 If you're struggling with procrastination right now, I just want you to know you're not alone. And there is a way forward and it's about adopting a much healthier support of mindset for yourself. And in this video I'm going to talk about what that mindset looks like and the balance between discipline which we're all very familiar with and something else. So I've got this question and it relates to somebody who is struggling with procrastination. I'm going to bring in a little bit of mindset stuff for this. So this question is from Sean, it's a quick one and it says, I've tried to discipline my day but I'm not able to stick to it. I've been learning about the usefulness of structuring, a scheduling to keep on track but try as I might, my plans derail often early in the day. I then feel demoralized and can't find the motivation to keep going. It's like I need to do the whole day perfectly or not at all. And a lot of people have that. Some people even have it around trying to put in better sleeping habits as part of their productivity hacks I guess you might say. And you know they fail immediately to wake up at the time they would like and you know what the day is right off. So even before you start today, your disperfectionism thing kicks in. I talk a little bit about that in my book on sleep, the free book on my website. Sleep is just one of those things. I'm going off in a little tangent here before I even begin but sleep is one of those things that you can't really negotiate with. So it's almost like you just start your day whenever you get up. If you want to get up earlier you try but you don't let that hold you back in terms of what I can do when I am up. But anyway back to the question here from Sean. Sean is talking about discipline and he's trying to instill discipline and of course you read the self-help books and you read all about discipline and scheduling and all those things. And a lot of people like Sean try it and struggle with it. And I certainly did read all those self-help books. The thing about it is there is some truth to it but there's a piece missing and if we know what that piece is it'll make a big big difference to us. So you know I'm not going to stay here Sean and say you know what it is discipline. You need to really go harder down that road. You just need to do it better and harder next time. That's not it but at the same time I'm also not going to say well look forget discipline and throw it out the window. Forget your scheduling all that stuff throw it out the window doesn't work. So basically I'm saying it's not discipline and it's not this sort of Lizzy fear relaxed attitude it'll all work itself out don't worry about anything. The real solution is a balance between what I call discipline or I refer to it in my book on emotional needs called forget happiness. I refer to it as responsibility which is often put in structure around things or doing the things that you don't sometimes want to do and spontaneity. So what we're looking for here in this mindset to help us when we're struggling about procrastination is a balance between some responsibility or discipline you could call it Sean refer to it as discipline and spontaneity. Now I have found that for most people the balance is way off. Everybody has been told repeatedly again and again about discipline so we're really identified and we really like this idea of developing discipline. So this balance I think needs to be really swung in the other direction where there's more spontaneity in our day lack of discipline with a little discipline in our day. So you could say that the 80-20 rule might apply here where 20% of your day is sort of structured or disciplined or you've got goals or an agenda for it and the rest is not like that. The rest is much more loosely designed if you like. You see the reason we need both of these things we'll call them discipline and spontaneity is that a life without discipline or a life without any sort of structure it doesn't work because discipline is grounding it's a masculine trait not male trait a masculine trait in terms of what Jung would call masculine feminine. Discipline is grounding it can help us orient ourselves in our day and without it we become a little bit sort of disembodied or not grounded in our day so we need some degree of structure but the thing is imagine your whole day is structured like this and it's rigorously planned out and it's scheduled there as Jung was saying and probably from when you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed it's all scheduled and of course there's a lot of things that can go wrong in that sequence and then we beat ourselves up for it but imagine your day was like that we're not robots you know there is a ghost in the machine somewhere and the thing about um you've probably heard people talk about the flow state the flow state is not really achieved in a disciplined mentality it's more through a balance between a little discipline which grounds you in your day and then moving into now that I've met my bases and I've done these easy things in my day now I'm more maybe open to being a little bit more intuitive about where do I go with my day or again spontaneous and that's where the flow comes in flow is all about being attracted to something rather than forced into something okay so I would suggest that don't throw out the baby with the bad border here you keep some degree of discipline but not much and you dedicate yourself to do an easy consistent steps if you want to have that discipline a lot of people talk about that the utility or the helpful the usefulness of having a morning routine for instance and actually I really like that because having a morning routine means that you do meet your your your goals if you like quite early in your day probably and now you've got this ocean of time in your day where you're moving into okay look I've done I've achieved growth in those areas at least now what comes next is not going to be structured and I'm going to be drawn to things more intuitively my decision making is not going to be rigorously planned out it's going to be where do I go based on what I'm attracted to or what I really authentically desire in my life and you'll actually find that with that approach by the way complete relaxation should be somewhere somewhere in your schedule I talk about that a lot in my procrastination book that's the one the first thing you should really be thinking about is where am I going to switch off here but in that period after your discipline has been addressed and you're in that spontaneous intuitive decision-making taking action perhaps it's incredibly effective being in that flow state is where insane amounts of creative ingenious things can happen for us so take away from this video is basically what I'm saying don't over schedule your day don't be too disciplined but have a commitment if you like to small things you can commit to in terms of your discipline and watch what happens try that for a while you'll probably find that the discipline is easier to maintain and you may be very surprised about how effective you become when you're in that space of spontaneity so Sean I hope that was useful and for anyone else watching this if you want to know more about my work on procrastination you can check out my book it's called a procrastination decoded you can get it on my website and as always thanks so much for being with me and I'll see you again in the next video bye