THE CURE TO LAZINESS (This could change your life) // We all have days when we are feeling lazy and unmotivated. A lazy day is not the end of the world, but you don’t want to let too many of these lazy days form in your calendar. If you want to avoid laziness, stop procrastinating and find your motivation, peak performance expert and coach, Eric Partaker, has some solutions for you. By the end of this video, you will have the inspiration and strategies to combat laziness so you can pursue your goals and reach your full potential.
KEY POINTS
Starting Is The Hardest Part, The Rest Will Follow – Finishing a task can feel overwhelming, but just starting takes only a second. Adopt the mentality “I choose to start for just 5 minutes”.
Get The Right Things Done, Prioritize! – Are you feeling overwhelmed by the number of tasks on your to-do list? What is the one thing that you could do that will help you progress, even just a inch forward? Pick your most important task and start with that.
Perfection Is An Illusion – Often we feel lazy when we are seeking perfection. Perfect is impossible to attain. Instead focus on improving by 1%.
Are You Getting Enough Sleep? – Are you feeling lazy because you are actually tired? Is the laziness of your feeling actually your body wanting to recharge and get energy back? Ensure you are getting a full 8 hours of sleep per night.
It’s Ok To Ask For Help – Laziness could be triggered by the fact that you actually need some support. Are you feeling isolated, alone, and not sure how to move forward? There is most likely a lot more support around you than you realize. Pick up the phone, or send that email and reach out and ask for the help that you need.
TRANSCRIPT
Eric Partaker: Today, I want to talk about ways that you can stay focused and get things done, even when you feel lazy. Because let’s face it, it’s not every day that we feel like we’re ready to conquer the world.
Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and I’ve been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country. And I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms. So the first thing that you can do if you’re feeling lazy, but you still want to stay focused and get things done is just focus on starting, do not focus on finishing. Finishing feels overwhelming, but starting takes simply a second. And the way I do that simple phrase in my head, I literally just say to myself, “I choose to start for just five minutes.” Working on whatever it is that I actually don’t feel like working on.
Number two, prioritize. So, you can’t do absolutely everything. And it could be the overwhelming number of tasks on your list that are actually making you feel lazy, making you want to step away from all the stuff that you’re working on. But if you just prioritize and you literally pick, what is the most important thing, if everything else were to stay the same, what’s the one thing that you could do that would feel like you’re progressing things even just an inch, or a centimeter forward, and just focus on that thing. And using the previous tip, just choose to start on it for just five minutes. You don’t need to like doing it. You don’t need to think about working on it for hours and hours and hours, five minutes, 300 seconds. What will happen is that you’ll forget that the five minutes have passed and you get a lot more done than you actually had expected to.
Number three, just focus on a 1% improvement. Don’t try to improve everything all at once, or try to get perfect at something, you know perfect is completely unattainable. Yeah, you’ll never become perfect at anything, but you can always get 1% better and you can always progress a little bit more. And so sometimes when we’re feeling lazy, what actually is happening is that we’re in a bit of a perfectionist mode and we want to get everything done and have everything just right. And because we know that that’s actually not possible, secretly we do know that, it’s in our subconscious perhaps. And the effect is that laziness, the effect is, “Ah, forget it. I just want to sit on the sofa, watch Netflix, or watch a film, or just kind of zone out on something.”
And there’s nothing wrong with doing that either. But if it’s becoming a bit of a habit and you realize that you’re not doing the things that you genuinely want to be doing, whereby you feel quite bad about it. Well, then it could be that once again, you’re trying to do too much. And instead of just doing 1%, you’re trying to think, “Okay, I need a hundred percent of everything done, improved, progressed right now.” And you can’t get instant results and the need for instant results like that for the need for everything to be absolutely complete and finished could be triggering that laziness within you. So once again, just focus on a 1% improvement.
Next up on the list is your sleep. You could be feeling lazy because you’re actually tired. You’re exhausted. And the laziness is actually you just wanting to recharge and get that energy back. So if your sleep is off, that’s somewhere to be looking as well. And one of the primary things that you need to do when it comes to sleep is, first of all, make sure that you’re actually sleeping a full eight hours. You might think that you don’t need a full eight hours of sleep, but most people do. You know, there’s a gene associated with not needing a full eight hours of sleep and whereby you can thrive with less. I think it’s like six hours and 15-minute average if you have this one particular gene, but your odds of having this gene is equivalent to your odds of being struck by lightning.
So you do not have the gene, mathematically speaking the odds are completely against it. So if you are a normal person, then which I am, and you most certainly are, then you will need those eight hours of sleep. So are you getting them? Think back on the week that’s just past. And go through the days, how many out of the seven days did you actually get eight hours of sleep? I don’t mean eight hours in bed. I mean, eight hours asleep. And you can use different devices to track your sleep if you want. At the moment I’m using this Oura ring, for example, which tells me quite precisely how much sleep did I actually get. And having that data and that feedback is quite useful because I know if my sleep is trending up or down, or if I’m as rested as I want to be.
Next up is asking for help. One of the reasons you might feel lazy is because you feel overwhelmed and you actually need some support. So ask your family, your friends, your colleagues, your peers, anybody who could help you with whatever’s important to you in your work, or life. And just ask, “Hey, can you give me a hand, can you help me out with this project?” Or, maybe you’re stuck and it’s not even a project, but you’re just stuck in your own thoughts. And so you can call a friend and ask them if they can help you think through whatever it is that’s on your mind. Your laziness, once again, could be triggered by the fact that you actually need support from other people. And you’re feeling isolated, alone, and not sure how to move forward, or how to untangle your thoughts, or how to figure out what the best next steps are. And there’s probably a lot more support around you than you realize if you’re just willing to pick up the phone, or send that email and reach out and ask for the help that you need.
And last but not least, if you’re feeling lazy, it could be because it’s all hustle, it’s all grind and there’s no reward for your achievements. Are you taking some time out during the course of the week, for example, are you scheduling into your days, time for yourself? Are you scheduling into your months, time away, on the weekends? Are you scheduling within a quarter, a weekend getaway with a loved one, or with a friend, taking that extra Friday or maybe a Monday off and extending that weekend and doing something different? And it doesn’t need to be a big extravagant holiday, but on that note, when’s the last time you took a proper vacation.
And did you actually take a vacation when you’re on vacation, or were you still checking your emails and actually doing a quasi vacation where realistically, you didn’t have a full day off and you were kind of working a little bit on each and every day. There are so many different ways that you can reward yourself for your achievements and taking some time off and spending some time with friends is one of the fantastic ways to do that. And I’d love to hear from you. So don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The 3 Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com. That’s E-R-I-C, ericpartaker.com, where you could pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
