The Real Reason You Can’t Make Progress

when they try to progress a part of their mind tells them don't bother unless we're going to go the whole distance there's no point in starting to date unless we know it's the one and if you kind of think about this what does this allow your mind to do it allows you to procrastinate it allows you to not do that hard thing it allows you to not deal with uncertainty I don't know if this is going to work out or not but I definitely know that if I binge watch a particular show I will have

fun today and this is the calculation that your mind makes today we're going to talk about how to choose progress over procrastination and what a wonderful clickbait kind of like oh like today we're going to teach you how to progress instead of procrastinate but legitimately that's what we're going to talk about because if we sort of look at our lives we sort of see that okay in a lot of ways I should progress right I should work on this particular Google AdWords certification I need to polish up my resume I need to you know go

through this course of emotional awareness so that I can be more emotionally available my relationships there's all kinds of stuff that we should do and we want to do these things right we value these things are important to us this actually this progress is important to me what I want more than anything in life is to make more money have a successful relationship etc etc etc the problem is that we don't do those things right instead we just end up procrastinating which seems really confusing right why do we do I I don't care about binge

watching Netflix for like 15 hours or playing video games what I really care about is dealing with this crippling loneliness but that's not actually how we function we don't our actions are not aligned with our perceived goals and here's the main thing to understand see the body the brain and the mind will do what they think is best so if I have a choice between eating a salad or eating a cookie in that moment there are all kinds of calculations that something within me is making either my my stomach my brain or even my mind

that make me choose the bad thing and the craziest thing about progress and procrastination is that based on the calculations that you were making progress is not a good thing progress is the enemy and should be avoided and procrastination is the thing that we should be doing that's why we do it right so all human organisms operate based on this biological principle of doing on some level what the organism thinks is best so in the case of video games we know that dopamine circuitry is all messed up but that's where that signal is coming from

and I've worked with a couple of hundred people probably at this point who come to me with this problem hey Dr K I'm stuck I may be like I've worked with an entrepreneur for example who can grind all day when it comes to their business but for the life of them they cannot like engage in relationships oh the only thing that's missing in my life is relationships but I just can't do it I have to do this work I have to do this I have to do this and then at the other end of the

spectrum I've worked with people who were like video game addicts who need to put together their life and are filled with shame but for some reason they can't progress and what I've found working with these people is that about 95% of them make a particular kind of miscalculation in their mind so remember that the what happens in your brain and your mind and whatever is that you're making some kind of calculation right there's some kind of subconscious calculation that drives your behavior and even though we think progress is a good thing there is another part

of us that is calculating progress as a bad thing when there should be a plus sign there's like a negative instead of a positive and the crazy thing is when I work with these people and we discover these particular miscalculations it opens the floodgates for them to progress forward because these people will come in and they'll say like oh I struggle with motivation it's not an issue of motivation it's that there's a bottleneck something even though you can try to cultivate all the motivation and go to workshops and go to an ashram and go find

yourself and like join some like group right or like some entrepreneur startup WhatsApp group you can do all of these things to cultivate your motivation but as long as your mind is making this miscalculation it won't work so you may Wonder okay what are these miscalculations and I'll share them with you okay so we're going to go through about six of them and what I find is that in 95% of people that I work with they are doing this particular thought process which turns the positive a progress into a negative when people hear about our

coaching program their first response is usually why why would I work with another human being when I can watch YouTube videos all on my own working with a coach is about amplifying your time and effort we're great at wanting things and even making some progress but we usually struggle with follow through or have some kind of setback and that's exactly why working with a coach can help you accomplish particular things in a fixed amount of time they'll help you set appropriate goals keep you accountable towards that progress and ultimately even work through the setback facts

that you will inevitably face so check out the link in the description below to see if coaching is right for you so the first one is it's not enough so anytime someone thinks about making progress your mind if you pay attention your mind will do something where you're like hey I should do this particular thing and your mind will tell you it's not enough therefore don't do it because what is the point of expending effort if it isn't enough so I'll give you all a simple example okay so I was working with someone who was

an entrepreneur and the example that I mentioned earlier they were interested in their in building a relationship they're like okay I'm someone who wants to put together my life right so like I'm going to put together my life I'm going to start this company I'm going to grind I'm going to learn marketing I'm going to do all this kind of stuff and then they come to me and they're like you know the one thing I'm missing in my life is I'm lonely and I don't you know I I I I haven't been able to find

a partner and then we kind of tunnel down into okay like what about dating and things like that and that's when I sort of realize when they're talking to me they're like yeah well like I don't see the point in dating and I was like wait what what what do you mean you don't see the point in dating well like I don't have time for a relationship in my life right now I'm working 80 hours a week and I don't have time for another person so why don't you go on dates well anytime I think

about going on a date I don't have the space for a relationship so there's no point and now this is really really subtle but it's like really important to understand because now what we're doing is if you want a relationship that presumably starts with dating but the second that you think about dating your mind says okay this only brings us one % of the way and we need to go 99% of the way right we need to create space in our lives for this person and there's no point in getting started because just starting dating

isn't going to be enough but it's not just examples like this and I've seen that same example with people who are like developers at Fang companies and things like that it's also people who are like in their basement at the age of 24 younger versions of myself who need to put together their lives and we sit down and we say okay well like what do you need to put together like I need to put together everything okay so let's get started and what does their mind do their mind performs a very very interesting bit of

mental gymnastics oh there's no point in finding a relationship because I don't have a job progressing in this path is not worth it because there is so much left to go and I want youall to just think about this for a second if I have to go from 1 to or 0 to 100 and I go forward 10 points right so if I go 10% of the way there and my mind tells me this is not enough what does ises that do to my motivation right now I've literally moved forward 10% but my mind tells

me this is not enough scratch it because now we have to go from 0o to 100 unless we can go from 0 to 100 there's no point in getting started so this is the first miscalculation that the majority of people will make okay now another quick caveat here is that what I found is that people will sort of make one of these miscalculations very consistently maybe two maybe three so not everyone makes all of these that's why we're sharing all six with you okay the second one is similar but subtly different and the reason we're

sort of illustrating this is because we want to sort of give you a clue as to what to look for in your mind so the second one is there's no point in starting unless I Can Go the whole distance so this may sound a lot like the first one and they're somewhat related but honestly like it literally when people talk about it they say different things right so in one situation people are saying like Okay I'm doing this but it's not enough and I need to be doing more I need to be doing more I

need to be doing more in the other version of this what this is is there's no point in getting started unless I can go go the whole distance so I was working with someone who was trying to get back into school so they had been in school twice in University they had dropped out twice because they had picked kind of the wrong major or whatever happened they got into video games they got into pot whatever we don't really know exactly what happened and so I talked to them and I asked them okay what's what's your

goal right and their goal is like I need to finish college like I need to get some kind of degree so that I can you know find the right job and then I can start then I can get financially independent then I can focus on relationship so like the first thing that I need to do is like finish school fair enough right but then when I talk to this person like okay what's you know what's getting in the way why don't you apply or you know what's getting in the way and they kind of say

well there's like there's no point in starting unless I Can Go the whole distance I've already tried starting twice right and it I didn't go the whole distance so I don't want to do that again like I don't want to go through like like the start of school again and then just drop out later so what I need to know before I get started is that the whole thing will be complete I need to know that the whole distance will be complete and unless I go the whole distance there's no point in getting started and

if you kind of think about it right like this person is not wrong this is logical like if you guys have this thought you're going to say to yourself yes Dr K that's exactly what I do like what's the point of failing a third time right I need to know that I Can Go the Distance but I want youall to just stop and think about that for a second think about it critically do you ever know that you are going to go the whole distance before you get started right that's like impossible like I don't

know if y'all can predict the future I can't predict the future and it's not just the situation like college I've also seen this in relationships where people are like I don't want to invest in this relationship unless I know they're the one and I want yall to think about how self-defeating this is right so you want a relationship you can't predict the future you don't know if this is the one or not right and for the record I don't think that there is a the one I think that relationship is built based on you and

them working together over time you build up to being in a relationship with being the one it's not something that you find you don't find the one just on the street so this is the second miscalculation that people make which is that when they try to progress a part of their mind tells them don't bother unless we're going to go the whole distance and this is the really subtle and sneaky thing about the mind because when the mind tells you this it gives you good reasons to procrastinate there's no point in starting the date unless

we know it's the one and if you kind of think about this what does this allow your mind to do it allows you to procrastinate it allows you to not do that hard thing it allows you to not deal with uncertainty I don't know if this is going to work out or not but I definitely know that if I binge watch a particular show I will have fun today and this is the calculation that your mind makes and you see it's not stupid it's actually incredibly smart and all it does is drive you towards procrastination

the third one is my favorite if I do it now it'll be inefficient if I do it later it will be more efficient there's no point in starting now because in the future it will go easier for me so if you sort of think about this right oh there's no point in dating right now because it'll be so much easier I'll be so much more attractive to a potential partner of my if I have my own place and I'm all sexy and I have a sexy body and then I'm making a ton of money like

oh like if I do this later it will be easier so your mind is really sneaky right it's like oh like it's going to be so much effort if you do it right now but if you do it later if you put it off the effort will be reduce you won't have to work as hard things will be so much easier and of course do you want an easy life or do you want a hard life of course you want an easy life do you want to be efficient do you want 10 hours of your

work to give you $11,000 or do you want 10 hours of your work to give you $100 obviously we want 10 hours of our work to give us $1,000 we want to maximize efficiency and maximizing efficiency is done by waiting right so interesting how the mind does this so literally when I work with these people this is what happens when I ask them why don't you date well they're like well right now if I date it'll be inefficient it'll be hard if I do it later it will be easy and this is the real tragedy

of it right because the moment that our mind tells us this we have a justification to not act our mind actually tells us oh procrastination is better better to not do it today it'll be easier for you it'll be a net positive for you to not act today beautiful how this works the next one is a little bit more psychological psychiat psychotherapist progress actually makes us feel guilty we assume that progress is a good thing right we say okay like if I progress I'll I'll feel good about myself I'll give myself a pat on the

back like yeah like a com something yeah but with some of the people that I work with when they actually progress they don't experience a positive Rush of motivation what they actually feel is guilt now you may be like what on Earth Dr K what does this mean so I'll give you all examples of this okay oh I should have done it earlier I feel so stupid for finally doing it right oh my God I'm such an idiot I should have started this a long time ago and I want you all to think about literally

what this is right let's tunnel down into it cuz I feel this way I feel this way on a weekly basis oh I should have done it earlier I should have gotten started earlier so let's understand this so when our mind when you make some kind of progress and you feel stupid you feel guilty you blame yourself for not doing it earlier let's understand what's going on so here I am I move over here as I make progress I experience a negative emotion of guilt and what do you think that does right what is the

function of guilt guilt prevents us from engaging in the behavior again we feel guilty when we do bad things right and so I want you all to think about how crazy this is that when you make progress you feel guilty like what the hell no wonder you don't continue to progress because if progress is associated with guilt in your mind The evolutionary function of guilt is to reduce a behavior oh I did something wrong I got mad and I yelled at you I feel guilty I'm never going to yell at you again that's what guilt

is for and now we attach this crap to progress what do you expect is going to happen now often times when we think about progress we don't even notice that we do this we don't really pay attention to it but when I work with people you'd be amazed at how many people I'd say 30 to 40 to even 50% of people feel guilty when they make progress and if you feel guilty when you make progress how do you expect yourself there's no positive motivation that's why our brain views progress is a bad thing it's like

hey this is bad that's our experience of it now we move on to the next thing also veryt very de devastating and very justified in the mind we devalue our progress so let's say that you have a pile of mail that needs to be gone through and you go through the pile of mail and then someone asks you hey what did you do today and you're like yeah I sorted through the mail and then you look at this and you're like this is pathetic like this Noob oh my goodness like people are out there starting

companies and developing apps and even climbing to the top of the leaderboards on a particular game and here is my dumbass what did I do today I went through the mail people are out there exercising in my dumbass all I can do is go for a walk all I can do is this pathetic little thing and once again I want youall to think about what is this calculation resulting in what's on the right side of the equal sign you have literally made progress and what do you do you beat yourself up for it you devalue

the progress there's another way that this looks which is that sometimes people will even congratulate you and they're like hey like great job you know 6 months sober like good job bro good job girl like solid good for you and then what does your mind do your mind says oh this is easy like other people do this very easily like I don't understand why you are congratulating me for something that I did that is pathetic I don't deserve congratulations for this if I win a Nobel Prize sure congratulate me if I'm sober for 15 years

sure congratulate me if I actually land a job sure congratulate me but hey I applied for a job congratulations no this is pathetic this is the way that you view things you take your progress and you devalue it in your mind so once again what does that do what does this actually teach your brain about progress what are you learning about progress that progress is pathetic you should not be rewarded for this this is pathetic you should have done this a long time ago and once again I want you all to think about if I

make some amount of progress what is my mind telling me is it reinforcing is it say good job Pat on the black believe in yourself you Can Go the whole distance no you're blaming yourself you're devaluing yourself and then how do you expect to progress so now we have two options I can progress and feel pathetic which creates negative emotions or I can waste a day I can play a video game I can Doom scroll and that will quiet those negative emotions so this also reveals a really interesting pattern that we see with people oh

I can't follow through let's understand why you can't follow because you did it one day I started cleaning I cleaned the closet but I didn't clean the kitchen on Monday I cleaned you feel that this is pathetic you devalue it now you're full of negative emotion so what happens on Monday you clean the closet what happens on Tuesday morning you're beating yourself up oh my God I spent a whole day and all I did was clean the closet I didn't even get to the kitchen I didn't get to the garage you devalue yourself you feel

bad now you have negative emotions activating and so what do you do do you continue cleaning do you work on that momentum no it does the opposite now you have to manage those negative emotions and what do you use this bad boy right you may have even done something productive yesterday and what are you doing now you're watching Youtube because you're looking for that inspiration to keep going so we devalue things and then we have to deal with the negative emotion of progress and then we spend the next couple of days dealing with the negative

emotion we wake up on Friday frustrated with ourselves oh my God I got a such such a good start to the week and then I've wasted it all I'm so pathetic shocking progress is not a good thing it is a painful thing now the last thing that we do comparison right so thankfully the good news about this one is that we know that comparison is not good right there's a lot of stuff that says that comparison is the thief of Joy I see people sharing this on the Instagram and the Twitter and like oh there's

like some you know picture of a cat and motivational inspirational oh don't compare and Dr K talks about the ego and evils of comparison but remember what we're focused on is literally when you wake up on a particular day why do you procrastinate instead of progress because once again when you do something what is does comparison look like oh this other person it would have been easier for them I worked for 8 hours and I only did three job applications and this person worked for 8 hours and they did 15 and this is something that

I struggled a lot with in med school right like in my first year of med school I was like oh my God like I'm working so hard and I only got through this much and I have all of my like friends in med school and my colleagues like these people in our pre-assigned study groups because that's what you do when you start out they're doing so much more than me and so anytime I would actually like study for something what I feel good and positively motivate myself to keep going no it's like when I actually

spent 4 hours studying instead of giving myself a carrot I gave myself a stick and it's like what the hell you are making progress in life and then you are punishing yourself because some other human being who is not living your life can do it better than you and if we're really really careful and we're really subtle this is what I love about working with other people you don't just compare yourself to one person do you no you compare compare yourself to this person in terms of relationships you compare yourself to your older brother or

sister in terms of their financial success you compare yourself to your younger brother and sister because they got they fell in love and they found a beautiful relationship and they got married your best friend you compare yourself in terms of their face and your face or their hair and your hair your other friend that you have or this neighbor that you have you compare your body to their body and this is how it goes so any dimension of progress that you make what does your mind tell you your mind tells you some someone else does

it better and does this positively reinforce the progress absolutely not so this is the Crux of it these are the six things it isn't enough I don't want to get started until I'm sure I can finish there's no point in doing it until I Can Go the whole distance if I do it tomorrow it'll be easier let's focus on efficiency if I do it today it'll be inefficient progress makes me feel guilty I should have done it I should have started a long time ago oh yeah like I did this but like anyone could do

this this is not an achievement my work is a source of me feeling pathetic instead of something to be celebrated and the last thing we compare to others yeah this person did better than me this person did better than me and all six of these things result in one thing anytime you move forward your mind makes this mental gymnastics calculation turns a positive into a negative and then suddenly the whole equation is moving in the opposite direction now the question is what to do about these things and we're going to start with the most basic

thing to do so when I work with these couple hundred people who have one of these six things the start of the answer is the same is to notice the activity you don't even need to fix it because if you really pay attention what's going on here is these are subconscious or unconscious conclusions that settle into your mind automatically and once your mind has this conclusion in its calculating apparatus that is what will dictate what you do today versus tomorrow do you progress or do you PR procrastinate as long as we let these conclusions Remain

the way that they are we will it will be a struggle to progress so the first thing that we want to do is just catch them in the act and I want to say this is responsible for 50% of it now according to some theories so if you look at the yogic theory they say catching it in the ACT is 100% enough to change you don't need to even do anything even Psychotherapy will say like okay you're going to get a lot of mileage out of just a observing and sitting with these feelings you know

Freud said that language serves as a substitute for Action so when you kind of like you know if you're in therapy and you like really want to kill someone right so sometimes we deal with something called homicidal ideation venting those feelings out basically reduces the feelings so you don't actually have to kill someone to feel satisfied thank God please don't hurt anyone else if you have homicidal ideation go see a psychiatrist because they can help you eliminate those feelings without Harmon another human being so we know that observation of the thing is therapeutically useful so

the first thing that we need to do is catch yourself in the act at the end of the day did I want this task to be done it is done why can I not experience a win why am I beating myself up for accomplishing my goals like what the f and when I work with people this works incredibly well it starts out by them realizing holy crap I did not realize I was talking to myself in this way I did not realize how much I really beat myself up over these things because remember the more

automatically they happen the more they happen behind the scenes right like the more it's shaping your thought process and the moment that it stops being autopilot and you have awareness of it it doesn't calculate in the same way right so if you think about a lot of your behaviors they're due to subconscious calculations most of what we do is not under our conscious control I don't know if that kind of makes sense but we kind of think about like when you get up in the morning and you pull out your phone you're not sitting there

making like a 15 you know line calculation about okay should I do the phone should I not do the phone if I do the phone now should I do it for seven minutes should I do it for 8 minutes should I set an alarm should I set a timer should I make coffee first that's not what you do you just pick up your phone most of your life is unconscious and that's the way that the brain is design designed like even if you sort of think about digestion is unconscious hunger is relatively unconscious until it

tells you hey we're hungry so much of our life runs on autopilot because that's the way the brain is designed but it only runs this way and controls your life is is why you feel out of control because all of these autopilot calculations are happening in the subconscious bring awareness to it and that's honestly 50% so just notice yourself and catch yourself am I doing one of these six things and you will be stunned at how much you do them throughout the day the next thing to do is when you catch yourself ask yourself is

there some way that I can deviate this right it's not to induce some false sense of Pride you can even start with the question what makes it hard for me to feel positively when I make progress right that's the second question this is the way that you start to metabolize it crumble it apart the third thing that you can try to do is to intentionally try to reframe a little bit right so this is where we don't want to like counter necessarily we don't want to be harsh with that other voice when you say oh

like other people could accomplish this way faster than I could we're not going to try to argue with it interestingly enough we're not going to say that's not true because it is true other people may be better at at it than you instead what we want to do is take the attitude of so what right at the end of the day if someone else is better at it than you are what can you do about that at the end of the day what is important to us so what the question is do you want to

continue to do this are you happy at the end of the day if if I could create an alternate universe where you did not do whatever it is that you're thinking about at the end of this day today are you glad that the thing is done or are you glad that the thing is not done focus on the fact that it has been checked all of the caveats that you want to had sure it's inefficient sure someone else could have done it better sure you should have done it earlier all of that stuff is true

we're not saying that that stuff is true that's by the way why it's so powerful because your mind doesn't convince you with lies it convinces you with truths so it's not about arguing against it's about so what can I be happy with something what Pride can I take that's kind of the fourth step and if you go through these four steps what Pride can I take I'm not saying that you should go call all your friends and cause us you know organize a celebration people will celebrate oh like we're getting married let's have a celebration

you're like I made a Tinder profile let's celebrate I'm going to invite 150 people we're going to have a ballroom we're going to have a band yeah I'm not saying do that that's absurd but wouldn't that be fun wouldn't it be fun if we could celebrate the small things as a society so instead what you should do is get whatever celebration you can right so so acknowledge whatever positivity you can doesn't have to be huge doesn't have to be equal doesn't have to be as good as what someone else does just acknowledge what you can

that is positive and when you go through these four steps your brain will start to change so we know for example that willpower correlates with your awareness of the internal environment because anytime you exert willpower you are fighting with yourself you cannot exert willpower and be on autopilot so we know that these kinds of techniques strengthen your frontal Lopes you catch it in the ACT we also know from research on impostor syndrome that when we start incorporating small positives and a more balanced perspective on our life that this leads to good outcomes see we know

that one of the pathological signs of some mental illnesses things like depression things like borderline personality disorder are black and white thinking I'm a loser for going through my mail it's pathetic that I made a Tinder profile today and my friends have been married this is black and white thinking we just know that when the Mind stops thinking in black and white this moves towards health so if you are even measuring whether someone fits the diagnostic criteria whether someone qualifies for the diagnosis of borderline personality disorder one of the diagnostic features is black and white

thinking so if they stop thinking in black and white they are literally by definition less borderline so this these are the components that we want to add right so pay attention notice the thing in the act you know how did I come to think this way where is this coming from next thing so what right so what that someone else can do it how does that affect my life that cultivates some degree of Detachment and then the last thing is find whatever positivity you can and I've worked with like I said hundreds of people who

have this problem and generally speaking this is the formula that works for them it doesn't happen overnight it happens slowly right because neuroplasticity and rewiring your neurons takes a lot of effort over time the last thing that I'll leave you with is if I say oh it's not going to fix it overnight does that mean you're not going to get started today [Music]