Kickstart Your Progress: Part 2 - Techniques to Pick Up the Pace

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:00]:
Welcome back to the make time for success podcast. This is episode number 200. I'm so excited for this particular episode, which is part 2 of the kick start your progress series of 2. And in this 2 part series on the show, I describe lots of different mini techniques that have helped me to become a speedier person, a speedier worker, a speedier thinker, and I thought I would share a lot of these tips with you. Today, we're gonna do tips number 7 through 12. Let's get right down to it together now. Hi. I'm Dr. Christine Li, and I'm a psychologist and a procrastination coach.

Dr. Christine Li [00:00:49]:
I've helped thousands of people move past procrastination and overwhelm so they could begin working to their potential. In this podcast, you're going to learn powerful strategies for getting your mind, body, and energy to work together so that you can focus on what's really important and accomplish the goals you want to achieve. When you start living within your full power, you're going to see how being productive can be easy and how you can create success on demand. Welcome to the make time for success podcast. Hi there, and I'm so excited to be in episode number 200. And I wanna thank you for being a fan of the show and for listening week after week. Today, we're going to continue with part 2 of my series on how to speed your movements up and in line with doing something speedily, and we're gonna just get right down to it. So the first episode, which was episode number 199, I listed 6 ways to speed yourself up.

Dr. Christine Li [00:01:59]:
So I'm gonna start with tip number 7 today, and tip number 7 is to focus on one thing first. That sounds really basic, but I have to tell you people really struggle with this particular tip because we're inundated with things to focus on. We have to do groceries. We have to plan the week. We have to take care of this person, that person, and then that person's friend. There's so much on our minds that it can feel difficult to just hone in on one thing, and I wanna stop you right here and have you use your intuition right now and come up with the thing that really is the thing that should be first, the thing that you need to laser focus in on so that you can actually get it done, so that you can actually move the needle with that particular task, so that you can eventually get it out of your life. And as I was preparing to just press record on this episode, I was thinking of myself, you know, you really need to get over the fact that everything feels so important because what I like to do to speed myself up is to remind myself that, actually, nothing is that important. Nothing is so important that I need to slow everything down, that I need to give up my precious time in my life and drag things out.

Dr. Christine Li [00:03:25]:
Nothing is that important. So remember to focus on one thing. Remember that nothing is so important that you should make yourself miserable and waste all your time, and then go for that one thing. The 8th tip that I have for you is to figure out what is your carrot. And by carrot, I mean, carrot like your motivating factor. What is the thing that you're looking forward to feeling? What is the little prize that you can promise yourself for when you finish this task that feels difficult in the moment and feels like a huge slog or time suck, figure out what your carrot is. For me, it might be I get to walk the dog and be outside for 20 minutes and be relaxed, or I get to go to the gym, or I get to not work for a while. Whatever your carrot is, figure it out, weave it into your plan of action, and then decide, I'm gonna go for that carrot.

Dr. Christine Li [00:04:21]:
I'm gonna knock that carrot out right away. I'm looking forward to being able to enjoy the carrot, the reward, the result, that good feeling that comes when I'm done. That in itself, that task or that technique of designing a carrot for yourself will help you to do tip number 7, which is to focus on one thing. You're gonna be able to just say one foot after the other when you know where you're headed and you know that there's a reward ahead. Now tip number 9 is you're going to double your movements, and that is a really simple technique that I do without thinking all of the time. By double your movements, I mean that when you're waiting for dinner to boil or be fully cooked, you're loading the dishes that you have used for dinner prep or the dishes that have accumulated over the course of the day or those mugs that are on your desk or your partner's desk. We all know this. We've all been there.

Dr. Christine Li [00:05:25]:
So just use that time where you're waiting for something else and double that use of time. So you can go up the stairs if your bedroom's upstairs like mine is, and then maybe tidy up there. And then you've done a little bit of exercise, a little bit of tidying, and your dinner is still safely cooking on the stove. You always wanna remember to not forget the dinner on the stove, but you get what I mean. If you're setting a bath, if you're like my bathtub situation, you have a good 20 minutes waiting for that bath to fill. So what can you do in that 20 minutes? Double your movements. Don't think anything of it. Don't think that this is working twice as hard because that kind of thinking is gonna drag you down.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:11]:
You're gonna think to yourself, I am light as a feather. I can't wait for that bath. I can't wait for this yummy dinner. I'm so glad I get to tidy my room when I'm already busy with something else. I'm not wasting any time here. So you get to be proud of yourself over the course of the day periodically, and you just wanna schedule these doubling your movement periods when you can. And, again, it doesn't have to be super planned out. It can just be on the fly.

Dr. Christine Li [00:06:40]:
The 10th tip that I have for you is a little bit trickier but also important. I want you to know what your triggers are, and triggers are those things where you're either gonna get upset, you're gonna get derailed and distracted, or you're gonna feel like you're not good enough somehow, or you're gonna forget what you're doing in the 1st place. And there are, of course, so many other different triggers that we can have. Even the phone ringing could be a trigger for you. It could be, oh, well, you think every phone call coming in is so important that you have to abandon what you're focusing on, and that we could call a trigger because it's gonna trigger you to lose your focus. And so I want you to figure out what are your triggers and be kind with yourself when you're listing your triggers, but also make an Uber plan. An Uber plan, I'm just making up that term right now, is a plan where you're gonna bypass all your triggers. Instead of getting distracted by the incoming phone call, you're gonna let the phone take care of it.

Dr. Christine Li [00:07:45]:
You're gonna let the person leave a message, and you're gonna jot down on your pad of paper, listen to messages after I'm done with this task. You're going to keep your vibe really high. If you're working on a difficult writing assignment, you're not gonna let yourself get tanked by thoughts that people aren't gonna like what you're writing or that you're never gonna finish or that your writing is not gonna be acceptable to other people that you submitted to. Those are very triggering thoughts. You wanna say to yourself, you know, the past me was really trying to get me to do a better piece of writing, but the current me knows that I wanna get through this writing really quickly and still do high quality work. And so I'm gonna separate with the past me and that behavior of tearing myself apart when I'm writing. I'm no longer gonna engage in that triggering activity. That way, my nervous system stays regulated, I stay focused, and I go for my one thing, which is writing a cohesive, coherent, brilliant piece of work.

Dr. Christine Li [00:08:55]:
I'm so excited to be able to focus, get this done, and submit it for the world to see. You can see that even just describing this fictional scenario, you're going to feel so much better doing your writing work when you are taking care of your triggers, when you're not allowing yourself to be taken down by your own errant distracting thoughts. We want those to stay aside for this time, and we want you to go more quickly. Tip number 11 is we want to change the perspective you have on your task to be positive. Because when we don't do that, the task tends to remain in a stuck, unfinished, undone, uncared for position, and we don't want that. We want everything to actually be relatively neutral. So if you don't see yourself as being someone who's positive Polly Pocket like I am most of the time, that's okay. All you need to do is decide, you know what? That's my next task.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:03]:
You're gonna keep yourself in a neutral frame of mind. You're not gonna say to yourself, this is even harder than the last time. Oh, This is so boring and draining and so annoying. You are not gonna say that negative stuff. Even if the task is terrible, even if the task is the worst thing you've ever dealt with, you're gonna keep yourself balanced. You're gonna keep your language neutral or positive or better than positive, and you're gonna have more fun with this task. It's the way through. It's the way to get your energy to cooperate with your mind, to cooperate with your action strategies.

Dr. Christine Li [00:10:45]:
You're gonna get everything that's inside of you to cooperate, to be aligned so that you're not fighting yourself from within. Right? When we fight with ourselves, we think, oh, I wanna do that, and then I also don't wanna do that. And then you have a conflict. And guess what? When you have a conflict inside of yourself, you are not focusing on the thing in front of you. You're not focusing on your work. And don't get me wrong. This doesn't mean I need you to focus on your work all that time. But if you know how and when to focus in this aligned, strategic, really streamlined kind of way where you're not fighting yourself from the inside, you're gonna have a lot more time to play with in the end and enjoy yourself and good work accomplished too.

Dr. Christine Li [00:11:33]:
So remember, to change your perspective from negative to positive about what the task is for you, just keep it positive, be grateful for the fact that you even have this task, and then go. The very last tip that I have for you, tip number 12, is to use time as your friend and not an enemy. This makes me wanna cry. I don't know why, but time is just there. Time is really essentially your life ticking by, and that may sound really scary or doom and gloom to some of you, but I don't mean it that way. I mean to tell you that time is kind of like the container for your life. So if you're always thinking that time and you are in a battle till the end till somebody dies, don't think like that because you don't have to die. You just have to accept that time is ticking, that your life is going.

Dr. Christine Li [00:12:29]:
But I want you to just kind of connect with time instead of thinking you're separate from time. In some ways, the shortcut to doing that is to think, I don't actually have to think about time at all. Time is always gonna be there for me. Time is always there ticking. Time is always there to be read. Time is always there supporting me. But what I need to pay attention to is how am I using my time. Am I using it well or am I wasting it? Am I using my time well or am I not paying attention to it at all? And then letting hours and days go by without much being done or being enjoyed.

Dr. Christine Li [00:13:08]:
Am I just being mindful about me? And I think that is the real tip for being speedy, for being productive, for being joyful, for getting all the results and the rewards. It's knowing what you're doing and having the confidence and the belief in yourself to get all of these elements, your energy, your mindset, how you're perceiving the task, what the carrot is, how you're using your time, and how you're relating to it. When you bring all that together into one calm little basket for yourself and you say, you know what? We're picking this thing next to do, you get to go as fast as possible for you. And I can't wait to hear what happens when you let me know what happens, when you speed yourself up, when you do not waste your time, when you have all the energy that you need at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day. I can't wait to hear your success stories, and I can't wait for you to implement these 12 tips that I've shared with you in episode 199 and episode 200. In episode 199, I shared a free download of a summary of that episode, and that was maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/speed. Again, maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/speed. I'm gonna do the same thing for this episode, episode number 200.

Dr. Christine Li [00:14:44]:
I'm going to provide another free download with a summary of these tips, and that download you can get at maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/speedy, which is speedy. And, again, that's maketimeforsuccesspodcast.com/speedy. And I'm gonna throw one more thing in here if you don't mind. If you would love to help me celebrate 200 episodes of this wonderful podcast, this joy of my life. It's really a joyful, creative, fun project for me, and I can't believe we're at 200, but I'm also really excited about that. If you wouldn't mind helping me celebrate this milestone, please leave a 5 star review for the show. Make Time For Success podcast, it'll take you about 2 minutes or 3 minutes to leave a wonderful review. I would love that.

Dr. Christine Li [00:15:41]:
It will help many more people get to know about the show and start to listen, and I would be so grateful if you did that in a 2 or 3 minute speedy event today. Alright? I will see you guys in episode number 201 next week. Thanks again and be well. Bye. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Make Time For Success podcast. If you enjoyed what you've heard, you can subscribe to make sure you get notified of upcoming episodes. You can also visit our website, make time for success podcast.com, for past episodes, show notes, and all the resources we mentioned on the show. Feel free to connect with me over on Instagram too.

Dr. Christine Li [00:16:26]:
You can find me there under the name procrastination coach. Send me a DM and let me know what your thoughts are about the episodes you've been listening to. And let me know any topics that you might like me to talk about on the show. I'd love to hear all about how you're making time for success. Talk to you soon.