Yesterday I was working with my coaching clients and I had a good laugh accompanied by an epiphany. One of my clients summed up our topic beautifully when she said that procrastination “is like laying in bed, eating bon-bons, praying for great abs.”

Thank you, Laura Barker! What an astute observation!

I hear real estate agents talk about all the things they want to change in their business. We all have a lengthy list either in our heads or on paper of what we would like to get done. When agents get frustrated because they can’t seem to make progress on their list, I ask them what happened. Often they focused on how badly they wanted to reach the goal but admit they didn’t actually put any work into it because they got too busy, were distracted, or felt the project was too complex to make the progress they wanted.

Building a successful real estate business takes a lot more than just the desire to get things done; it requires that you dig deep and do the work that is necessary to propel your business forward.

If you want a successful past client following then you have to do the work of following up consistently with your past clients. No hoping and praying here. What is required is good old fashioned connecting with your database.

If you want to be a top blogger then you will need to put together an aggressive blogging plan and will need to be consistent with what you do and how often you blog .

I loved what Laura had to say yesterday because it was a great way to visualize the concept of procrastination. Sometimes we don’t realize what profound brilliance we possess; Laura’s statement was brilliant.

In the end, the problem is not that there are not enough hours in the day. The real challenges are the other tasks agents allow to get in the way that seem more pressing than the tasks such as client follow-up, blogging, etc because they don’t have a client on the other side demanding it gets done. The other main challenge is that new projects can be overwhelming because they are unknown.

However, just like 5 minute abs, you can have a whole new personal discipline outlook if you apply my 5 Minute Rule.

I tell agents that when they come up against a project they feel is too big for them to tackle is to take it one small step at a time. That small step is to simply spend five minutes on it. Do you know how powerful it is to spend just 5 minutes on a project that seems overwhelming? When I am in over my head and need to move forward on something that seems daunting to me, I simply resign myself to working on the project for five minutes. That is usually enough time for me to begin to get my head around it and decide how I might tackle it. About half the time I wind up spending more time on the project right there and then and the other half of the time I get the project into my head and spend some brain time actually working on solutions, not just dreading and avoiding it.

Do you know that most of the time the challenge is not the project itself but the barriers we erect in our minds that keep us from completing the projects that we need to complete to move our business forward?

So if you want killer abs and want to excel in your business, don’t rely on eating bon-bons and praying. I suggest implementing my 5 Minute Rule for both. Your business and waistline will thank you.