 If you're interested in this, I promise you that if you do the course, I used to be the worst procrastinator in the world, and I figured out why I procrastinate. Procrastination is a defensive mechanism, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It's very, very fixable. You don't have to live this cycle of guilt and procrastination, guilt, procrastination again and again for months and months and years and years. It is so easily solved if you're interested in solving it. A lot of the advice after is not good, I'll grant you that, but once you figure out the right approach, you can't go wrong with this. Hey guys, David here, and I have a question from a viewer, and this is on procrastination. And this person has big problems, or had big problems at least with procrastination, and they took my online video course, and they've had a follow up question. So it's really, their question is, there's a few parts to it, but one of the main things was, how do you overcome procrastination? Now that's obviously the question that's answered in the program. If you're interested in that, you can go to my website, drdavidmaloney.com, where I show you a systematic approach to completely eradicating the behavior of procrastination from your life. And what it involves, a part of it, is to become more mindful of how you talk to yourself. So it's to change the conversation that you're having with yourself. Now that is, what I've written up here is CBT versus mindfulness, because the question is, this person, they were already practicing meditation, and my course doesn't say an awful lot about meditation. It's really more of a CBT approach, cognitive behavioral therapy approach, which is basically changing your language, changing how you talk to yourself. And there is a lot about behavior as well in there, about the actual things that you do and things that you no longer do in terms of procrastination. Now this person was practicing mindfulness, and they were wondering, does mindfulness play an important part in overcoming procrastination, and if it does, how should I incorporate mindfulness with this cognitive behavioral approach? So for instance, do you meditate after you practice these CBT exercises, or do you do beforehand, or is it effective at all, is it important? Now what I would say about this is mindfulness is fantastic, and you can say meditation is fantastic, but what I would say is procrastination is a problem that happens because of misperceptions and myths we hold about ourselves and personal productivity. So there's an awful lot of challenging old beliefs that needs to take place, an old paradigm of what it means to be productive, what it means to be effective, what it means to be lazy. All these things have to be questioned, and we need to come up with a new perspective on personal productivity for ourselves, which is exactly what the course does on my website. So just simply meditating without actually having challenged any of those prior beliefs won't really do it. It will help you be more relaxed, which is fantastic. It has all sorts of benefits in fact, but what I want you to do, especially when you start doing this program, is to do what the program says, which is basically to keep practicing the cognitive behavioral therapy exercises. Doing them repetitively over and over again. Now what it is basically, and I'm going to get into a story here a little bit. This person has sort of examples of how they've changed their story using the CBT exercises. It's a process of inquiring about whether or not what I've said in the past is true and also setting an intention. This new story, you could call it, is basically an intention that you have for yourself, but we're going to get into that. Practically speaking, if you're talking about the exercises, the CBT stuff versus the mindfulness stuff, what I would say is if you're doing mindfulness, if you do meditation regularly, consistently, definitely continue to do that. Do not stop doing that. And I would say to practice that before you do the exercises. Because what mindfulness meditation can do is it can relax you, it can take you out of the pre-programmed sort of habitual way of thinking about things into a state of sort of less thought or less attachment to our thoughts, which makes us far more open to the experiences and the benefits that we'll get from doing these CBT exercises, which is inquiry about all beliefs and creating a new story, a new intention for yourself through a new narrative, a new story. So meditation first, I would say, there's no right and wrong way to do meditation, but if you're really looking to sort of hone your process and get the fastest possible results out of this, I would say do the meditations first and then do the exercises. Now, this person, and thank you for your question, it's obvious to me that this person is doing the work because they've sent me an email here and I'm not going to read it really, but it's their past story, how they used to talk to themselves in terms of personal productivity and what their new narrative looks like. Now, in the program, I basically coach people, I tell them to write your story, your current situation as it is right now. Don't try to show a quote, don't try to be positive, just to be brutally honest, be negative. If you feel negative, just be negative and write down what your current experience is and then what you do is you start to reverse that story. I have a template for an effective story for procrastinators on my website or on the course and you basically start to rehearse it. That's what I mean by intention. You're not trying, when you're rehearsing this new story, they're the opposite of the old story, if you like. It's sort of, you're not even trying to manifest or you know, that old thing about what you say comes true. It's not even that. It's you're reminding yourself of an intention of how you would like to feel on a day-to-day basis in terms of your projects, your goals and your personal productivity. That's what it is. It's a reminder of the goal of how I would like to feel. Would I like to feel overwhelmed all the time? Would I like to feel liberated emotionally, optimistic about my work and start to enjoy the process more? That's what our new story is. So we start to get in touch with how it will be possible to feel and what sort of thoughts would bring me in that direction emotionally. And if we do that often enough, habitually, you will find huge, huge changes will take place just in your motivation and more importantly, even in that, where his motivation comes from. It comes from self-care, relaxation, having fun in life. So the old story here is this person won't mind me saying it because it's the point of the old story that they had about their personal productivity. It's very, very negative. It says like, I don't have time for my main goals. That's just a story. That's what that is. Now, the opposite of that is I do have time for my main goals. I have loads of time for my main goals. So it's just a way of starting to flip things. Now, I would say the process of inquiry about the old story. It is very simple to do. You just flip it in the opposite direction. But there's a deeper level to this that if you're open to doing it over time, because this person talks about, should I change my story over time? Should I tweak it? I talk in the course about process of inquiry which is challenging, limiting beliefs as they come up. And what that involves is like I teach you how to do it on the course. It's a four-step process that will help you just get over negative emotions or beliefs that cause negative emotions when they come up, just by challenging it. That is really the most transformational thing of all, that technique of actually challenging a negative belief when it comes up and you're feeling the emotional charge that's coming from that negative belief. And then that can be incorporated into your story too. So the story that you'll create to begin with is your initial story, using a template on the program. But the story changes, the story changes, you can absolutely feel free to tweak it. As long as your editing of the story isn't actually stopping you from sitting down and actually just being with the new perspective, the new story to rehearse it, to actually get the benefits of it, to practice it, okay? So those are a few thoughts, great work by this person. If you're interested in this, I promise you that if you do the course, I used to be the worst procrastinator in the world, and I figured out why I procrastinate. Procrastination is a defense mechanism. Doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. It's very, very fixable. You don't have to live this cycle of guilt and procrastination. Guilt, procrastination, again and again for months and months and years and years. It's so easily solved if you're interested in solving it. A lot of the advice after is not good, I'll grant you that. But once you figure out the right approach, you can't go wrong with this. It's very easily solved. So go to my website, check it out if you're interested. And I'll leave it there for the day, guys. Thanks for watching, and I'll talk to you soon, bye.