In this poignant episode, Eric Twiggs, Author of The Discipline of Now, shares how he helps entrepreneurs and business leaders excel by showing them how to manage time effectively and exploring their gifts and talents.
You will discover:
– The surprising cost of not having a … boss
– Why pessimists are more likely to procrastinate
– 2 powerful principles to prevent procrastination
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello, and welcome. Welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast. And I’m here with yet another high demand coach. And that is Eric Twiggs. He’s a founding partner and president of The what now movement. His mission is to build high performing entrepreneurs, authors and career professionals who are prepared for life’s unexpected curveballs. He is the author of The Discipline of Now – 12 practical principles to overcome procrastination. And the discipline of now has been recognized as a global top 10 finalists for the 2020 author elite awards in the category of the best self help book. Now this recognition was based on a combination of the following criteria cover design, content, popularity and social contribution. What’s remarkable though, in all of that is the amount of time Eric has spent coaching, I think I saw some was 28,000 sessions that you use to come up with the concepts that are in this book and prove it out. And so Eric, I’m dying to dive into this and just see what this is all about. But before we get there, actually want to pause for a moment, rewind a little bit, and and hear from you tell us your story. What were you doing before getting into all of this? And how did that ultimately lead you to make the leap?
Eric Twiggs
So really, it started for me, back in college, it was my senior year at Hampton University. And I was having this conversation with a good friend of mine named Danielle. And I have to admit that in those days, he and I were a little different. He was all about his purpose, and I was all about the party. And he would always say, Eric, you need to get serious and get focused and figure out what you want to do. And I’m like, Man, loosen up, we’ve got plenty of time for all that serious stuff. Are you coming to the frat party with me or not? So Pam goes by several weeks, I don’t talk to him. But then I get a phone call from his mother informing me of the fact that he was killed in a car accident, changed everything for me. And they sent me a message that maybe I don’t have the time that I think, to leave the legacy that I want to leave. And that’s the starting point. That’s really when I started focusing on becoming as productive as possible, overcoming procrastination and figuring out how I’m managing my time. But that’s really the reason that you and I are talking right now that experience that I went through back in college.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow, wow. So fast forward a couple of years, from your college days to now you’ve coached with 1000s of individuals, what would you say is some of the most important work that you’re doing today?
Eric Twiggs
So today, I coach entrepreneurs, right? So I’m your procrastination prevention partner, the author of the discipline of now, I’m the host of the 30 minute hour podcast, and I help these entrepreneurs to ditch their excuses and beat procrastination. So they can make more money, get more done and feel more confident.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s, that’s awesome. And what would you say are some of the biggest challenges to doing that? Right? Why is it that procrastination is so rampant even even in these hard charging entrepreneurial types?
Eric Twiggs
So the challenge with procrastination, especially if you’re talking about an entrepreneur, is that the entrepreneur doesn’t have a boss, right? So if there’s something that you don’t like to do, you can just put it all right. And if you don’t really have that person to say, No, you need to get back on task, as opposed to if you work in a corporate environment, and your boss is like, Hey, do you get the project done? And so one of the main reasons that people procrastinate is task aversion. They just, it’s not that deep. They just don’t like doing it. Right. And they’ll avoid it if they can. And so the other problem with procrastination is that a lot of times there’s not a, an immediate negative consequence. Right? There’s not like you put off right in the report. And then the procrastination police bricky doing that and in rescue. So yeah, that’s so you feel like you’ve gotten away with it. And listen, you wait till the last minute to do a presentation. And then it feels like it went, Well, everybody’s patting you on the back. But now you start telling yourself, oh, yeah, I work better under pressure. But you don’t know that there are consequences. You’re hurting yourself, you’re hurting your reputation. The work, especially if you’re doing something that’s creative, isn’t as good as it would be if you started when you should have. So for those reasons, it’s important that we really get out in front of this and get our arms around your destination.
Scott Ritzheimer
A friend of mine actually shared something with me that has really stuck with me, but he he does a lot of public speaking. So there’s kind of three levels of readiness for public speaking in his mind. No one is level one haven’t prepared at all go out totally winging it. Right. And, and he’s like, I’m okay at that. Yeah. Is I wait and took almost the last minute and then try and scramble together some halfhearted plan, and then trip over myself the entire time or three, I sit down and I really work through it, I get my reps, and I do it several times. And that’s where I really nail it. And he said, for him, he there needs to be one or three right to is that that middle area? And I think I think it illustrates one, there’s some truth to that. But to it illustrates a big problem that I’ve seen with it is, even when we kind of think we don’t procrastinate, but we actually do we push it off until the second to last minute, we oftentimes haven’t given ourselves enough time to really process it. And then it doesn’t go as well as we’d like. And it kind of confirms the belief that oh, we should just wing it instead. Right? It was I was better off not messing with it at all. Have you seen that show up? And how do you help folks overcome it?
Eric Twiggs
Yeah, so the thing is, it takes your if your ideas take time to incubate, right? If you wait to the last minute, you’re you’re just doing something together. Whereas if you start, the best thing you can do is let’s say you hear, okay, 90 days from now, we want you to do this presentation, the best thing you can do is to start immediately, even if it’s a small step, it doesn’t have to be something that’s huge. It could be doing research, it could be I would start with it with an outline. And it’s when you start, then all of a sudden, the next steps start revealing you kind of put things in motion. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been preparing something and thinking I’m going in one direction, then I have a conversation with somebody, or I hear something or a guest on my podcast says something and I’m like, oh my goodness, I didn’t think about it that way. And then the end result is something that’s completely different from what I had in mind. But if I just waited until the last minute, all of that. And then when you’re presenting or speaking, most people are going to say, hey, great job. A night. I’ve had presentations that ad muted and really go well. And everybody was telling me oh, man, yeah, that was great. Oh, excellent. So you have to be careful with that. And then the other thing is that’ll help you to people always ask me about how do I get rid of all this fear and anxiety that I feel? And the biggest thing is preparation. I just think the more you’re prepared, the less you have to fear.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And so I can I can kind of hear the thoughts and I’ve had this conversation. I know you’ve have to, they’re thinking, Okay, that’s great. But I don’t have time, like I’ve got nine things that were do three days ago, I’ve got to get them done. So you know, the entrepreneur, especially if they’re still like solopreneur mode or staying in solopreneur mode, it’s like, you know, if it’s gonna get done, you have to do it. And so how can someone who’s in that position where they they’ve got maybe more than need more to get done than can get done in a day? How do they start chipping away at that?
Eric Twiggs
Well, you have to prioritize right? It problem isn’t having too much to do, it’s not knowing what to do next. It’s really the key is really setting you’re good, there’s always time to do something that’s a priority. Right? If I said, Hey, you know what, I’ve got $100,000 in this briefcase, and the only way you can get it, if you find the time to prepare for this presentation. I guarantee you, you will find the time. Okay, what you have going on, you will find the time to prepare. Because why? Because the $100,000 is a priority. And we always make time for those things that are priorities. So here’s something else I would say, say Express for the solopreneur, I would strongly consider investing in a virtual assistant is i i can just tell you firsthand, it’s been a game changer for me. And it’s really helped to the lot of the things I was just spinning my wheels doing now I could just hand that off to her. She’s better at it than me some of some of these administrative things. She didn’t make my presentations, my PowerPoint look like that at another level. So I would I would recommend that as well. If you can get a vest in a virtual assistant that can really help you with that type of challenge that you feel.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, well, I just recently brought on actually found a group that was a team of folks that have different specialties and they’re all coordinated by one person. And it has been it’s been an absolute game changer. And so I couldn’t agree more with that advice. So I know in your book, you’ve got 12 different principles and 12 might be a little much to cover in the context here. But I’m wondering if you could just kind of outline what would you say, especially for entrepreneurs, or founders, business owners, what would you say are the two or three that they should really start dialing in on first?
Eric Twiggs
Yes, so So, first thing is attitude. And when I get to chapter seven of the book, I’m talking about the procrastination prevention pyramid. And if you follow this pyramid, you’ll find that you’re overcoming procrastination, they’re really at the foundation of the pyramid is your attitude. And that’s really at the foundation of your success. And for people who are are stuck, people who like if you’re an entrepreneur, and just things just aren’t moving 80% of that is a mindset issue. In most cases, so you really have to, and the challenge is, is we have this in towards negativity, right? And we think, am I we’re just naturally if you’re in business, you’ve been trained up to this point to look for the problems, look for the opportunities, right, so you have to watch it, because that that can turn you into a pessimist. And if you’re a pessimist, you’re more likely to procrastinate, you really have to, to break a bad habit, you have to bring in a better one. And that really focusing on gratitude, focusing on like, I have my clients, they have to tell me about their wins. Right for we, when we start our session, what are the wind and stuff we talked the last time, and I people who, when they first start, they don’t have any wins, oh, no, nothing happened to me good and the entire week now. And now they’ll have 15 to 20. So that’s really the edge of foundational step, if you want to overcome procrastination is making sure that you are consistently focusing on your attitude and what you’re grateful for. So that’s one thing. The next step I would focus on is awareness. And awareness is critical. You need to be aware of like your power times, for example, you know, are you a morning person? Or are you a night owl. And the key is to schedule your high priority activities during those times of day, when you have the most energy, and just really having that aware to even like for me, me being a morning person, though I try to schedule, the more involved and challenging conversation I’m going to have early, when I knew I’m up, and I’ve got the energy and not five o’clock on Friday. That’s not gonna go as well. So it’s really, it’s about being aware of your power times, being aware of the people that you’re around, and even like your personality as it relates to the tendency to procrastinate.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. I want to go back to attitude real quick, because I think it’s a rare entrepreneur that comes out and says, I have an attitude problem, right? Or maybe even like, would recognize that they’re being a pessimist, right, I would say most entrepreneurs have, they’ve kind of taken the leap, you know, not all of them. But a lot of them, you know, have done it in the face of some pretty lousy odds, you know, and so they see an opportunity to go after it. But there’s so many challenges and so many problems that that starts to consume more and more of our vision. Right. And and I think what’s what’s helpful about this, and, you know, if I could coming out of some of the questions that you’ve asked is, yes, there’s always a next problem. But are you stopping to take the time to say what went well? Right. And, and I think that’s something that, you know, again, I don’t think a lot of folks that I’ve worked with would would out of the gate to they’ve got an attitude problem, but they’re almost always overwhelmed by the problems that they’re facing. And you make a great point that that is pessimism, right. So the question that I have that you made the statement that something along the lines of pessimists are more likely to procrastinate, why is that?
Eric Twiggs
Well, all the studies show that, you know, if you if you have a pessimistic attitude, you’re more likely to put things off. And you’re more likely to procrastinate, if you think the glass is half empty, you know, you think that you know, there’s just no good people out there, you’re going to, you’re more likely to delay taking the steps to find a good person, as opposed to if you think that you know what, there are great people out there, I just need to find them, you’re more likely to get started sooner. So that it’s just that that little difference right there. And they’ve done studies where they’ve said that the typical person 80% of their self talk is negative. Like most of the day, if you just this unchecked, you just pay attention to what your is mostly negative. And so that’s just making that shift. And now it’s kind of like the more you write your wins down, the more wins you’ll have to write down. Because I will set now you start noticing things that you didn’t before. So so that’s a critical step and you can’t really move your business forward to where you want it to scale it to where you want it until you really address that foundational step.
Scott Ritzheimer
And, and I think another part of it is it’s not necessarily you’re always pessimistic or always optimistic, right, like, in one of the things you mentioned earlier, this idea of task aversion. So you may take the most opportunistic person, but when it comes time to go in and actually do their books, you know, let’s say they don’t have a VA yet, right? And they’re in what we call early struggle, and they’re not quite all that profitable, yet, they know they’re gonna see a number, that’s not the number that they want. They’re gonna put it off month after month after month. And so you can be a very opportunistic, very optimistic person, but still have pessimism in a couple of key areas, and it can have dire consequences. Would you agree?
Eric Twiggs
I agree, 100%. And that again, that’s where the awareness comes in, right? Because like, I’ll talk to people who say, Oh, Eric, I always procrastinate, I’m just a procrastinator. Now, like I’ve yet as long as I’ve been focusing on this, I have yet to meet someone that procrastinates in every area of their life. I mean, some people procrastinate at home, when it comes to household chat tasks and chores. But then when they’re at work, they’re on point. So you just really need to be able to have that awareness to understand. And just be aware that, for example, the bookkeeping now might not be something you look forward to. You’re not like, Yes, I have to go a beat books today. All right. But recognize that because you know, there’s going to be consequences if the books don’t get done. You don’t have to do it. But somebody has to do it. Somebody you trust needs to do the books. So I think it’s that awareness level. And can you put the systems in place that it’s happening without you having to do it?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, excellent. So here’s a question I like to ask all my guests. And it’s this. What is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening or watching today knew?
Eric Twiggs
Well, so this isn’t really a secret, but it appears like it is like the value of like this something you want to do. Finding somebody who has already done it at a high level, and just doing what they did. You’re really just using that model. I just so many people try to reinvent the wheel. Right. And I heard it said that, you know, success isn’t necessarily just mental. It’s also environmental. You really have to get around the people who have the results are really like the question you need to ask if you’re starting something like if you’re starting a podcast, let’s say I can say because I’ve started a podcast, okay, who is successful, who was successful in my space that I can talk to? What do they do? What can I listen to their show? What what what are their habits? How do they prepare? And it’s like, it’s almost like, That’s a secret. Because a lot of people just try to go at it. And see, that’s the debt. When you’re an entrepreneur, you feel like, Oh, I got this, I’m gonna, I’m gonna press forward, I’m gonna take the chance, I’m gonna make it happen. But you really need to get around people who have done what you’re trying to do.
Scott Ritzheimer
There was a saying that we used to use being from Atlanta and the south here, kind of fit, but we would say, don’t tear down a fence until you know why it was built.
Eric Twiggs
That’s good. That’s good.
Scott Ritzheimer
And I think for entrepreneurs are great at tearing down fences. And oftentimes, that’s right, you know, like we’ve got, we can have a track record of tearing down fences that should never have been there. But when we don’t take the time to figure out why they were there in the first place, you know, to your point, if you you’re doing you don’t have to do it the same way that someone else did, but you should at least understand how they did it. And if you want to improve it, or tweak it, then you’re doing it from a place of knowledge and, and stability, right? Like we actually understand the thing as opposed to just winging it, making it up as you go.
Eric Twiggs
Absolutely. No, I totally agree with that.
Scott Ritzheimer
So another question for you here. I’m actually gonna shift gears a little bit I’m gonna have you take off your your accountability partner, and, and procrastination prevention partner hat, put on your CEO hat for us for a moment, jump down into the ring with the rest of us founders and leaders and share with us what’s the next stage of growth look like for your business? And what obstacles do you think you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Eric Twiggs
Wow, that’s a great question. So I’m really looking to kind of get back into the speaking. I think once the pandemic happened, I didn’t focus as much on really growing my business through speaking. You know, we got into this whole virtual world I speak now, but I’m really I see myself, grow my business a couple of ways. Number one, really getting back out and focusing on my speaking and getting in front of people and really growing things that way and then just continuing to grow through my podcast, the 30 minute hour I mean, we’re, we’re at like 915,000 Total downloads, that that continues to grow. So it is really using that just to get in front of people and have my guess, who I can ultimately do business with as well. So those are two areas that I’m really looking to maximize your going forward. But that’s a great question by the way. This is a podcast. I appreciate that question. That’s great.
Scott Ritzheimer
We would be remiss to not said, well, we’ll make sure folks know how to get a copy of your book to you but your podcast, right. remarkable, remarkable podcast. But tell us a little bit about, you know, the what the why and where we can find it.
Eric Twiggs
Yeah, so it’s a 30 minute hour podcast. It’s a personal development podcast for the seven figure entrepreneur who’s looking to level up and become unstoppable. So I had my co host, Ted Phils. He’s the CEO of his own IT company. He’s had it for 27 years. You can find the 30 minute hour on Apple, podcast, Spotify, any of those places where you consume podcast content.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. And so there’s folks listening, they’re like, ah, Eric’s got, me, you know, it’s like, I’ve been doing that that’s exactly what I’m doing. And they they’re tired of procrastinating in areas that they know are important and they need to move forward. So how can they find more out about the work that you do and get in contact with you?
Eric Twiggs
Visit my website, ericmtwiggs.com. You can see information about getting the book The discipline of now, logging on to the podcast. And that’s the best way to connect with me and even email me my email address. You’ll find that when you get to the website,
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. ericmtwigs.com. Go get a copy of the book, the discipline of now and you will not regret it. Do it now. Don’t procrastinate. All right. Eric, thank you so much for being on the show. It was just a pleasure having you there’s so much good stuff in here. I really appreciate it. And for those of you listening and watching today, you know your time and attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did. And I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Eric Twiggs
Eric M. Twiggs is a founding partner and president of The What Now Movement. His mission is to build high performing entrepreneurs, authors, and career professionals, who are prepared for life’s unexpected curveballs. He is the author of The Discipline of Now: 12 Practical Principles to Overcome Procrastination. The Discipline of Now has been recognized as a Global Top Ten Finalist for the 2020 Author Elite Awards in the category of Best Self Help Book. This recognition was based on the combination of the following criteria: cover design, content, popularity, and social contribution.
Want to learn more about Eric Twigg’s work at Eric M. Twiggs? Check out his website at http://www.ericmtwiggs.com/
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