Please rate and review my podcast here: https://ratethispodcast.com/ericThe reason you procrastinate is not what you think. You think it's something about you, as if you're broken but it's far easier and simpler to fix than that.Out of all the stuff that I did with regard to improving my own procrastination tendencies, these were the three that delivered the biggest bang for the buck and I'm pretty confident they're going to do the same for you.So the number one, most powerful thing that I learned behind the reason why I was procrastinating was simply how I was talking to myself. The moment you say I have to do something, or I should do something. I have to finish something. It just conjures up resistance.When you say that you are choosing to do something, you're putting yourself in control, you're taking agency of the situation.The second thing that contributed to my procrastination is not scheduling in my week things to look forward to. Knowing that I had something to look forward to, I found myself less likely to procrastinate because I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.The last thing I did to conquer my procrastination, to transform from a procrastinator to a producer, is all around timesheeting your day. I developed a hyper-awareness on where my time was going.

Please rate and review my podcast here: https://ratethispodcast.com/ericToday we're going to be talking about focus, how you can up your game, how you can stay more focused so that you can get the things done that you know you need to be doing, or that you would like to be doing.So the number one thing that you can do to increase your ability to stay focused is set goals that inspire you. Who wants to be working on something that doesn't inspire them, right?Number two, to help you stay focused is to create time in your schedule for whatever it is that you'd like to be focusing on.Number three thing that you can do is, decide the day before what you want to be focusing on. If you decide those things the day before, you're able to start your day in a much more focused state, because you know what you're going to be doing and when you're going to be doing it.Number four, you should get plenty of sleep. Studies clearly show that if you don't have the recommended eight hours of sleep, your ability to stay focused, tremendously diminishes.Number five to help you stay focused: start your day with some exercise. When you spike your energy at the start of the day, it helps keep your energy higher throughout the day.The number six technique that I use to help with focus is called centering, or you can refer to it as meditation. Whatever works for you to get you into a more relaxed state. Because when you're relaxed you will have the ability to stay focused for longer periods of time.Number seven technique that I use to help stay focused is to start my day creatively rather than reactively. I encourage you to start your day, at least for that first hour doing something creative.The eighth thing that you can do to help improve your ability to stay focused, is to take frequent breaks. When groups are put next to each other and one group has no break time at all, and the other group has frequent breaks throughout the day, the group with frequent breaks throughout the day, even though they're working less total time, they actually have a higher output than the group that didn't have breaks.

Please rate and review my podcast here: https://ratethispodcast.com/ericHave you ever wondered why certain people seem to be so full of happiness, so full of vibrancy? Well, there's some secrets to happiness that we can all learn.Number one thing that you can do, I do this on a daily basis, is start your day engineered for happiness. And I do this with a simple phrase, I start my day saying, "Today is going to be a great day." It immediately puts a smile on my face, puts me in a positive mood. Number two: A good happiness secret is to schedule guilt free leisure or hobby time in your week, time for yourself, time doing things that you know will make you happy. Make sure you're scheduling that guilt-free kind of free time in your week, and you'll generate a lot more happiness in your days. Number three secret to generate more happiness is to think about your energy generators versus energy drainers. What are the people, places and activities in your life that give you energy versus drain you of energy?Number four thing that you can be doing to generate more happiness in your life is to look after your health. Without our health, we're nothing. And if we actually invest in our health, it generates more happiness in our lives.And number five, and this is perhaps the most important of all. To generate more happiness in your life, choose to be happy. And I know that might sound simplistic, but it really is a choice at the end of the day. No matter what happens to you, you can still choose to be upset or happy.

Please rate and review my podcast here: https://ratethispodcast.com/ericHave you ever wondered how incredibly successful people think? Because if you could start thinking in the same way, the sky's the limit. Today I'm going to share a set of principles that underpin the way incredibly successful people think.Number one, the first thing that underpins the way incredibly successful people think is that they take a long-term view on their success. They are not looking for overnight success. The number two principle that underpins how incredibly successful people think is that they think beyond themselves. "How can what I'm doing be of service to others? How might what I'm doing benefit the world?"The number three thing that underpins how incredibly successful people think is that they take an 80/20 approach to their lives and to their businesses. They don't try to do absolutely everything. Instead, they look for, "What's the 20% of things that I could be doing that could create 80% of the results?Number four. Incredibly successful people zero in on the 20% of things they could be doing for 80% of the results. And then they think, "How do I break down those goals?" Incredibly successful people always break down their goals into sub-goals.Number five. Incredibly successful people realize that they can't get there or do whatever it is that they hope to do on their own. They know that they need to surround themselves with wisdom.Number six. Incredibly successful people take action. They resist the temptation to overanalyze, overthink. And eventually if you take enough action, the results start to appear.Then number seven, despite everything that I just said there, successful people expect the unexpected. Now, they don't know what that may be, but they expect that something may happen that they haven't planned for.

Your approach to learning does not work. You're taking way too long to learn all of the valuable skills that you need. Today I'm going to teach you 10 tips to learn all those valuable skills that you need a lot faster. The first is to respect one of my favorite rules, the 80/20 principle. It simply states that 20% of causes create 80% of the effects.Get into the habit of quizzing yourself. It's much more powerful than simply taking notes. So what that means is you get to the end of a chapter and before you immediately move on to the next chapter, just pause, pause for a moment and ask yourself, "What did I just learn? What were some of the core concepts, the core principles?"The number three way that you can learn things much faster is to get into the habit of teaching or sharing what you learn. When we teach or share what we've learned with someone else we more deeply embed that learning within us.Number four. Quit bad material, or quit things that aren't helping your learning. And I'll go back to the example of a book again. You don't simply need to complete the book because you started it. Number five is a concept called space repetition. Space repetition is presenting what you've learned back to yourself in space intervals, with each interval increasing over time, because as you're learning the information, you don't need to refer back to it as much. Number six, to learn faster you need to actually schedule learning into your day and week.Number seven is taking advantage of the micro moments throughout your day. There's times where we're commuting or moving from one activity to the next or exercising, and those are all learning opportunities.Number eight is to put some pressure on yourself, and you can do that in the form of looking for a certification or an official course that's tied once again to whatever it is that you're trying to learn. That kind of healthy pressure will force you to learn faster.Number nine, try learning in a group, with a group of other people, a group of friends, or a group of peers. Try not to learn on your own, but try to learn in a social setting.And the 10th way in which you can be learning faster is simply choose things that you would enjoy to learn. You're not going to learn anything quickly if you hate whatever it is, or if you don't truly want to learn it.

Your lack of confidence certainly isn't helping you, and it's probably why you're not as far ahead in life as you'd like to be.But here's the thing: confidence is something that can be built, it's not something that you simply have.We are all born the same. Nobody's born with confidence. We're all born clean slate. So everything is learnable, including confidence as well.The number two confidence builder is all around learning, up-skilling. Taking your game up to the next level. If you want to build your confidence, you have to take some time to.The number three thing that you could be doing to up your confidence game or develop more confidence in a particular area is to ask the experts. There's experts out there for everything.Number four, if you want to build your confidence, you have to get comfortable pushing yourself just outside your comfort zone. Confidence doesn't happen staying in your comfort zone. Five, 10%, whatever it is just beyond your current capabilities. And trying and building and seeing how that goes and learning from your mistakes.The number five thing that you can do to build confidence is anticipate the obstacles. You'd be surprised you could probably anticipate 70, 80% of the obstacles likely to appear before you.The number six thing that you can do to build your confidence is develop an action attitude, an orientation towards taking action.So in summary, there's lots of ways that you can be building your confidence. Once again, confidence is something that you build, it's not something that you're born with, it's not something that you simply have.

Today, I'm going to give you a silver bullet that can really help propel your success, one thing above all others, which if you enact, which if you appreciate, will set you apart from all of the rest.A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference, and after I spoke at the conference, an aspiring entrepreneur came up to me and he said, "Eric, what's the one book that you'd recommend that I read?"I said, "Do you know what your problem is? You're searching for a silver bullet. You're searching for that one thing, that one book, and there is no one book.""Instead, you should be scheduling in 30 minutes every day to develop a reading habit, 30 minutes every day to continually pour through the things that interest you.Knowledge compounds, and so you have to develop that habit to let it start growing, to let it compound. It's discipline," I said, "That is your silver bullet."It's a discipline to do what others don't want to do when they're just messing around. It's a discipline to stay the course when it's easier just to stop.Where would your life or business benefit from a bit more discipline? Where are you super undisciplined, and where could you make a commitment to show up more strongly, more powerfully day after day in a disciplined way?

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur, but unsure what to start or what to do?Today I want to talk about three things, three lenses, if you will, three filters that you can apply to your life to unlock the entrepreneurship within you.So the first lens, the first filter is looking at love. So what is it that you love doing? To what degree would you love doing whatever the idea may be?I highly encourage you to take all the potential ideas that you might have and just list them all out on a piece of paper. And then you're going to put each of these things I'm going to go through as a column. And you're going to rate each of the ideas 1 to 10 to the degree to which you do that category.The next thing, the next column on your list is skill. So how skilled are you at each of these things on your list?And last but not least, I want you to think about the need. To what degree would the world really need this idea, this activity that you have in mind, this new business proposition?So love, skill, and need, these three together, high scores in all three of these categories really can unlock the entrepreneurship within you or give you that push towards an idea and the myriad maybe of ideas that you have, or maybe even help you generate an idea.

You're letting bad days get the best of you. When you have a bad day, you simply take way too long to recover. Super simple short message today about how to recover from bad days. I want to give you three things that I always keep in mind to help me rebound much more quickly.  Number one is to recognize that having a bad day is completely normal. If we're constantly measuring our success by only having great days, we are sure as heck setting ourselves up for failure.Number two, remember to play the long game. The secret to a life with a wonderful positive trajectory or a business that is doing super well is to recognize that over a long period of time, having more winning days than bad is the goal.And last but not least, when you do have a bad day, never have two in a row. Think very proactively, "What are the things that I could do today to make sure tomorrow is a rebound day?"So try those three things to help you recover much more quickly from a bad day. Recognize that it's completely normal, play the long game, and make sure that you never have two in a row.

Did you know that some researchers estimate we only retain 10% of what we read? What if I could show you a way to retain 90% of whatever it is that you're trying to learn?Today's message is super simple, super quick. It's all about how to up your retention game. Teaching leads to a retention of up to 90% versus reading, where it's only around 10%.So here's a few simple ways in which you can employ this in your business or life. Number one, after you've read something, rather than seek to summarize it, seek to share it instead.The second thing that you can do is get into the habit of presenting your information. So this works super well in a work environment. Just the act of preparing for a presentation will lead to much stronger, deeper retention.Last but not least, an awesome way in which you can get into the habit of retaining more of what you learn through the power of teaching is by sending out a weekly email to your friends, colleagues, to your network. Just simply consolidate your learnings and share some of the things that you're coming across, that you're reviewing, that you're studying, that peak your interest, with those that are important to you.So in summary, if you want to change your retention from as low as 10% from when you read something to as high as 90%, seek to teach.