I get to meet and hang out with a bunch of people who are teetering on the edge of the entrepreneurial dream.

They know that they want the freedom, wealth and happiness that small business success can bring. Some of them are keen to build an empire!

They also have read books that drill in the “be passionate about what you do” message.

Problem is, these people still end up utterly stuck and frustrated. Sound like someone you know (perhaps really well)?

If you feel like you’ve been there, it’s probably because you don’t know what you’re passionate about!

For me, this is one of the areas the inspirational authors skim over too quick. Not everyone knows their passion as well as Gary Vaynerchuk or Chris Guillebeau – nevertheless, both links are worth clicking to take a look.

A psychologist, when asked to help a patient discover “their passion” would probably try to analyse the activities that created the most pleasure for the patient. They’d figure out what gave your brain the biggest shot of dopamine.

My solution is simpler:

Turn procrastination into a business

You know that thing you do when you procrastinate?

That thing that you love to do – even when you know you don’t have the time (or money) to do it.

That’s your passion. Now just figure out a way to make money from it. It won’t be easy, but you’ll love every minute of it.

A good place to start is by asking a question in the comment section (below). I’ll happily answer any queries (no matter how broad) about turning your passion into a profitable business.

Beating procrastination starts and ends with your thinking. Let’s lose the intro and just get on with it:

1. Give yourself a real incentive

Working towards your ultimate business/life goals is tough going sometimes. Give your latest project a deadline and give yourself a tangible reward for achieving it. Anything from a snack to an overseas holiday works. Be strict.

2. Put a deadline on your procrastination

You’re already procrastinating so why not enjoy it?! Give yourself thirty minutes of messing around and then commit to work.

3. Brainstorm your “reasons why”

Ask yourself “Why must I finish [insert-task] today?” and “What will it cost me if I don’t?”. Write it down and make sure you feel the answers.

4. Advertise your deadline

Most people are more psychologically driven away from losing face than they are driven towards getting stuff done. Share your deadline with someone you really respect. Don’t let them down.

5. Turn off the internet

Takes Jedi levels of discipline but really REALLY works. Enough said.

6. Take more breaks than usual

Most procrastination and distraction is caused by people attempting unrealistic levels of productivity. Experiment with taking a ten minute break every forty-five minutes. You’ll know it’s working if you find the breaks boring.

7. Stop in the most exciting part

When you’re done for the day but have more work for tomorrow, leave your project incomplete in a really exciting (and disjointed) place. This guarantees it’ll be fun and easy to dive right back in when you need to.

This article written in 14 minutes using techniques 2, 3, 4 and 5. Spelling and grammar errors for entertainment purposes only.

Sometimes chunking huge goals down to microscope tasks does wonders for motivation.

I just finished up a session with a client’s Business Development Manager (sales rep).

We simply worked out that they could be well on track to an exciting six figure annual income – if they would just spend two hours a day making calls to new prospects.

Previously, the very thought of the 40 to 50 massive, business-to-business sales they’d have to make (over the year ) was absolutely overwhelming.

Conservatively connecting the dots between two hours on the phone and the pie-in-the-sky annual income goal is like a caffeine jolt to the motivation muscle.

How can you chunk your impossible goals into bite-sized fun?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re involved in any kind of selling or not, this fourth step in my Sales Management series is useful for everyone.

Why? Because it’s all something both you and I all need all the time.

Sales people need to it the most. For every entrepreneur, or at least the successful ones, it is the fundamental ingredient in any given day, project or business!

Read on to discover why…

Wilful Action

… is so important:

For starters, it’s the most blatantly obvious step of all. Whether you’re getting sales across the line or doing anything significant at all, Wilful Action is critical.

Duh. You already knew this.

Then why aren’t you doing it? Thing is, the most obvious step in the formula for Sales success (or indeed, “Life” success) is the step that entrepreneur wannabes ignore the most.

Here’s how they get away with it:

They convince themselves that it’s okay to stay embedded on the couch. They do this with a crazy notion they call “tomorrow”.

The idea is very seductive. Tomorrow is a magical place on the other side of the sunset, filled with boundless possibility and potential… and possibly unicorns.

Lazy folks, with ten years of habitual procrastination under the their belts, see it all happening tomorrow. Tomorrow is the place where they effortlessly launch themselves, with energy and joy, towards their goals.

So don’t worry about today.

In fact, you better rest up because tomorrow is going to be such a big one.

Time to wake up?

I’ve never met a single person who has lived a single day of tomorrow.

There is only ever today. Take that as deep and meaningful as you need to.

It is time to join the group of people who do things today.

It’s a small tribe, but it’s growing. Best part? It’s fun and it gets easier… day after day.

Do yourself a favour and make it happen… today.

PS Want more info on Wilful Action? Check out the riff I wrote (click here) in response to Seth Godin’s latest ebook.

Ever get frustrated with where you’re at in life or business?

I’m talking about those moments where we turn around, look at our selves with unusual honesty and realise that we’re not living up to our full potential.

Ever feel like you could have done better, tried a little harder or made more of a commitment?

I get these moments all the time – especially on those days where I don’t have meetings or client consultations… Those days, in other words, where I have total freedom over how I spend (or waste) my time.

No one ever plays the game of life at 100% and this article reveals the psychological reasons why.

Additionally, you’ll learn a proven and simple technique that consistently increases your performance – the easy way… even if you’ve never genuinely given anything “your all” before.

The Background…

For the last few years, I’ve run a (offline) coaching programme called “Peak Potential Plus”. It’s a solution for busy entrepreneurs who need a regular (monthly) sounding board and Jedi mind tricks expert to keep ‘em at peak performance.

Fortunately, being “that guy” put me in a position where I could learn from some super successful entrepreneurs – in exchange for tweaking their thinking for maximum effectiveness.

One of the most useful discoveries from this collaboration was a breakthrough in the psychology of “potential”.

“You should stay away from your potential, you know. It’s a lot like your bank balance – you always have a lot less than you think.”

- Irish Comedian Dylan Moran

Working with my entrepreneur clients and pals meant being a sideline spectator to many exciting business ventures.

I provided pearls of psychological wisdom while my clients did things like:

• Launch a new national television service
• Dealing with a 120 million dollar corporate takeover
• Starting a micro niche therapy practice
• Sharing the secrets of ancient Indian medical wisdom online
• Open a new flagship retail store

Massive diversity between clients, in other words, but also identical in one critical area:

Effort

Each person heading these revolutionary projects was forced to harness every scrap of their potential. They had to attempt to play a 110% game – all the time.

And guess what…

They failed.

Not a single one of these folks (including serial entrepreneurs with a track record of massive success) was able to consistently kick ass, day in, day out.

Any attempt resulted in the following:

An initial 12 – 48(max) hours of total, extreme performance

Followed by :

3 – 5 days of half-baked effort

OR

On going, overwhelming action but zero productivity

OR

Total “emergency vacation” burnout

It seemed that playing a “110% game” was not a long term option. The most common result was the 2nd one – loads of work hours (16+ per day) but very little useful action or productivity.

Why do we do this to ourselves

When we get fed up with our current performance or we decide we really want something, many people make a decision to go nuts… they invest enormous action and energy in a very short space of time.

They believe this will turn their life (or business) around.

They keep it up for a day or two, before going back to their old habits of procrastination… or worse, they burn themselves out and have to take a complete break.

The solution

The folks I was working with figured out that their new projects were doomed to failure if they kept up their old patterns of thinking and behaviour.

So we set out to create a smarter, sustainable approach to “getting stuff done” and “changing your life” that my clients field tested each day for six months.

The “Daily 1%” principal

Instead of “maximum performance” we committed to minimum performance!

Each day for the six month period, each client (and me too) would identify one area of our lives where we could take a tiny action to improve things.

The rules were simple: The proposed action must be SO tiny that it was effortlessly easy to accomplish – almost without noticing.

The only catch was this: Once we made the tiny change, we had to keep it…. Each and every day, forever.

This made everyone be very, very careful about each day’s new commitment.

“You don’t want to find out that the most you could possibly achieve, if you gave it your all, if you harvested every screed of energy within you, and devoted yourself to improving yourself, that all you would get to, would be maybe eating less cheesy snacks.”

- Dylan Moran

The trick to it was exactly that – committing to eating less cheesy snacks. We can all make a tiny change and keep it for ever.

In fact, we can all make a tiny, tiny change… every single day (and keep them for ever).

In the real world, this resulted in:

The TV entrepreneur broke his to-do list into teeny, tiny micro steps and started off only achieving one (a single email written) the first day. On the second day, he did two tasks and three on the third. Rinse and repeat.

The therapist committing to jogging either 1 minute longer (or 100 metres more, but in the same time) than the previous day. Every, single day.

The Indian life-science internet entrepreneur committed to things like posting a comment each day (for SEO value).

One client made one cold call on day 1… then two the next day, three calls on the 3rd day and so on. By the time he got to 100 days, he had enough cash flow in his business to hire a full time telemarketer!

Slow and steady incremental success

The real value of the Daily 1% strategy is the mathematics of “exponential” performance.

Instead of jumping to the top of the 110% game and burning out, we can slowly, incrementally work our way up to serious levels of performance… proving ourselves and practicing consistency along each step of the way.

The possibilities are endless here. Imagine working your way up (over 75 days) to 75% performance in some area… like your fitness, or cold calling for your business.

Imagine how easy it would then be to go to 76% (make just one more call…. run just one more minute).

Suddenly 80% isn’t so far away.

The real magic

The big point here is that the Daily 1% continues every day of your life – or at a minimum, 5 days per week.

The value of consistency (in cold calling, exercise or simply checking off the “to-do” list) is absolutely enormous.

Business empires are not built on 355 days of half-baked effort interspersed with 10 days of random, manic enthusiasm.

My clients and I personally discovered that true value of consistency.

The Daily 1% principal forces you to systematically increase your true potential.This opens up a whole new capacity for extraordinarily powerful stamina.

By committing to Daily 1%, you’ll be able to comfortably play a bigger and better game.

Imagine what that will feel like – when you look back 6 months, to the day when you committed to just trying a tiny bit harder and doing 1% more.

What are the areas in your life where you’re frustrated with your efforts?

For me (at time of writing), it has to be exercise and promoting my online business (I need to think less and do more).

What Daily 1% could you commit to, to improve things?

Let me know by leaving a comment below.

Here’s a very simple yet effective technique for narrowing the gap between planning and action.

Everyone makes plans, to-do lists and brainstorms… very few of us tick off as many tasks as we’d like. Personally, I scribbled massive to-do lists in my handy notebook for years without getting much action to happen.

I made a real big breakthrough when I learnt how to increase my instantly increase my action-taking abilities. Here’s how you can do it too…

The secret that bridges the gap between planning and action is simple: Plan to take action

What do I mean by that?

Most people make a really common mistake with their to-do lists: They write huge, significant tasks like “build a website” or “make 5 sales”. They do this because it feels good to “plan” for such big achievements.

The big (important) stuff seldom gets ticked off because huge goals appear overwhelming and become too easy to procrastinate.

The solution is to break your massive, important tasks into bite-sized, achieveable action steps.

I would take:

“Make 5 Sales”

and turn it into:

“Select 100 prospects from database”

“Make 100 calls”

“Set 20 Appointments”

“Make 5 Sales”

The secret, in this example, is the first task. Selecting names from a database is super easy for any sales person. It is an action step that can happen well within their comfort zone, at their desk. No effort required.

By beginning the list with something so simple and easy, it becomes easy and simple to take immediate action.

What easy, simple actions (that get you started on major goals) can you take today? Post your reply in the comment section below…

We’ve established that the biggest obstacle most people face, when it comes to setting a new direction for life and work, is fear.

Even when you’re totally prepared and ready to get decisive and take action, a little knot of terror in your stomach usually remains. So let’s find out how to get rid of it…

Half the time, fear is inappropriate and unwarranted – which basically means you’re responding to your past conditioning, like someone with a phobia, only the feeling is probably not so intense (I hope).

Most of us are conditioned at some level to be anxious about trying new things. My experience, working with clients, suggests that (nine times out of ten) this is because of our schooling.

For the majority of those important, personality-forming years, we are conditioned to be punished when we fail and rewarded when we find easy success. So when we start stressing out about a new career, business or whatever, it’s because our unconscious mind is back in school – worrying that failure is round the corner.

Here’s the big shift – the one thing you really need to get:

The emotion of fear preceeds an extraordinary breakthrough

That’s right! Think about it: The times in your life when you have exceeded expectations and done something spectacular… did you feel nervous or anxious right before that? If not, go try bungy jumping and get back to me!

In the modern world, discounting all bear attacks, every time we feel fear (when prepared to the best of our ability) it’s a good indication that something super-exciting is just around the corner.

How do you think your life could change if you adopted a new belief:

“Whenever I feel Fear, it means that I need to prepare for something extraordinary to happen”

Try it for a week… I promise the gap between your goals and results will get considerably smaller!

Peter Shallard

Whether you’re giving up a secure job to do what you love, or creating any major change for yourself, there is one psychological secret you need to “get”.

This post (and the series that  follow it) provides insights into overcoming the psychological obstacle that pops up when we humans start getting ambitious. Read on for practical tools to overcome this and the more subtle self-sabotage techniques like procrastination and analysis paralysis.

If you’re someone who has considered starting their own business, making a major career change or shaking up your own personal “status-quo” in any form, I would guess that you’ve experienced a seriously nasty, gut clenching feeling.

These “sphincter tightning moments,” as one of my client’s lovingly refers to them, tend to happen everytime we start planning a major change in life. They also hold back 90% of the population from taking serious action towards achieving their extraordinary goals.

The first step to overcoming these mini panic-attacks is to:

1. Identify what it is you’re actually feeling
2. Determine whether or not it’s actually appropriate to feel that way

Fear is actually a very useful emotion. When we’re walking through the forest and a bear jumps out at us, our body pumps full of adrenaline. This is the fight or flight reflex.

As a pre-conditioned reflex, this was damn useful when we lived in the jungle. However in the modern world, over half of the fear most people feel is inappropriate. This means that we’re getting scared – but there isn’t any bears around!

So when we work out that we’re having a fearful, anxious moment or bothering thoughts that hold us back, we must then work out if the fear we’re feeling is appropriate or not. Fear is a powerfully protective emotion – it stops us being eaten by wild animals.

If there is no real danger, then it means the fear you’re feeling isn’t really very appropriate. In fact, all it really means is:

There is an event coming up you need to prepare for…

That’s right. That’s what fear means – so you’ve got to prepare yourself for life changing decisions (like quitting your day job)… and once you’ve done enough preparation and totally convinced yourself that you’re ready, the fear should disappear.

So, are you feeling:

• Nervous
• Anxious
• Stressed
• Scared
• Terrified!

… about a big change, decision or event coming up? Does the idea of doing something extraordinary freak you out?

This could be a message from your unconscious mind telling you to prepare.

Want to know what to do after you’ve prepared? Find out in an upcoming blog update – subscribe to get it straight to your inbox

Peter Shallard