Hi guys! Welcome to Episode 492 of the Wildly Successful Lifestyle podcast! Whats goin on out there? The sun is shining where I am and I just sat in the sun for a few minutes with it on my face and man does that feel so good! I totally get cats and dogs chasing the sun for an afternoon nap. So if you have sun don’t forget to get a little but of sunshine on your face…it does wonders!
Have you ever had something you needed to do and you just kept putting it off and putting it off wishing it were done but never really doing it? I find myself doing that a lot. If I know Eric my husband is coming home at a certain time and I don’t want the house to be a wreck when he gets there, as soon as I know he’s 20 minutes away I will be running around like a madwoman trying to get everything done before he gets home and usually I do get it done. That’s why the saying goes….
If you wait til the last minute it only takes a minute.
Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. When you know you have unlimited time, natural tendency is to most around, but when you have a specific time frame you work like crazy to make that happen,
Years ago, I was working with a life coach. He was sort of more like a business coach and we were talking about accomplishing things and he asked me. When was the last time. I really accomplished some thing big that I was proud of and I thought about and I told him and he said OK. What is the difference between , what you did with that accomplishment and another accomplishment that maybe you didn’t finish or you didn’t see the fruition what was the difference? I thought about that maybe for five minutes 3 to 5 minutes while we sat on the phone and it finally dawned on me. I had a deadline, I had set deadlines for the things I wanted to do. I’m going to do this by this date. I’m going to have this finished by this date and I knew exactly what I needed to do and when I needed to do it it forced me to focus and it forced me to be intentional with my time And I realize that often when I don’t finish something, it’s because I haven’t said a deadline, I say oh I can do that tomorrow. Who knew how important a deadline is to completing something. I read that A deadline has been said to be to a task what a corral is to a herd of wild horses. What a deadline does is it surrounds untamed impressions thoughts and feelings with a clear boundary that can allow your ideas to formulate as an attainable goal John Templeton said that in the laws of life that I’m reading.
If you really think about it deadlines are what make things manageable and deadlines a lot of times are what make goals possible.
Tony Robbins often says what’s talked about is a dream, what’s envisioned is exciting, what’s planned becomes possible, what’s scheduled is real. We’ve all heard the old adage “hope is not a plan, or hope is not a strategy”.
Honestly I’ve personally been guilty of using hope as a plan. And I can say even though it keeps me optimistic it doesn’t keep me focused. What keeps me focused is a schedule. A deadline. A known end.
So many times when I’m working with Kevin my trainer and we are doing something really hard and I think I can’t keep going, I’ll ask him “how many more” or “how many of these are we doing?” and he’ll tell me and I then know ok I have 4 more, I can do that! If he had of said “I’m not sure”. I wouldn’t have continued. If you were asked to look at a flame for 5 minutes you could do it fairly easily but if you were asked to stare at a flame for an extended or unspecified length of time you probably wouldn’t do it or wouldn’t want to do it for sure.
It’s amazing what a deadline will do for our brain.
When my coach and I made that discovery that I am really only focused when I have a deadline, it was an aha moment for me because it could not be more true, If I think about the things I am extremely consistent on…its usually because I have a deadline. I have a deadline for my podcast, and I never miss one. When I have deadlines in my design work, I will work 10 hours straight to make it happen. If there were no deadline those 10 hours could have been stretched out to 20 hours over however long. As I sit here I’m thinking about the areas where I want to grow and I definitely lack deadlines. Good to know.
My challenge to you this week is to test the power of a good deadline. Give yourself a deadline in an area where you would normally not and see how it changes the game, if you’re like me, it will change it a lot. Share this with 3 people who
