How I cured procrastination…

Summary

• When our business was making $4.4 million a month, I felt burnt out and wanted to end it.
• Despite external success, internally I felt like I had no time for life outside of work, even neglecting date nights and friendships.
• The moment of realization came when I felt dread instead of excitement upon learning about our record-breaking month.
• I had a mental breakdown and knew I needed to work through these feelings since I felt isolated and overwhelmed.
• Conducting a time audit for myself, I discovered I was spending my days on tasks that ultimately didn't matter – what I call productively procrastinating.
• Upon auditing my team's time, I realized many weren't doing productive work either, making the situation feel worse.
• I identified a pattern of avoiding new challenges to not look foolish, leading to a lack of personal and business growth – a cycle of secure but unfulfilling productivity.
• To combat this, I embraced the concept of "productive failure," which involves taking risks and learning from both successes and failures.
• Productive failure means trying new things, accepting that failure is possible, and using that experience to improve and try again.
• I recognized the need to transition from playing it safe to courageously making big decisions and taking leaps of faith to continue growing – both personally and in business.
• Auditing your time and the decisions you make can help identify if you are productively failing or just "spinning your wheels."
• Living out the consequences of past productive failures shows that continuous risk-taking is essential for sustained growth.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a time audit to see where your time really goes. This means writing down what you're doing throughout the day — especially look for tasks that seem busy but don't add value, like I discovered in my own life; I call this productively procrastinating. Cut those out!

Next, think about areas where you've been playing it safe. It might feel scary, but consider embracing 'productive failure.' This means trying new tasks and allowing yourself to make mistakes. Remember, mistakes are opportunities for growth.

Make sure you're taking on challenges that push you out of your comfort zone. If you haven’t made any big decisions recently, that might signal you're stuck in a rut. Break out of that by asking yourself: What’s one thing I’ve been avoiding because I’m scared to fail?

Then, just go for it! Even if you do fail, you'll have learned something important. And if you succeed, well, then you’re moving forward!

It's also really important to remember to take time for yourself. Don't skip on personal stuff like date nights or friends like I did. Balance is key to not burning out.

I think if you try these steps – auditing time, tackling new challenges, learning from failure, and keeping your life balanced – you'll find new energy and maybe even more success in your business or personal growth. Good luck!

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"I felt like on the inside which is the crazy part"

– Leila Hormozi

"If this were an employee that I were paying, I'd be like what are you doing all day"

– Leila Hormozi

"I started to put more emphasis on other people's opinions"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you do this you also never succeed"

– Leila Hormozi

"I needed to shift from productively procrastinating to productively failing"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

what i want to share with you today is why when our business was doing 4.4 million dollars a month i looked at my husband and told him i wanted to end it and the one tweak that i made uh to how i i worked and how i lived that helped me um not need to end something that was making us a lot of money and instead be able to turn it into something i enjoyed and so if you are doing 100 000 a month half a million a month 2 million a month 3 million a month whatever if you feel like you want to quit right now i hope that this video is for you because i felt that way too and um this is what helped me get past it so back in 2019 i was feeling extremely burnt out and i was not happy with what i was doing but there was this illusion of perfection right so it's like everybody from the outside was like you guys are killing it you're like winning all these awards you guys are donating to charities like you're doing all these things right you're the perfect couple you're fit all this stuff and i felt like on the inside which is the crazy part and the reason i felt that way was i was just i had literally no time right and so it's funny because people always ask me about time management tools uh as an aside and back then i probably had five times as many as i have now and i felt way worse that's a whole nother video where i'll talk about why those don't work but either way um i didn't feel like i had any time i was extremely burnt out i was exhausted we had literally gotten to the point where we made um a decision that we wouldn't even do date nights nor would we have friends we literally made the decision we're like we don't have time for friends right it's crazy but um we were doing anything we could to just grow these businesses and it essentially sacrificed all of our lives and i remember we were on a walk one day and my husband looked at his phone and he was like holy crap i was like what he's like we just had like the biggest month to date and i was like what is it he's like we just did 4.4 million and i was like instead of feeling excitement or happiness or anything like that i just remember my stomach dropped and i felt this feeling of dread because i knew i wanted to end it and i was like how can you want to end something that's doing 4.4 million dollars a month like you're crazy there's something not connected here like there's something distorted and that was when i realized i really needed to figure out what was going on with myself and uh why was i feeling this way and so i'm sitting there and i'm really distressed and it was probably the one time in my entire business career i had like a real mental breakdown where i was like i don't know what to do i want to quit i want to end it let's sell it let's kill it like i don't even know i just don't want it anymore and i felt like one of those people that i had for so long not wanted to be because i'd always been like i will never be that person i'm so together i have my routines down to a t i've got everything controlled and yet i still felt that way and so i felt like this huge sham and i thought to myself okay like you have to coach yourself out of this because at that time i didn't have anyone that i felt like i could really talk to about it and so i sat down and i audited my time and so i looked at everything i was doing and i thought to myself okay i'm going to do this how to do with our teams with our teams i'll have them audit their time if they feel like not good about what they're doing and i'll figure out why and so i looked at my time more objectively when i was measuring it myself and what i realized was that i was spending all of my time on that just didn't matter and it's funny i was like if this were an employee that i were paying if this was my ceo or ceo i'd be like what are you doing all day you know like none of this is even that important and instead what i was doing the entire day of most of my days is i was really productively procrastinating right and i think that the reason that this is so interesting to me is that i was never like that in the beginning when we started the business it's like you just go head on like attack attack attack thing after thing and you're incredibly productive in your mistakes right so i'm making productive mistakes the entire time in the beginning and then what i feel happened uh when i took a a step back and really thought about it was that i really started to put more emphasis on other people's opinions and it wasn't my family my hometown my friends anymore it was clients and employees and so what happened is over time i really didn't want to make mistakes because i didn't want to look like a stupid boss i didn't want to look like a stupid you know whatever role model to our our clients whatever it was and so i was just like okay well i just not do anything then right and what i realized is it it was partially me and it was partially the people on the team and so i started to audit my team's time and i was like holy crap nobody's doing anything productive like no wonder it feels so horrible right now we've got like three people on the entire team that are actually moving the ball forward and i think that this is something that's really hard for a lot of people to admit because i see a ton of business owners and ceos that do this but they don't want to say that they do it right because it's embarrassing it's embarrassing to admit that you are literally stalling your business or you're the reason that your business isn't feeling the way operating the way that you want it to and so what i want to share is the the framework that i've been able to dissect that was in my brain and what i switched it to so that i could actually feel good about a business that does 4.4 million a month here's what i realized that it gets to and this is what a lot of entrepreneurs get to is you productively procrastinate which many would say this is doing small tasks i think it's just not doing the hard tasks and making the hard decisions right and so what it means you do is you don't ever try okay and so what i mean by never trying is you will do things that you have proven to yourself you can already do right you stop attempting to do new things because you might have failed so many times because you were just in attack mode you kind of just back off and think like maybe i just shouldn't be trying right which is never the right way to look at it because you never try you never risk failure right so you never have that keep you up all night feeling like crap you know i just messed this up in front of everybody feeling because you never risk that you also never fail right which is good we're not failing i feel safe i feel secure like i don't have to question my ego like nothing's threatening me right and then because of that you never let yourself down right except the big obvious one of all of this is that if you do this you also never succeed and that is what i realized i was doing to myself and so what i was actually doing was that in the short term i was keeping myself safe and not failing in the micro right but in the macro picture i was never succeeded so it's like you're successful in keeping yourself safe and you're also successful in keeping yourself miserable right and so that is when i realized that i really need to trade by productive procrastination for what i want to call productive failure so what does that look like right what's productive failure look like and how do you know if you're doing it or not doing it okay productive failure means you're going to try so it's like you see something needs to get done in the business you see something that you would like to do you see something that you aspire to you try because you try you do risk failure right and then i would say about 50 of the time you are going to fail right the other 50 of the time you just learn right and the thing is that you learn when you fail and you learn when you succeed and so what that means is that once you try and you fail you tweak and you try again and so this is what i would consider uh most people aren't doing if they're feeling like they're really burnt out they're feeling like they the wheels are spitting but you're not getting anywhere is you're probably avoiding trying the things that are most likely to uh threaten your ego because you're most likely to fail at them so anytime you're starting something new anytime you as a ceo and entrepreneur need to level up you have to try doing something that you've never done before and you're probably gonna look like an idiot i look like an idiot when i try most things i've never done it's like would it be reasonable that i would look like an expert when i've never done something before just because i'm a ceo or an entrepreneur no like you're just as new as somebody who's not a ceo or entrepreneur trying something right it doesn't mean anything and so this is what i realized that i was doing and because of this i wanted to quit everything and so um what i've realized is that if you feel desperate for a change and you feel like you don't have time what i realized for myself was that it wasn't time that was the issue wasn't i need more project management tools it wasn't that i needed to delegate more it was it wasn't any of that right is that i needed to shift from productively procrastinating to productively failing and so if you feel burnt out um i really would challenge you to audit your time audit how many big decisions have you made that move the ball forward in the last 60 days in your business because i will bet you that whether it be in your personal life or in your business you are living out the decisions of the productive failures you made years ago and so it takes more than that leap in the beginning when you start a business you have to continue to make those leaps which are productive mistakes while you have the business and that is something that once you reach a certain level of success it's very hard to do because it threatens everything that you've built but there's also no way to grow unless you do it so i hope that was of use to you this is what got me unstuck realizing that um not like doing all the things i was doing to productively procrastinate i actually don't need to do them other people can do them or they just don't need to get done most of them nothing would happen if they don't get done instead i need to focus on productively failing through making the big decisions making the big moves or trying the big new things and so i hope that was of use to you if it was hit the subscribe and i'll see you on the next one