The 5 second secret to ending procrastination for ever!

I discovered that secret as a 12-year-old boy as I lined up on the starting line of a dirt bike race. Only I didn’t realise it at the time. You see I had been abused physically and mentally by my father for several years and would continue to be for several years to come. So, I didn’t give it that much thought. I had grown up being told that he hated me and that the day my life began his ended and how I was never going to amount to anything. Because he was my father and an authority figure in my life I accepted his words as the truth and so they became true for me. Then they became beliefs. This is how beliefs are created within us as from the moment we accept them as true they become true for us and then become driving force in our lives.

The Jesuits have a saying “if you give me the he boy at birth, I will return the man to you at seven”. This is the very thing they were talking about.

So, it wasn’t really a surprise that I didn’t stop to consider the fact that I may just have discovered something that would one day change the course of my life as well as anyone that I would come to share this secret with. The day would come, but not for another eighteen years when I turned thirty.

I had been studying beliefs for several years as well as various aspects of the mind, then one night I found myself lying in bed frustrated at my own lack of progress in-spite of everything that I had learned. I had learned how to replace many of my own limiting beliefs. I had learned about perception and many other things. Yet I still seemed to be operating at way below my potential. I knew what to do so why wasn't I doing it. Why wasn't I taking action.

I dwelled on this for several nights before I went off to sleep. Have you ever had the experience where you find yourself trying to work out a problem in your mind as you lie there awake and frustrated searching for answers. Only to find yourself waking up in the middle of the night with an answer. This is your subconscious mind at work as when you present it with a problem it will search for a solution. These are called AHA moments. The reason why we don't have more of them is because we ask the wrong questions as we tend to do our worrying just as we hit the pillow, which is usually after we have watched late night news on TV. In America they refer to CNN as constantly negative news so what chance do you have really? 

Well I had an AHA moment. Only I nearly didn't get it and I was just about to dismiss it as stupid. I had been asking myself what was missing and why I continually failed to act. Then I had a dream and awoke. In the dream I was back at the race track as that 12-year-old boy. I was sitting on the starting line on my bike and we were getting ready to race. Then as we sat there the 10 second board went up. The 10 second board is there to let you know you have just 10 seconds before the race starts. At this stage it can be quite frantic as you struggle to demist your goggles and adjust your helmet and you are full of fear and trepidation as you begin to frantically multitask, something that us men tend to struggle with on a good day.

Then its flipped over to show the five second board, so you know you have just 5 seconds before they release the tapes. In the dream it was just as if it was on a continual loop and it made no sense to me whatsoever. We would all be revving our engines and the five second board would appear. And then it just kept appearing over and over again. Just like a broken movie reel that ‘snapped and keeps showing the same scene until the light in the projector burns a hole through it.

I threw my head back down onto the pillow in frustration and went back to sleep. Then the dream came back again. The five second board was being shown to me repeatedly., I sat bolt upright in bed. Once more I shocked my wife out of her sleep and she is starting to become convinced I'm going mad. What do you mean starting your thinking!

Have you ever watched a movie whereby someone's trying to solve a problem and then these scenes flash across the screen? suddenly all the dots are joined and in this moment of clarity the problem is solved. Well this is exactly what happened to me as I sat up in bed. All these scenes flashed across my mind. 

I was just 12 years old when I began racing. I loved it but before the race began I was terrified. When the bikes started to fire up and I saw everyone putting their helmets on I used to run behind the hedge to be sick. But then the dream made me aware of something. I had noticed it at the time it was happening as I sat on the starting line all those years ago. But I just imagined everyone experienced the same thing. And as I felt like nothing more than an impostor who spent his life waiting to be found out. I didn't think for a second that I had discovered something that would enable myself and others to overcome procrastination!

After all I was just a kid anyway. What did I know? I would be so scared I just wanted to run and hide and the fear only intensified when I got to the starting line. However, all fear left me when the five second board was shown. You see the moment the five second board appears it demands your focus and you are forced to commit to action as you must count down from five to one and hopefully anticipate the tapes and get a jump on your competition. The five second board forces your mind to make a commitment and act. And in the moment, you act all fear leaves you. That was it right there. I had the answer I’d been searching for, for so long. I realised in that moment that the reason we procrastinate is because we literally talk ourselves out of everything. But that's not a luxury that you have when you are sitting on the starting line with thirty-nine other motorcycles racing at warp speed on loose ground. All of whom are trying to make it to a corner at the end of the straight that's only big enough to take three motorcycles. In that situation procrastination can leave at the back of the pack or in a pile on the ground with multiple broken bones.

I lost count of the broken bones I had which included my left foot being back to front. The ferocious and unforgiving sport of motorcycle scrambles as it was called in the 70s had taught me one of life's greatest lessons. Which just happened to be the most common cause of failure known to man.

Our inability to act when we have a great idea. 

At some time in your lives all of you have had what you believed to be a life changing idea and you have got really excited and fired up about it. You know what I'm talking about. That idea that you discovered. The one thing that was going to change your life forever. Do you remember how you felt? You were so excited that you couldn't sleep for ages as you began to spend all the money that would soon be yours because of your life changing idea. But then what happened? You woke up didn’t you. You woke up the next morning feeling deflated as a million reasons had appeared overnight as to why it wouldn't work! So, you didn't do it. Only to see someone else change their life with the idea that you had sometimes many years before.

Did you ever wonder why what you thought was the mother of all ideas suddenly became a source of embarrassment as you looked at yourself in the bathroom mirror wondering why you could have ever been dumb enough to think it would work in the first place, before heading off to work blissfully unaware how close you just came to changing your life forever!

Here is what happened. Your brain is designed to protect you from threats. It perceives most change as a threat. When I was having these flashbacks rushing through my mind after my dream I was seeing everything I had done successfully and everything that I was failing to do.

When I succeeded it was because I had acted quickly? However, it didn't mean I always succeeded but that isn't the point. As ultimately, we are guaranteed to fail when we fail to act. We all fail. Everyone does. But in truth I don't even believe in the concept of failure. Because failure is only feedback as it simply gives us a chance to learn and begin again more intelligently. I believe that our failures are our greatest teachers, but sadly, most people don’t view failure that way. So instead of embracing it and learning from it most simply allow themselves to be defeated by it.

But some don’t… the average millionaire has been bankrupt several times before they became successful. I have a friend who lost everything. His business his marriage. He couldn't even afford a meal. But then he had a life changing idea and he did something that most people never do. He took immediate action. A couple of years ago he sold the company for 50 million. The truth was the same for this man as it has been for most successful people. It was their failures that facilitated their success. Very few people go out into the world and have everything go perfectly for them from start to finish.

James Dyson the man who invented one of the world’s most sought-after vacuum cleaners dedicated 15 years of his life to its success and made 5127 failed attempts before he finally got it right. Truly a modern-day Thomas Edison. But if you took a thousand people and gave them all that task. 15 years later you could count how many of them would still be trying on one hand even if you had lost half of your fingers.

Because most people quit as soon as they hit an obstacle. Why, because they viewed the obstacle as a reason to quit instead of something they needed to overcome. This is a belief problem. They then rationalise that success. Happiness or whatever the goal was wasn't meant for them and they give up. Why, because it was hard. Do you want to know the truth? Life is hard. It's hard for everyone. It’s very easy to look around you and think that everyone else has it easy. You can thank Facebook for that. They don't, no one does! They just have different problems at different times. The average human being has a major problem to deal with every 3 months. So, don't trouble yourself with failure or challenges. Failure is nothing more than feedback that allows us to begin again more intelligently. 

When I over thought something, I procrastinated and then the thing I hoped to do never happened

I noticed that there was a powerful pattern emerging. Every single time I had attempted something whether it succeeded or not I had acted within five seconds.  Because if you don't act within five seconds your brain kills the idea to protect you from a potential threat. Failure. Pain. Humiliation. Embarrassment or whatever else it seeks to protect you from.

As soon as you pass the five second mark your brain will immediately begin to protect you by flashing up all past failures from the depths of your subconscious mind with the simple goal of protecting you from suffering the same fate again.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens!

But the flip side of this is that it's preventing you from achieving success as it stops you from releasing the greatness that is doomed to remain dormant within you if you didn't know what I have just shared with you. This is it. This is the key to everything that you have ever wanted. Make no mistake about it. 

When I won races, it was because I acted quickly. Even when I met my wife the five second board technique gave me the courage to ask her out, I can remember that moment as if it was only yesterday. I was terrified of asking girls out because I couldn't deal with the rejection. Then there she was, without doubt the most beautiful woman I had ever seen and in a split second I knew that If I didn't act immediately that I would regret it for the rest of my life. I walked over to her convinced I was going to drop dead of a heart attack before I arrived, but I went anyway. Even though my heart was beating so fast and so loudly I thought everyone could see and hear my heart beating, as all I could hear inside my head was the deafening melodic beat of my heart about to burst out of my body as I approached her.

We danced all night. Which was the first and last time I have ever danced. To this day my wife still regards this as a misrepresentation of goods. We got engaged 28 days later. Married 16 weeks later and had a honeymoon baby and we’ve been married 28 years this year. But I could have just as easily walked away. Sometimes I think she wishes I had! And I would have walked away if I hadn't acted within those crucial five seconds. Because my brain would have flashed up every single time I had ever asked a girl out and been rejected. The fear of embarrassment and rejection would have all reappeared and every other negative feeling would have reminded me about how bad I felt when I had been rejected previously. For what purpose. To spare me the pain and embarrassment of being rejected again. And your mind does this each and every time you get a great idea but fail to act within those all-important and potentially life changing five seconds?

When I examined my failures, it was the failure to act that was the biggest problem. The failure to act within five seconds is the reason behind most of your failures up until this point in your life. It’s happened to all of you at some time. You missed the opportunity because you didn't act only to lose out to someone who did.

The 5 second secret to ending procrastination is scientifically proven to work.

6. I get the most pleasure from giving of myself and there is nothing more satisfying than being able to affect someone’s life in a positive way. Most of the time the solution is just obvious to me, so I tend not to realise sometimes just how powerful the strategies and ideas are that I share. But that comes from a lifetime of experience and study.

7. There is always hope there is no doubt in my mind about that. When I was young most of the time I simply didn’t want to be here. But I discovered the power of visualisation and the importance of having a vision for your life. From the age of eight I used to visualise having a beautiful wife and two little girls. I always saw them sleeping in a room bathed in an orange glow although I had no idea why! I would visualise this every night for well over a decade. Then one evening I arrived home close to midnight after selling insurance. As I opened the bedroom door every hair on my body stood on end as I realised in that moment that my vision had come to pass. The room was indeed bathed in an orange glow as my wife had bought a soft glow lamp, so I wouldn’t wake her or our little girls when I came to bed. It was exactly as I had envisioned all these years before.

I quite often meet people who are suicidal. I always say that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem and always suggest that people say to themselves “This too shall pass” and it does, it always does. You also need to change your point of focus as what you focus on always brings more of the same into your life. I talk about how this happens in depth in my book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/unbreakable-spirit-childhood-achieve-enduring/dp/1788084276/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1534773803&sr=8-1&keywords=mark+anthony+baker+an+unbreakable+spirit