This week, we’re tackling a nasty demon that afflicts many of us building a business: procrastilearning. Get my best tips to know when you really do need to take another course and when you don’t.
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Transcript
Hello, and welcome to season three, episode two of the Grow Your Side Hustle Podcast, the podcast to help women grow the business of their dreams, whether they want to run it as a long term side hustle, or build it into their main business so they can control their time with their families and control their money. I’m your host, Jennifer Roland Cadiente, here to provide short actionable episodes that will help you build your business.
In this week’s episode, I’m going to admit that I am Jennifer, and I am addicted to learning.
That’s right, we’re going to talk about when you spend all of your time progressed to learning instead of actually doing anything in your business. So do you think you might be a learning addict too? You might be if every time you see an email that comes across your desk with a new course, you think, “oh, yeah, I need that I can’t do anything until I take that course, that course is exactly what I need to push myself into business success.” Or if you find yourself looking for courses, thinking you can’t take an action until you learn more about it. Or if you just find that you’ve spent a ton of money on courses, some of which you didn’t even do, you just enjoyed the fact that you purchased it and know that it’s there when you need it. And I’ve been there, believe me, especially at the end of last year, you know, there were all of those emails from people who wanted to, you know, sell last minute, last year, cheapest it’s ever been access to their courses, and I absolutely bought a few. And have I taken any of them? No, it’s almost March. And I have not taken a single one of the courses that I bought last year at the end of the year. Now, I bought courses throughout the course of the year, and I did take them. I bought courses previously that I have taken, bought some previously that I haven’t. But I still have my login details so that I can go in there when I have the time. And I know deep down that I’m using those courses to procrastinate on doing something that I don’t want to do. So what can we do to make sure that we’re just playing taking action instead of procrastinating? The first is to stop yourself and say, Hey, is this really the magic bullet that I need? Or am I just trying to postpone doing something I don’t want to do? Am I just trying to give myself another excuse for why I haven’t been successful yet? And if, if that’s what you’re doing, then give it a day. See if you still really need the course tomorrow when you get up? And if so then maybe you know, go ahead and buy it. If not, then make a list of the things that you need to do in your business. What are the actions that you really need to be taking to move it forward? Do you need to make more of an effort to make great social media posts? Do you need to do more promoting of your products? Do you need to spend time researching and reaching out to prospects? You know if if you’re running a service based business, then your products are just the services that you do for your ideal clients. So if you’re not fully booked with that service work all the time that you would have allotted to your business should be spent on marketing your business.
So you know, spend some time on LinkedIn if that’s where your people are Facebook, Instagram, wherever your people are. Spend time there connecting with them, figuring out what they need and helping them see that you are the person that can give it to them. If you need to make more products make new products and launch those. Just say, you know, say you’re gonna do it for five minutes, say you’re gonna do it for 10 minutes, whatever, you know amount of time sounds doable. And chances are that when you get to the end of that time, you’re going to be into it. And so you’re going to continue doing what you need to do. If you need to set a timer, to get yourself focused, set a timer, you don’t have to get up when the timer is done. But that timer will make you think, Okay, I’ve got to get into what I’m doing, I can’t surf social media, I can’t look for new courses to take, I can’t do these other things, I need to get focused. And that way, you can actually start taking action. And if you have some spare time, you can just make a list of all the actions that you really need to take, take some time to estimate out how long those might take. And then you can see if you know, you can make, you can separate that list out like you know, these are some five-minute tasks, these are 15-minute tasks, this is an hour-long task. And then when you’ve got 15 minutes before an appointment, you could instead of scrolling social media, like we all do, or playing a game on your phone, pull out your list, get a 15-minute task and do it get three five-minute tasks and do them or get two five-minute tasks and spend five minutes scrolling social media as a reward before your meeting starts.
The corollary here, the other thing that we need to think about, though, is that there are times when a course is what will push us forward. So how do you decide if you want to take a course to procrastinate, or if you take a course, you need to take this course to really and truly move your business forward. When you’re taking that day, to kind of think do I really need this? Or am I am I just trying to, to pretend that I’m working and not actually getting anything done? Think about how whether you’ve struggled to do that thing, of course that I’m in right now is to build visibility online and grow your email list. I knew that I had struggled with that. And I knew that I wasn’t taking action. So joining this course, gave me specific strategies to follow. And it forced me to actually do the things. So if there’s a course like that, or another one that might be really useful is Facebook ads, or Amazon ads or Instagram ads with whichever, you know, places you’re selling. If you want to really dive deep into creating effective ads that are cost effective, so that your click rates are not you know, you’re not paying $4 or $5 or $6 for a lead for a $4 or $5 or $6 product. Of course, like that could really, you know, change, change your income. But if it hasn’t, if it’s not something that you’ve really struggled to do, you think you won’t have the accountability to do it on your own. Then, you know, maybe take a pass on the course, chances are the course is going to be offered again. You know, we, when we’re copywriting to sell a course, we do put a fair amount of language in there that makes it sound like you’re just gonna miss out, you know, it’s the urgency, you’ve got to do this now or else you’re never going to do it. And there may be times when you know the price gets raised next time, or you know the person is is retiring and is never going to teach this course again. So sometimes the urgency is real. Sometimes it’s just that we want you to sign up. You know, we want you to sign up this time, next time. So think about whether it is truly urgent or it is something that you can you can procrastinate until the next time it’s offered so that you can quit procrastinating inside of your business.
What I would love to hear this week is courses that have moved your business forward and the courses that you have paid for and never took courses that were an absolute complete and utter distraction so that you never got anything done on your business. And it didn’t really help move the needle forward. So let’s talk about that in that Facebook group. Again, that’s the Grow your side hustle community on Facebook, search it up or use the link in the show notes. And let’s stop procrastinating and just start taking action. You can also sign up for the email list so that you can get notifications of new things you can access and get into that grow your side hustle Resource Library, which has some of the tools I’ve created to help you achieve what you want with your side hustle. Got to leave your day job checklist, a mindset reset a goals cheat sheet some other things that that I think are really useful. If you’ve liked today’s episode, please feel free to share it with someone that you think might enjoy it. And click the button to subscribe in your podcast app and leave a review because that always helps more people find us. Alright, talk to you next time. Hope to see you in that Facebook group.