.

Does this sound familiar? Toyota is one of the greatest manufacturing success stories of the late 20^th and 21^st century. They employ a method called ‘Toyota Kata’. From http://www.methodsandtools.com/archive/toyotakata.php “Toyota Kata is a structured way to create a culture of continuous learning and improvement at all levels. It is an organization’s daily habits or routines forming its “muscle memory” for continuous learning and improvements. The daily habits/routines help us to strive towards our vision or our state of awesomeness in small focused experiments.”. The idea of Kata is that while they may not ultimately know today how to get from point A to goal B; through experiments, they receive feedback on whether their new improvement ideas are leading them in the right direction towards the goal. This progressive improvement works because they have a clear understanding of what goal B is and where they are starting from, point A. This continuing feedback or learning from experimentation leads to greater and greater precision in their improvement efforts or directions towards goal B.

I wrote in a recent post that I could literally feel the first tangible evidence of some financial successes in the air and shortly after that post I got accepted to my first Pinterest Group Board.

The Group Board is thru Nadalie Bardo who also invited me to her Tailwinds Tribe. Those two acts have increased my Pinterest presence from less than 1000 monthly viewers to over 3800 monthly viewers in less than a month.

Quick back story, I’d applied to a few Pinterest Group Boards and had not seen or heard any feedback from the individuals running the boards. For those new to or unaware of Pinterest it is a social search engine of sorts where individuals can post and share entries on various subjects of interest (food, fashion, blogging, sports, making money…etc). As you indicate your interests, the feed of pins (topics) that are provided to you focuses on your indicated interest(s). Thus, you can imagine it is a veritable gold mine of opportunity for sellers of all sorts since the audiences are so targeted. Well anyway if you are a seller you can attempt to attract interest on your own by manually and singly creating and sharing pins via different subject interest boards. If you consistently create enough pins over a long enough period of time you may eventually create a sizeable audience. However, you can join a Group Board which has literally hundreds of participants in that area or general areas and immediately expand your potential reach from those who are naturally following your pins and topics to those in the Group who similarly have their own followers who track their pins and topics.

So, I was accepted to my first (Group Board) with Nadalie who then invited me to her Tailwinds Tribe. Tailwinds is a product that operates like a Group Board but is an established community of individuals who ‘commit’ to share one another’s content to their followers and boards. Another benefit of the Tailwinds tool is that it is also an automatic pin scheduler that publishes pins on an optimized pin schedule as determined by the software analyzing Pinterest traffic. This has led to the exponential expansion of my Pinterest reach and created an opportunity for me to pursue another monetization strategy that I am soon planning to reveal. Those are the branches on the ‘new path’ that I was describing earlier. (By the way, if you’re interested in trying out Tailwinds, you can get a free month here).

The next step is to do the work. I constantly jot down notes or ideas of things I can pursue or investigate for income generation. I have a folder full of post its and small notebook sized papers with thoughts and ideas on them. I am not at a loss for stuff to work on. I need to and perhaps some of you just need to put in the work effort. Those notepad/notebook paper ideas are fertile ground for discovering the additional paths that branch off into opportunities. Pick a tool, the notebook paper, an online project tracking tool or some other mechanism that will allow you to keep track of the status of implementation of your ideas but most important is to implement the ideas.

Finally, check and track how your ideas have performed after implementation. I struggle with this as well. You need to dive into the Analytics (Google, Pinterest, Heatmap tracking…etc) to understand if and how progress is being made and then correct course as necessary. In the corporate world, we call it Plan, Do, Check, Act or Improve.

So, the take away here is:

• Begin to create your future self by deciding and envisioning today this instant who you want to be;
• Start taking definitive steps in the direction towards your future self (signaling to others);
• Steadfastly begin to execute the work that will lead to your future self
  1. For me initially, it was incorporating (you can review the post later) and
  2. Creating my first web site
• Follow new paths of potential opportunity (be attuned to your subconscious identifying new viable opportunities) that will present themselves
• Be focused to recognize potential mentors (you may want to be along for the ride if their stock is heading up)
• Check the Analytics, perform an analysis of how successful your implemented ideas have been and correct course as necessary
• Engage with mentors and colleagues and take action on advice

If you’re interested in Maxwell Maltz book you can get a copy here.

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