speaker-0: The world does not care what your IQ is. It runs through the valley of boring, tedious, monotonous, consistent effort.

speaker-1: Procrastination is more of an emotional regulation problem than it is just like a logical discipline problem.

speaker-0: Your first time is never gonna be as good as your one hundredth time. The most important thing for you to do is get done the first time so you can go on to the second time. Send it ugly. Doesn't matter whether it's perfect, it matters that it's done.

speaker-1: How do you kind of unpack or unload that weight of avoidance?

speaker-0: You break out of the cycle and see it's not so scary. It's just another dumb thing to do.

speaker-1: It's easy for me to get excited about ideas, but the hard part comes later, when I have to sit down, do the boring work, and keep actually do the things that are required to make this idea a reality. And that's usually where I start looking for something else to do. I answer messages, I work on a different project, or I have another bright idea. So why is it so hard to just sit down and do the work that I know I need to do? To help me answer that question, I'm excited to be joined today by Adam Tilove. Adam is an executive coach, the founder of Neurodiscipline. And the author of Split Second, stop stalling, start doing. And he helps people understand what happens between deciding to do the work and actually doing it. In our conversation, we discuss why smart people can avoid the work that matters, how emotions are what drive procrastination, why new ideas pull entrepreneurs off course, and how small kept promises can rebuild self trust and confidence. If you get value from this conversation, be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend. And now please enjoy my conversation with Adam. Adam, thank you so much for being here.

speaker-0: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

speaker-1: Absolutely. So Adam, before we get into your story, I wanted to start with the bigger pattern that you're working on. So why do brilliant, capable people still struggle to finish the things that they care about?

speaker-0: You started, why do brilliant people? So all people struggle, right? Brilliant people, however, struggle for a specific reason. And that is that they've always been told they're smart. And so we're we learn early on that being smart is gonna solve our problems. And the fact is, is that the world doesn't care what we got on SAT. The world does not care what your IQ is, it cares like. What do you produce? What do you ship? What do you create? What do you get done? And the problem is that growing up in school, like I never really had to do homework. I just like cooked on everything and people would say, ⁓ you're so smart. And I thought that that was gonna s that was gonna save me. That that was gonna solve all my problems. And I learned I was wrong when I got to calculus, and you actually have to do homework. And if you don't, you're lost. And like I was a brilliant math student until calculus. And I didn't do homework, and ⁓ suddenly I was getting seized for the first time in my life. And that was the end of my math career because I didn't know how to get things done on my own, outside of class, like just sit down and do the homework. And part of that was because people told me I was so smart. I started watching the people who were not as smart as me, who I didn't perceive as as smart as me, as an arrogant kid, but who actually did their work. started getting A's and I started struggling. And it just had to do with the fact that they were putting in the work and I was not.

speaker-1: Yeah. So Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like I can again look at my own journey, right? Being somebody that's told you're smart. I never did homework. Right. I never did homework pretty much my entire time throughout school, I guess, until it was like mandatory, like a part of the grade. So you just kind of learn that you can kind of skate by without having to do the work necessary that other people are required to do. So you just never really quite build that muscle of being able to just, you know, sit down, do the thing that you don't want to do.

speaker-0: Place to start.

speaker-1: Which is required later on in life.

speaker-0: And that muscle that you just mentioned, that muscle of like sitting down and doing the thing that's required of you, is probably the most important muscle in the brain. Your brain muscles. There's an execution gap, what I call the execution gap, and that is the gap between brilliant idea and shipped finished product. It runs through the valley of boring, tedious, monotonous, consistent effort, which is stuff that doesn't feel very good and is not very exciting, but that is the bridge. Between idea and product.

speaker-1: Yeah. There's a great kind of ⁓ story that I've heard before where it's like if you imagine two people, or if you just imagine a person, I think is the example, and they're a hundred out of a hundred out of out of intelligence and a hundred out of a hundred out of work ethic, and you start taking away intel or you start taking away work ethic, you'll have a brilliant person that just never accomplishes anything. And if you go the other way where you take over a hundred out of a hundred, then you start taking away intelligence, you'll find like a multimillionaire who's runs a ⁓ Garbage, like a waste management business or something like that. Right? Like the people who have the work ethic, the people who can go through and ship, execute, get through the boring work are the ones who are gonna that's the only way to make something real, right? Ideas are worthless without execution. ⁓ great products are worthless without great distribution, right? It's just an age-old story that remains true to this day. So how do you actually go about if you refine yourself as the person who You can relate to this idea where you have a lot of amazing ideas. You ha you are aware of what you need to do. How do you go about building and developing that muscle in your brain that helps you just kind of get through the boring, monotonous work?

speaker-0: So look, I mean I'm I'm still struggling with it, but I've made great strides, thank God. And I think there's a lot of I think there's a lot of steps to it. The first thing is that that I would just say is that we perceive doing a starting work. Let's say let's call it the thing. Like whatever the thing is, making those calls, writing that thing, doing your paperwork, the pet taxes, whatever. The thing. Right? There's that one thing that you know you need to do. And typically speaking, the one thing that you need to do is also the hardest to do. So why? Why can't we just it's like identify what the object is and just start working on it? Right? And the fact is, is that it's emotions. And we don't want to acknowledge our emotions all the time. Like we we watch a sad movie, we feel sad, or we watch a horror movie. Like we can acknowledge our feelings then. Right? Or someone dies or someone leaves us or we fall in love. Like these are all acceptable emotions where human beings are allowed to feel emotions, right? But when you're sitting down to do the thing, we think, why why should I have emotions then? This is a logical task. I just have to sit down and start writing the thing and it's done. But it's not all logical. It's emotional. So have you heard about the elephant, the rider in the pathway? No. I didn't make this up. Not exactly sure who did. I read it in the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. Great book. But essentially, you have an elephant and a man riding it and you have a pathway. And the man says, go right, and the elephant goes to the right. And the man says go left and goes to the left. That rider is your rational brain, your prefrontal cortex. Do this. Your body does it, right? Lift your hand, your hand goes up, right? Whatever whatever the thing is. That's your rider. It's it's making the decisions. The elephant is your emotional brain. As long as it's peaceful and regulated, the rider can say go to the right, and the elephant goes to the right. But let's suppose we have an unregulated, anxious, angry elephant who doesn't want to go to the right. And the rider says, Go to the right, you ain't going anywhere. The rider has control when the elephant is willing to be controlled. When the elephant is out of control, the rider is along for the ride. Our emotions run the show. And the fact is, even when you sit down to do the thing, whatever that thing is, you come into it preloaded with emotions. Yeah? So it could be like, what happens if I write this thing and I send it out and nobody looks at it? Nobody cares. It falls on its face. You're afraid. You're anxious. Right? Or what happens? Maybe I need to look at it one more time. It's not good enough. What happens if I send this out and then it takes off and I don't have and I fail at implementing? That I I don't have what it takes. So there's all this fear and anxiety. That's not the only one. There's other emotions of like fog. I don't even know what to do next. Right? Flood. I have 50 different tasks. I don't even know which to do first. This is how you're like, I know I need to be working on the thing. But the lawn, I need to mow the lawn. So you end up mowing the lawn and staying busy all day but doing the wrong things. The things that aren't really gonna move the needle. Right? There's so there's flood, there's fog, there's fracture. Fracture is a big one. To be honest, like before this business coaching business, I was in real estate. And I couldn't do it. I was a failure. Because I couldn't emotionally get wrap my head around Buying people's houses for less than they're worth. That's the job. Right? I need to convince you to sell me your house for as little as possible. I was non-effective because there was a fracture between the work I was trying to do and my values. Right? Now my values are you're my client. If you're not winning, I'm not winning. I'm here to make you successful. And so that aligns with my values. I don't want to take from you, I want to give to you. Right? I want to make sure you win. So either way, like you enter your work every day, whatever your project is, you you're preloaded with emotions that you aren't even aware are there. And when you go to do the things, in a split second, you're triggered and you feel discomfort. You know, have you ever been lying in bedding and like suddenly you remember something embarrassing or some super stressful thing in your life, and within half a second you feel like a knot in your stomach or in your chest?

speaker-1: Absolutely.

speaker-0: That's how fast the connection is between your brain thinking something and the knot in your stomach. It it's it's it's it doesn't take time. It's like boom, it's right there. And so when you go to do your work, that's the example, you go to do your work and do the thing, and like you're trying boom, all these things are triggered. And whether you feel it or not, whether it's a knot in your chest or in your throat or in the stomach or whether you're even a consciousness or not, like you are uncomfortable. And your body, the other parts of your brain, not the prefrontal cortex, but the other parts of your brain. Like your amygdala, your threat warning system are like, get out. And you start looking for comfort. And that's when you do something what I call an off-ramp. An off-ramp is a thing like you have a destiny, you're on the highway, and the next thing you know, you're taking an off-ramp. You're scrolling on Instagram, you're washing the dishes, you are one more episode, you're reading that email for the seventh time, you're starting a new project that you hadn't decided on before, you have a new brand new idea, all these things that distract us. And take us away from the original project we're supposed to be doing.

speaker-1: And it sounds like what you're saying is something brand new to me, but it's this idea that procrastination is more of an emotional regulation problem than it is just like a logical discipline problem.

speaker-0: 100%. 100%. 100%. Especially if you have like ADHD, right? I like to say people with ADHD are just like everyone else, only more so. So we love new ideas. New ideas are a dopamine blast, man. It hits you have a new idea and you're like, Yes, I'm gonna be rich. And then it's like, okay, well, this is like a six-month process of doing the same stupid little th every single day. And it's like, ⁓ I I I can't I can't. Let me pause right here. I don't mean to monologue too much, Ian, but are you familiar with the the five stages of psychological entrepreneurship? No. So this is gold. You're an entrepreneur, you have a new business idea, right? You've got one, don't you? You have the idea. It starts with uninformed optimism. Phase one. I have an idea. No one's ever seen anything like it. I'm gonna take the world by storm. Hot diggity, right? Uninformed optimism. You start working on it. You realize, ⁓ my god, I didn't realize there were five other people already doing my project. And they started last year.

speaker-1: Yes.

speaker-0: And they already have a website and a business and they're already making money and advertising and I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going or how to build this thing. And you suddenly you hit phase two, informed pessimism. Now you're like, ⁓ now I know a little bit and this is it's I don't think this is gonna work anymore, right? But maybe you think your idea can still work. Maybe you still feel some energy around it, maybe you're dug in so deep you know you're going for it. So you keep going through informed pessimism. And then you hit the valley of despair. Now, the valley of despair is like you are spending money, you are having calls, you're doing whatever you need to be doing, and it's failing. It's just not working. You're digging deeper and deeper and deeper. And you don't know when it's ever going to turn around. When are you going to sell that first widget? When are you going to have that first client? When are you going to get that first thing released, right? And until. You get that first client, you sell that first widget, that the the like whatever, you hit your first million downloads on a podcast. I don't know what the thing is, right? And now you're like, ⁓ I see something that works. I'm gonna do that over and over again. Now you're in stage four, which is informed optimism. And then you just keep doing that and growing and scaling until you reach success and fulfillment. Now here's the problem with many entrepreneurs, and I would say all ADHD entrepreneurs, right? Is that we go from stage one, this feels good, dopamine blast, hot diggity, I feel great, to stage two, uh-oh, this is really uncomfortable, I don't know, to stage three, I have an idea. And we cycle right back to the idea phase. Right? We don't ever fight through. to the end of the valley of despair, to the informed optimism, it's too uncomfortable, so we restart with a brand new idea and it kills us. It's kind of mind opening, isn't it?

speaker-1: Yeah. So wow, as I was listening to that, I can map exactly where I'm at in the in that journey, right? In that stage. Like I can recognize myself in all of those stages. Like I think for me in my own journey, I'm probably at the tip of you know, hopefully on the the cusp of going from valley of despair to informed optimism. But like I can think back to, you know, a few months ago, you know, like a year ago, let's say, when I just had uninformed optimism about this new idea of what I was working on. Like this is gonna take over the world, it's gonna change the world. ⁓ it's just this huge great brand new idea. And then I start taking action, building it, and then I do see other people doing it. I'm like, ⁓ I wasn't first to this idea. I'm not that special. Seeing how they're doing it, me trying to like get clients, it not really working out, it's like, okay, is what I'm doing actually useful? So I mean, that's super well said, and I feel like we could probably even map this journey to like that, you know, statistic that every entrepreneur knows that ninety percent of businesses fail after the first year. Right. And then you pair that with the idea that you only fail if you quit. that most people quit in the middle of that stage two or stage three, right? Whether in informed pessimism or the Valley of Despair, they just haven't done the work required to continue iterating, to continue just pushing through the slog of delivering and just doing whatever it takes to ⁓ bring this thing to reality. But no, yeah, that that five stages of psychological entrepreneurship is is new to me, but I could definitely recognize myself in it.

speaker-0: Yeah, I think sometimes even just being able to say, ⁓ there is a map and I'm on it. Right? To be able to frame your own discomfort and despair in a way where it makes some sense to you. Right? It's not like just, you know, I think when we as entrepreneurs sometimes we d we go into this thing hoping for the best but not having Not having a coach, not having P models or not having people to talk to about it, and we just assume you start a business, you start making money, you're all set, right? It goes from stage one to stage five. But if you can sort of say, All right, well, I'm gonna take a deep breath. I'm on this map, I'm working, I I'm starting to see some optimism and moving towards that, it I think it it helps and I think it you know, it can give some some energy and light when it feels dark.

speaker-1: 100%. Like that's been the biggest value to me in my experience in coaching and in joining communities is the I'm not alone in this. Like I'm not crazy, right? I'm not the only one struggling with the same things that I'm like the things that I'm struggling with, right? This is normal. You know, and I think the other value of coaching and working with a coach or being in a community of other people who are, you know, working on the same kind of business as you are or doing doing the same kind of thing that you are is just the answers, right? It's just like there's Everybody talks about when you start a business, when you become an entrepreneur, all this freedom that's supposed to come with it. But they never talk the flips talk about the flip side, which is nobody's telling you what you're supposed to do. Right. It's on you to be able to make the decision of what you need to do next. And every single one of those decisions, I would imagine that you're gonna kinda go through this same like mini version of this five stages of psychological, you know, ⁓ whirlwind of like, okay, I have this idea for this thing that I want to do in my business. I'm super optimistic about it. But then I start doing it and it's like, Hey, is this really the most important thing to do? And then you shift and you just start and never finish like 50 different things. And then you're sitting there with like a billion different things that you need to do in your business and you're not sure which one's the most important. But when you work with a coach or you're in a community of other people who are maybe a few steps ahead of you, they can give you just clear conviction in like just do this, focus on doing that, then you can worry about doing the next thing. And it just takes a lot of the guessing out of it because that's what I found is the hardest thing about entrepreneurship and starting a business is that there's no It's on you to figure out what the next right move is, what the next thing to work on is. Yeah. So that's been like a huge value. In addition to just like being in

speaker-0: No, it's really hard. Like the same people that want are like, I'm not working for somebody else. I I wanna be the boss, I wanna have my own ideas, I wanna have my own image like image of what this could be and you know, the same things that make you want to be an entrepreneur can make you a lousy entrepreneur. Right? Because like where's the follow through? Who's looking over your shoulder? Who's going to stop you from changing strategies every three weeks and never implementing any of them? Who's going to provide the direction? Like, it's enough freedom to kill you. Right? So, like, figuring out, I think part of it is just the awareness of knowing, like in the book, like it's about what are my off-ramps? What am I actually doing here that feels like work is actually a distraction? Or how am I? psychologically avoiding doing the things that I know I need to be doing, right? 'Cause you want to be your own boss and to a certain degree everyone's their own boss, right? You might have a boss but you still run your own family. So what's blocking you? How do you move around those things or bulldoze them or, you know, get through them?

speaker-1: So how do you separate the things that you should be like focused on, right? The things that you actually should be doing and actually move the needle versus those off ramps, those distractions that can feel productive, feel like work, but are actually just steering you away from what you actually should be focusing. How do you determine which is which?

speaker-0: Yeah. You know, I'm a big fan of of AI, just like everybody else these days. And I've actually created my own proprietary AI system that that helps me filter and stick with an idea. So that's number one. Number two, I have my own coach. I so I I seriously believe that like if you are a coach, you should have a coach. Right? And like for example, if you were to go and be buying a BMW. Right? And your salesman drives up in a Mercedes Benz and gets out of the car. Would you keep shopping for a BMW? Right? So if you're trying to sell coaching and you don't have a coach, you don't even believe in your own product. You don't even believe in it enough to have your own coach. So you might as well be a snake oil salesman. You might as well be a BMW salesman that drives up in your Mercedes Benz. Right? So anyway, the point is I have a coach. I got an AI, and I also, this is just an important lesson, which is there's past me, present me, and future me. Present me is the worst. Present me is the most selfish, lazy, distracted me there is. So for example, future me wants to come home and lie down in a nice made bed. Present me is like, ⁓ wasn't that right? But I gotta respect FutureMe. If I want to lie in a nice made bed, I gotta make the bed right now. Present me never wants to do it. Future me is very grateful if I do. The other thing is though, like past me, I make a plan today. I've got a good, solid plan. I know it's a good one. I have the right strategy. In two weeks, I haven't done any work on it. And I'm like, ⁓ yeah, well. That strategy probably wasn't the best idea anyway, but I've got an idea. No. No, present me. Present me is like totally disrespecting past me. Past me make a decision, and present me needs to shut up and fall in line and do what past me said. Right? Because present me is always trying to get distracted, always trying to do something different, always trying to change course. So it's certainly like you have to Set your strategy, set your North Star, know what you're working on, and then make yourself shut up. No new ideas. No new ideas until you execute it on the previous one.

speaker-1: Got it. Yeah. And I've just somewhat Yeah, absolutely. And it's just like funny. It's just like present me's gotta shut up. I like that. ⁓ and just fall in line. But ⁓ so you you talked about the idea of like, yeah, if you have a coach, if you have somebody who can be there to hold you accountable and just kind of remind you to keep you on course and just say no to your new ideas, right? Just be like, No, like maybe not right now. Like you need to finish and execute and finish what you said that you were gonna do, what we had already discussed ⁓ before.

speaker-0: A bell.

speaker-1: And then again, it's just like an awareness. But we had mentioned earlier that procrastination and getting distracted and maybe chasing new shiny objects, right, is just this inability then the inability to just sit down and do the thing that you know you need to do, whatever that is, is more of an emotional regulation problem than it is like a discipline problem. So how do you coach your clients to kind of build up that emotional regulatory capacity?

speaker-0: This feels a little woo woo. But the bottom line is like when you face those moments. And you're like, I'm about to take an off ramp, I'm about to do something else, I know what I need to do, but I you need to turn that split second. The name of the book is split second, right? That's ⁓ we need to stop that split second and turn it into a three-second window. That's it. Three seconds. You need to be able to, in that three seconds, saying, I'm facing emotional resistance. What is it? And name it out loud. Why? Because all of this, because our subconscious, our emotional subconscious is driving the bus. And if we can drag it out of the subconscious into the conscience and say, I feel afraid that this is going to fail. Now all of a sudden, instead of having an unnamed thing, we've dragged it into the prefrontal cortex where our brains, where our logical brains can absolutely wrestle with it. Is it worthwhile being afraid? Yeah, maybe. Is that gonna stop me from doing my work? No, it's not. What do I have to do? I have to touch the thing. How do I touch the thing? Small step. Smallest possible step. Right? Smallest possible step. And I believe like what I I call it touch the thing. It means that like basically we go in these emotional whirlpools, right? Like like we know we have to do this thing. We don't do it today. We do 50 other things as we, you know, watch TV, move along, work on a different project, play a video game, clear out our email. Great stuff. Did it move the needle? No. So then we feel guilty. And we feel a little bit ashamed, right? And we feel guilty and ashamed. What do we do? Well, now I wanna, I don't know, smoke pot, watch TV, do something that feels good, comfortable. And the next day, We have a whole day of of avoidance behind us. And that gives us more stress and anxiety. So now we have more emotions, more stress, more anxiety. So what do we we need? More comfort, more dopamine. Right? So we hit this spiral, this negative spiral, we can't break out of it. When really, if you could just open the document and work on it for five minutes, just touch the thing. You'd see you'd break out of the cycle and see it's not so scary. It's just another dumb thing to do. So it's about like the whole pattern is pause. Breathe, drag it out of the subconscious, have a glass of water, touch the thing, and then what we're looking for is eventually doing what I call IA, which is an irrevocable action. Mm.

speaker-1: And what are you what is an IA irrevocable action?

speaker-0: An irrevocable action is when you take your work to a place that you can't undo it. Right? So for example, I had a client and she was like, I can't get clients. I can't get appointments. I don't know what to do. I'm not getting any appointments. I said, Well, how are you doing it? And she's well, I it's I'm not really marketing myself. I don't really know how to do it because I'm just embarrassed and I don't know. I lack confidence. And people gonna And I said, Do you believe that there are people somewhere in the world for whom they want to hear from you and no one else. And she said, Yeah, there's people out there. And I said, by not marketing, you are depriving them of your voice. So she was like, Okay. And I said, why don't you why don't we think of an irrevocable action? Like, if you have an appointment, are you gonna are you gonna show up for it? She said, I would never miss an appointment. I said, why don't you I don't remember whose idea it was, but we got there together, post something on your LinkedIn. your calendar saying you're giving free half hour meetings. And she was like, Really? I said, do it because once you post it, someone's gonna book and you're not gonna miss the appointment. So like let's just take an irrevocable action. So she did it. She had 17 appointments. She had met all the appointments and then she had four clients. And all it was was like taking it to the point like an irrevocable action is when you take the lighter and you light it to the fuse. And then it's like this thing's gonna blow, right? I'll give you one more example. I had a client. And he was supposed to give this presentation at this university. And he said, Well, I gotta finish the presentation first and then I'll call the professor and let him know it's done and set it on the calendar. And I was like, No, bro, you're ne you're never getting that presentation done. It's never, it's never getting done. So I was like, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna call the professor, you're gonna get a date on the calendar, then you're gonna get the presentation done, because you're not gonna show up there with no presentation. Right? So it's about taking your work to a place where you you've launched, where the cascading necessities follow. All the work that comes from the fact that you already launched something. Mm-hmm. Does that make sense?

speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Irrevocable action is

speaker-0: So we look for these things. We look for irrevocable actions. We look for those things.

speaker-1: Yeah, irrevocable action is like you're almost I don't want to say constraint or you're you're forcing yourself, but like you're you're putting a deadline to it, right? Like a lot of the work that this emotional resistance will come from. If you're familiar with the Eisenhower matrix, this is how I'm kind of perceiving it through, like this lens is like tier one work is the urgent and important work that has a deadline, like a client meeting things with deadlines, right? External deadlines that have to happen so you're gonna get those things done. But the work that really moves the needle and moves the business forward, moves things. makes things better, right? Is tier two work as defined in the Eisenhower matrix is important but not urgent. Meaning there's like no deadline to it. So in order to really light the fire underneath you that's going to lead you to actually getting this thing done, the irrevocable action piece is like, we're going to set a deadline to this. Like this is going to get done. There's going to be an external deadline, an external forcing function that's going to, you know, make it so that this thing has to get done by this day. So That's what's gonna happen. Right. And that presentation example is ⁓ very resonant with me. Like I signed up to do this joint venture program a couple months ago with the single idea, like, okay, if I only get a finished webinar out of this, it's worth it for me. Like whether I get clients or not, obviously I'm gonna do the best that I can, want to get clients. But I know that by signing up for this, paying the money, having the deadline in the calendar, it's gonna force me to get the webinar, like the presentation, the funnel, all the other bullshit that I didn't want to do done. So I love that idea. So figure out a way that you can make a irrevocable action and attach it to the work that you need to get done.

speaker-0: Yeah, that's it. Like and and that's what so what once you start working on whatever the project is, it's like I want to carry this over that target line, right? That's that's the finish line. It's an irrevocable action. And even like like like an email, a hard email. I was working with another client and she's like, I've had to meet it, had this meeting and I've been waiting for a year because I'm so anxious about it. And I was like, Look. Right now, is send the email. She's like, right now, it's like, yeah, while we're meeting, it's gonna take five minutes. She wrote the email and she sent it. Took five minutes. She'd been sweating over this thing for a year and it took five minutes to write and send the email. Right? And she could have spent another six months. Is the email perfect? Did it are the words right? Or are they gonna react? ⁓ my god, da-da-da. We got all wrapped up emotionally, right? Again. But the point is like. Perfectionism is an off ramp, right? And we're looking for irrevocable action. The quicker you press send and whatever comes out of it, the quicker you press send, the quicker you you you move on to the next the next big thing, right? But yeah, you can't keep all these little apps open on your desktop, your mental desktop. You're you you have too many apps open and then you can't move forward. And irrevocable action is basically closing the app. I love it.

speaker-1: Yeah. So I I think it would be worthwhile to go back and just because I know you you mentioned them pretty quickly earlier on, but the sources of emotional resistance. Like one thing that you mentioned is that a source of emotional resistance could be you being afraid that whatever product, whatever work product you create isn't going to be good enough. And that one really resonated with me with one particular thing that I've been delaying for like a week and a half that I know I need to get done, but I'm just like I've never done it before. So I don't know if it's actually going to be very good. But So if you could share with us like what are the common sources of emotional resistance?

speaker-0: Another concept I have in my book is what I call the first ugly rep. Let's say we're learning to play guitar, right? You want to be a good guitarist, right? You know the first time you pick up that guitar, you are going to suck. Correct? You were gonna be bad at guitar for a long time before you're good at guitar. The difference between being bad at guitar and good at guitar depends on you. Doing guitar many, many, many times. Right? But you got this, you just mentioned the exact situation, right? You're working on this thing that you've never worked on before, and you're like wringing your hands about it, and you're not quite sure, is it good enough, is it right yet, right? That's like you're expecting yourself to be a guy who's played guitar for five years before you you're before you've done your first practice. And you're getting stuck and you're getting discouraged by it, right? You have to embrace ugly work. And I mean it. Like, okay. So, Ian, well, I don't know what you're working on. We just met, but you're working on some project and it's like sitting on your desktop and you're like, is it good enough yet? Is it good enough yet? My answer is like, no matter how much you work on it, your first time is never going to be as good as your 100th time. Most important thing for you to do is get done the first time so you can go on to the second time. Send it ugly. Doesn't matter whether it's perfect. It matters that it's done. And then you can move on.

speaker-1: Yeah. Hundred percent. I was looking forward to this conversation all day because I knew that there would be some semblance of a kick in the butt that would just help me kind of lower the friction or the resistance to that task. So I'm excited to jump into that and finish it off. Cause it should only take me, you know, like an hour and a half, two hours to to do this thing, and I've just delayed it for a week. But yeah, a hundred percent like the pause, bring it out into the light, and just the recognition.

speaker-0: Right. I agree first wrap.

speaker-1: Yeah. Ugly first rep. I love it. So what are the other common so that's kind of like the fear based one. What what are some other kind of common sources of that emotional resistance?

speaker-0: I identify what I call six F loads in my book. There's probably more. But it's flood. Flood is like, I have too many different projects. I don't even know which one to start working on. Like fog. I don't even know which way to go. That's like pre-flood, right? Flood is like, I don't know. Flood is like, I know, and it's 50 different things. There's ⁓ friction. Friction is like, ⁓ man, it's gonna be a whole thing. And I don't wanna and it's boring and it's like a little you're like a little kid who's like, I don't want to go to bed. All of us were once little kids who said, I don't want to go to bed. And we all grew up, but that part of us that says I don't want to go to bed never left us. It just grew up and got hidden in different ways. So like there's certain things where there's certain things where the little kid, I don't want to go to bed, pops up. That's friction. Fracture, we discussed as like my values don't align with the work I need to do. Fatigue. Fatigue. Fatigue's not an emotion, but it's real. Fact is is like we have lost the ability to not work. So we we now have phones, we have laptops, we have computers, and like you look at any you look at me, my kids, my friends, like people at the park, people at the pool. We're all like poking around on our phones. And I bet if you were like, What are you doing? they'd like, I'm doing some work. Right? But they're also on Instagram or TikTok and So so let me just give you an example. Like Ian, are you reading a book right now?

speaker-1: Yeah, so I'm going back through a Return to Love by Marion Williamson for the second time.

speaker-0: So right I'm reading American Gods. I just finished ⁓ Lonesome Dove before that, whatever. It doesn't matter. Like I I have these fiction books and I like reading fiction and there's a reason for that. But if I hop off my stop working for a minute and I go onto Instagram, I could wait half an hour on Instagram, but I'm holding my phone so it feels like it's okay. Because I also work from my phone. Whereas if I just stopped working and said, I'm gonna read my book for half an hour. I'd probably feel guilty about it. But that's so backwards. It's so backwards. So because now we always feel this sense of guilt that we need to be on our phone. It's like a combination of shame and guilt at what we're doing and what we're not doing. And so we're always trying to double task, and we're like responding to text while we're driving, and we're researching while we're watching TV, and we're like, and it's just all muddled. And so we're always on. sort of half working from the minute we wake up to the minute we go to bed. And really it's like that just dries you up, right? So I'll give you another example which I know you've had and everybody else has. Have you ever had like like that hour where you just killed it and got an entire day's work in an hour?

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: You ever had that eight hour day where you just like got done a half hour's work? Both, right? Yeah. So what we need to do is like allow ourselves to rest real meaningful rest through exercise and sleep and reading. And then also by resting and regaining our energy and focus, allow ourselves to have like those power hours where get an entire day's work. Where we lose is when we just think we need to be grinding all day, but while we're grinding, we're also trying to enjoy ourselves and we're doing five things at once and we and we suck. Here's another thing, Ian. Multitasking is BS. I wanna give you a challenge if you disagree. Are you ready for my challenge?

speaker-1: Yeah.

speaker-0: I want you to take your shopping list and go to the store, walk in the store and call your mom. Okay. Try to go shopping while you're talking to your mom. If you can pull it off, go ahead and multitask. If you end up wandering around in circles, unable to concentrate on what you're doing because your mom needs your attention, or you're shopping and your mom says, What the hell's wrong with you? Then you know multitasking is a complete BS.

speaker-1: For sure. Yeah. I've been in that situation where I was on the phone with my mom ⁓ while walking around Costco and I walked out of there probably forgetting half the things that I meant to meant to get. So I already know that I will fail that test and the multitasking myth.

speaker-0: There you go. That's my that's my challenge of all multitaskers. They can pull it off, keep going.

speaker-1: Yeah. And a lot of what you mentioned there too of with like the power hour and like the eight hour, like you give yourself eight hours to complete a task, it'll take eight hours. You give yourself an hour to complete a task, it'll take an hour, right? Like the Parkinson's law, just to underline that there. But one ⁓ last thing that I would love to explore with you, Adam, before we get to the final question, the recurring question I ask every guest is you talked about this idea that also really resonated with me, where if you have, you know, a couple of days of avoidance under your belt or weighing you down. It just s compounds the issue. Right. And for a lot of us, including myself, right, like maybe I'm being a little harsh on myself, but like I just think that I've had stretches where I've had like weeks or months in a row of just like knowing that I'm not performing my best, of just like consistent avoidance, like putting things off, things kinda dragging out, just not being at my best. And then I've had also had periods where I've had like months of month stretches of just working super well. But in those moments Or those days like where you have that avoidance baggage just as built up from days or weeks or months. How do you kind of unpack or unload that weight of avoidance? Like how do you kind of get around that or how can you let go of it?

speaker-0: That's a big question. There's so many ways to answer it. But like you have to sort of be like, okay, there is no history. There is no yesterday. There is no like the stories that have bound me my whole life, the stories I'm telling myself about my life, like, they don't apply today. Like you were born this morning. Like that's it. Like and like you don't have to be the person that's avoiding it. You don't have to feel the shame. You don't have to feel the anxiety. What you have to do is just touch the thing. Like you don't have to finish it. You just gotta touch it. And I think part of it part of the things that really get us stuck is like our are stories. The things that by people sometimes people can call these things ⁓ limiting beliefs. But I don't think they're just beliefs. They're like they're narratives. There's they're stories from which we make sense out of our lives. The random the random things that happen in our lives, we frame them through stories. And but we're just telling them to ourselves. So whatever that story is like I can't, I'm never good at, ⁓ I I I always I sh like those things are all just stories that can be broken down. And the other thing is that like should, should is like when you catch yourself saying should, you should just like just have a burst of energy doing the thing. Right? Because should is just an inherent loser. When you say should, you know you're not going to. Should is like, yeah, I the one word says I know what I need to do and I am not going to do it and I'm going to feel guilty about it. All of that is what the word should is.

speaker-1: Yeah. And I think that should, like I think ⁓ like early on when I first started reading books, I got really confused about this idea of, you know, I should never say the word should, ⁓ but I shouldn't never see words like must or have to, right? It's like, no, you choose to or you you can or whatever. So then it kind of led me to saying should more often. It's like, ⁓ I sh I know I should do this, not like I have to do this or I must do this, but it's maybe maybe changing like what do you see as being the placeholder and like You shouldn't say should, you should say I will or something like that. I know that's probably kind of woo woo fugazi, but is there

speaker-0: I am. I am. I should work out. I am working out. I am. Just a place I am. And you say I should and you're like, okay, instead of like ⁓ I should work out, like do ten push ups. There you go. I am. I'm working out.

speaker-1: Yeah. So just that burst of energy.

speaker-0: That as quick as possible. So one thing about you know my the name of my program is neurodiscipline. It's sort of about based on like how the brain builds patterns, how we think, ⁓ how the the brain operates. But the the neurons that fire together wire together. That's like a little cliche from the neuroscience world. Right. So learning to f learning to fire, like learning to do things in a small way. Like again, like if you're starting to work out Saying I'm gonna work out every day for an hour and a half. Guarantee failure. No, you're not. You just lied to yourself. Don't lie to yourself. I'm going to do 10 push-ups every day. Okay, now we're talking. Can you do 10 push-ups a day? Yes. If you're sick, yes. If it's daytime, yes. Nighttime, yes. Do you need materials? Do you need supplies? Do you need gym clothes? No. Learn to Keep the promises you say to yourself. I tell my clients they may not have more than one alarm. Because if you have like three alarms that go off in the morning, what you're telling yourself is, okay, I'm lying to myself at least twice every morning. The first alarm goes off and I know I get to ignore that one. The second alarm goes off and I get to ignore that. The third one, I'm actually gonna trust myself. No. Like one alarm, when it goes off, you get up. You need to build that in, right? If you set the goal, set the goals very modestly and keep them until you learn to trust yourself and then you can build on from that. Mm.

speaker-1: One of the lines that stuck with me is that ⁓ confidence comes from keeping the promises that you make with yourself. So when you keep when you set modest, reasonable goals and you follow through and you meet them, you will trust yourself, you will build confidence in yourself, which will enable you to set higher, more aspirational goals for yourself. And you have built the muscle of being able to follow through and keep those promises. But I love that alarm idea. That's definitely another thing that hit me right in the face. I'm definitely a three alarm setter on a daily basis. So that'll be a change that I make. Starting tonight, one alarm. Get up when that alarm sounds. I love it.

speaker-0: Yeah. Just one alarm. Set it for set it for the last possible time. The last possible time. So that when that alarm goes off, you're like, if I get up one minute later, I am gonna be screwed. If you get up before your alarm, go ahead and get out of bed. But when you're alarm like, and then you're waking up without an alarm. But when the alarm goes off, it is go time, man. That is your ⁓ that is your last ditch emergency, right? And then what you'll find is like, okay, I woke up before my alarm. I guess I'll just get out of bed. But if you use three alarms, then you mean you're never you're you're training yourself for failure.

speaker-1: Yeah. Amazing. Adam, thank you so much for the time today. I have one final question for you. It's a recurring question I ask every guest, but before we get to that, how can people find you, get in touch with you?

speaker-0: The name of my company is Neurodiscipline. I my email address is Adam at neurodiscipline dot com. My website is neurodiscipline.com and neurodiscipline.co. If you want to book an appointment, just go to neurodiscipline.co. I have a book. It's called Split Second. It's on Amazon. My name is Adam Tilove. I'm sure that'll be written there somewhere. I'm pretty out there. So if anyone wants to talk, I'm happy to hop on a call with them.

speaker-1: Absolutely. We'll have the links to all of that in the description. So go check out Adam, connect with him on LinkedIn, check out his website, book a call if you're interested. If anything that we've talked about today sounds like something that you would need help with, absolutely would encourage you to check out and talk with Adam. I'm sure I will be doing so myself. ⁓ and then buy the book, Split Second. That's I already added it to my ⁓ my cart on Amazon before we started our conversation, just 'cause again, so much of what you teach resonates with me in something that I know is an area of personal growth for myself. So really appreciate the time, Adam. My final question for you today is if you had a giant billboard that everyone in the world could see for ten seconds, what would it say and why?

speaker-0: Sleep like you're getting paid by the hour. ⁓ the reason I'm saying that is because sleep, I think, is the foundational health habit. When you sleep, you r have a better memory, you're in a better mood, you get more work done, you have longer focus. When you don't sleep, it affects your immune system, it affects your diet, it affects the number of calories you eat, it affects your like it makes you grumpy. And we all think about sleep as a waste of time. Right. I'd rather be up watching TV, I'd rather be up working, I'd rather be up partying. I like and like every night we ruin the next day. Cause we don't respect sleep. Sleep is like probably the number one thing that affects our lives and we just typically ignore it. So sleep, like you're getting paid for it by the hour. That's what I'm saying. Because you are

speaker-1: That's so good. I think ⁓ I didn't respect that enough, but Brian John I heard Brian Johnson say something very similar. He's the guy who's putting like millions of dollars a year into his health. He's trying to live forever, right? He's trying to not die. And he said that if he had to if he had to only optimize for one metric in all of his health, it would be like his resting heart rate before bed, like his resting heart rate for sleep or whatever. But he kind of said a similar thing where like sleep is the foundational health habit. Just the foundational habit, a foundational thing that you can do because getting a good night's sleep is what enables you to do all the other positive things that you need to do for your health, relationship, career. Yeah. It's everything. So yeah, that's where I didn't take sleep as seriously. I was like, ⁓ I can sleep for four hours, it'll just give me more time. And it's just Yeah, amazing.

speaker-0: And again, yeah. The question is, it's the mindset around sleep as well. Like, yes, that's true. So how do you break out of your normal habit? And that's why my my expression would be like sleep while you're getting paid by the hour. Like value every hour of sleep, right? It's like if I was gonna say like you're gonna you you're gonna go j go to your job, you're making ⁓ you know, five hundred dollars an hour, would you like would you like watch TV through it? Would you like scroll through it? Hell no you wouldn't. But we do that about our sleep every single night. So sleep like you're getting paid by the hour.

speaker-1: I love it. Sleep like you're getting paid by the hour. Adam, thank you so much for the time.

speaker-0: Pleasure. You're a great conversationalist. Pleasure to meet you again. Thank you.

speaker-1: Thank you for listening. The main thing I'm taking away from my conversation with Adam is the fact that procrastination is more of an emotional regulation problem than it is a lack of discipline. So when I feel unsure or overwhelmed and I look for something easier to do, and every time I avoid the work that I said I would do, I trust myself a little less. That's why the small promises matter. Confidence comes from giving myself proof that I will follow through. If you want to get connected with Adam, you can find his website, LinkedIn, and his book Split Second, Stop Stalling, Start Doing, in the description of this episode. If you have a book, coaching program, or course, and you want to make it easier for your clients to get results, download the free program execution system toolkit in the description. It'll show you how to install what I call execution infrastructure so clients actually follow through and get results from your program. Thank you for listening, and I'll see you in the next one.