Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host Britt Seva here this week to talk about why the heck we procrastinate. Raise your hand if you’ve ever procrastinated. If you did not raise your hand, I know you’re lying to me. We all procrastinate from time to time, right? It’s just part of what we do as human beings. Heck, my seven-year-old son does it from time to time. Literally everybody does. And I caught myself this last weekend, procrastinating. And after I recovered from the silliness I was doing, I realized, “Oh my gosh, this has to be a podcast,” because when I overcame the procrastination, I had this massive breakthrough that I want to share with you right now.
So this past weekend, I decided to tackle all of the stuff around my house that I’d been putting off forever. Things like returning holiday gifts. Y’all, I’m recording this in the summer, so I’m talking about things that have been sitting in my bedroom closet. They did not even move to the garage. Sitting in my bedroom closet for six months, taking up space. Holiday gifts. My laundry room had become like the dumping grounds for everything ever, like the wildest stuff was in there. So beyond what should be in the laundry room and every time I’d go into that space, I was like, “Oh, I got to organize this laundry room.” Our laundry room has some storage cabinets above the washer and dryer, and there’s like household items and vases and presents for people and the weirdest things were in there. And then we’ve got a folding shelf above our washer and dryer, and there was no folding happening there. Let me tell you, it was piled up with just books and mail and invitations and shoes and just things that didn’t need to be there for months.
And I’d go in there and I’d see all this and I’d do my load of towels and I’d walk out and I’d be angry. It actually upset me to see it and it made my whole world feel cluttered, right? So I had this messy closet, messy laundry room. I could go on and on. Our food cabinet, our pantry had become out of control.
So there was all these things that had been irritating me, no joke for months. So I actually put a date on my calendar and it said, get your life together. That’s how I booked it on my calendar. This was going to be my day to pull it all together. I started the day and I went through and I cleaned out all the stuff and I organized all the gifts and I threw away the things that needed to be thrown away.
Do you know how long it took me? Less than two hours. Two hours to get my life together. Meanwhile, I had been stressing myself the heck out for six months, literally laying in bed at night, looking at the ceiling, thinking about this mountain to-do list of all the things I needed to do around my home that I wasn’t doing. Why wasn’t I doing them? They weren’t priorities for me. I was procrastinating and procrastinating and procrastinating.
The full circle moment was when I realized I put myself through—no joke, you can judge this if you want to—five and a half months of agony. What? I just could have done two hours of work. I can’t tell you—some of you will relate to this. Some of you won’t. When my home is messy, my life feels messy and I’m not talking out-of-control mess. It wasn’t like it was unlivable conditions, but the clutter had become so outrageous that it was really upsetting to me. I’d go home and just be so frustrated with myself.
And so what I realized was I had tortured myself when I could have just really taken a different look at all of these different little things that were feeling too big, too much, overwhelming. If I had changed my relationship with them, oh my gosh, my life could have been so much better.
So I sat down and really started to think, why do we, as human beings, procrastinate. I uncovered four reasons and I want to share them with you today.
The first reason we procrastinate is lack of education, and certainly that’s not the reason I procrastinated around my home. I knew well and good what needed to be done to get that place in order so that wasn’t the reason for that. But it is the reason why we don’t do a lot of things. We don’t push a lot of initiatives forward.
Something that I’ve been procrastinating is getting on TikTok and we’re going to talk about why, and I’m going to talk about it in different layers, but certainly one of the reasons why is I’ve not used it as a user before, right? It’s new social media software for me and so there’s that hurdle I have to overcome of learning how to use it.
Well, learning how to use it is going to cost me some things which we’ll talk about in a second. But because I’m lacking that education, it’s not innate to me to pull up the app and just create something, right? I’ve got to overcome that education hurdle.
So why do we avoid learning more? Why when TikTok came out did I not sit down and figure it the heck out? We as humans avoid learning to stay comfortable. One of the scariest things for me, not just in our industry, but as a people is there is a huge aversion to learning right now. Have y’all noticed that? And I’m talking about adults. I’m not talking about the youth today. Trust me. They’re all happy to be back at school and life is well for them. Adults, there is a closed-mindedness plague that is becoming like a poison, particularly to business. But I think in life in general also where people have decided they’ve seen enough, they’ve learned enough. They know enough, they’re over it, and it’s just this education exhaustion.
We’re living in the age of information, right? Ignorance is a choice. Literally everything you need to know is a Google search away, but because there’s so much information overload, people are just starting to shut down a little bit and they’re like, “I don’t even want to know more. I know what I need to know. I’ve met the people I need to meet and I am content.”
Well, the problem is content and comfort, when it comes to business, are the first steps to failure. I know that’s hard to hear, but what we have to realize is that the world around us is growing even as we inevitably head into the recession that’s looming. Some businesses will explode coming out of the recession. Netflix was a recession-born business. There’s plenty of other examples like that. There are a lot of people who are going to do really, really well in the next few years, and there’s a lot of people who are going to stagnate and completely change the future of their career, right? And so the reason why we quit learning is ‘cause we get tired and we’re like, it’s comfortable here. It’s just not that painful. It’s not painful enough to put ourselves outside of that comfort zone to learn something new, very common, very dangerous place to be.
The other thing about choosing not to educate is that we don’t know what we don’t know. I’m an education junkie. I have been forever. I could be like a lifetime learner, like a lifetime scholar. If somebody wanted to pay me, just like learn a bunch of stuff, I’d love it. That would be my dream job. I’m obsessed with always stretching my brain and stretching my awareness of just everything. I consider myself to be super open-minded and I think I’m just scratching the surface when I look at the depth of how much I have left to learn just in general, but what I’ve noticed and being this lifetime learner is I truly don’t know what I don’t know.
Because I can continue to put myself in learning a couple times a week, somebody will say something and I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t even know that was on the table.” I wouldn’t have even known to ask that question. I didn’t even know this arena existed and when you were not educating yourself, my friend, because you’re in that comfort zone, you don’t even know what you’re missing. Meanwhile, those that are learning forward are learning all these different skills and tricks and concepts and ideas and strategies that are cutting edge that are going to catapult them light speed ahead of you, and you don’t even know what you’re missing, cause you are not even in the room where the conversation’s taking place.
So many people are so close-minded that maybe you don’t know everything. Maybe, just maybe industries are changing. Maybe, just maybe there’s a better way of doing this. And if you would just open up to that little bit, life would become so much easier, but a huge part of the reason why we procrastinate is we see something we don’t know how to do, like me and TikTok. Instead of sitting down and saying, “Okay, what is going to be my education plan for this?”, I say, “You know what? I’m going to do it later ‘cause there’s a hundred other things that need my time and energy and attention. So I’m going to do this later.”
Now in some ways that might be a strategic choice because reason number two we procrastinate is lack of resources.
Maybe for me, I say, “The reason I’m not on TikTok is I literally don’t have the time.” However, that’s never true. When people say things like “I don’t have the time or I don’t have the money.”
Whenever somebody says, “I would do that, but it’s not in my budget,” or “I would do that, but I just don’t have the time,”—when I hear the words “budget” or “time”, those two words are spelled for me as P R I O R I T Y. You’re not prioritizing it.
When I hear the word “budget”, I hear “It’s not my priority.” When I hear, “I just don’t have the time”, it’s not my priority and it’s okay. I’m not here to judge your priorities. But also we as a people make time and find the money for the things that are priorities for us, period, right? Putting a roof over my family’s head is like top priority next to feeding them and making sure that they have the utilities that they need, right? Those are priorities. I will always find a way to make those things work.
For some of you, a priority is getting a craft $6 cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe that’s important to you. For me, I would say that’s not in my budget, but that’s ‘cause it’s just not important to me. I’ll make my little cup of tea at home and be fine with it. I don’t care. But for some of you, you’re like, “That’s my moment of the day.” “I need to wear red bottom shoes. It makes me feel like I’ve made it.” “I need to carry a Louis Vuitton handbag or suitcase or briefcase or whatever, because that makes me feel accomplished.” That’s fine. But you decided that those were priorities.
For me, with TikTok, when I say things like I don’t have the time, it’s because I know this podcast drives so much traffic to me. I see how many Instagram DMs I receive a day. I know all the content that is needed for me and my Thriver Society programs every single week. There’s so much that has to be done. Those are things that take more priority for me. I’ve got to take care of my existing students first. Like we’re doing program updates every single month. That has to take top priority followed by this podcast. I made the commitment to have this be a weekly show almost five years ago. Now I’m going to see it through, right?
On Instagram, I’ve already created a following. I can’t abandon those people to go to something else. I could, but it’s not my priority, right? So I’ve procrastinated TikTok not because I don’t have the time, but because I’m choosing to use my time somewhere else.
So when we say “I don’t have the money,” or “I don’t have the time,” I want you to know in your head, you’re saying this is not a priority to me and it’s okay. But that’s why you’re procrastinating.
Some of the things that could potentially be priorities, but you’re deciding your time or your money or spent better elsewhere. Right?
So we’ve done lack of education or lack of resources. The next thing is going to be fear. So a lot of those procrastinate things out of fear, big time. For me, a big part of the reason I did not get on TikTok in the early days is nobody wants to see me doing a dancing video. Let me tell you, you do not. That is terrifying. So when my team was like, “Britt, I think we should get on TikTok,” I was like, “Oh, only if you’re doing the dances. I’m not doing that,” because in my mind, because of lack of education, I had convinced myself I did not have time to learn TikTok nor did I want to do it because I was scared I’d have to dance and make a fool of myself and literally ruin my reputation in doing so.
Fear is another reason we procrastinate. Often it’s fear of embarrassment, ruining reputation. Sometimes things feel too vulnerable, which brings up fear for us. Fear of repercussion, and often the repercussion is either anger, hatred, or loss of revenue.
Sometimes we’ll procrastinate like I said earlier, letting a team member go that maybe you’ve let stay in your building for too long for fear that they’ll be upset. Maybe that person is your friend. Maybe you fear that they won’t be able to support their family and that’s like a legitimate concern ‘cause you’re a kind human and that’s for real. Maybe it’s because you’re like, “They’re a heavy hitter and if I let them go, I don’t know if I can pay my rent next month.” So you procrastinate ‘cause you don’t want to hurt their family. You don’t want to hurt your relationship and you don’t want to hurt your bottom line.
I know I’m speaking to some of you right now, but these are one of the reasons why we procrastinate. We let the fear take over when the reality is whenever we operate out of a place of fear, you are sacrificing your greater good on the off chance that something bad will happen.
Listen, maybe you’ll let that stylist go. She’ll be mad for two days and then she’ll message you and be like, “Honestly, I’ve been thinking about going to another salon for a while and I feel like this was just one of those scenarios that worked out for the best for both of us.”
That’s happened to me. Somebody—I’ll just call her M—hit me up in the DMs about four months ago, somebody I had fired probably seven years ago from the salon, hit me up in the DMs and was like, “You know what? I have to thank you for doing that because it was the slap in the face I needed. I needed to get my life together. I was not prioritizing work. You’re exactly right. And I left and had been able to build a beautiful career for myself. I was grateful all this time later,” right? But had I continued to procrastinate that decision, I actually would’ve made our life worse.
I think often when we operate from a place of fear, instead of saying, listen, if I make this hard choice, it might work out for the best for everybody involved. What if you let that person go and their toxic energy was actually the reason why your salon was not making as much money as it could? What if their toxic energy was the reason nobody did want to come and work for you? Right? Thinking about if I don’t let fear allow me to procrastinate, what good could come from my life, right?
And last but not least is going to be the lack of desire.
So when we don’t desire to do something, we are not attached to the outcome, right? Maybe if my business was falling apart, maybe if I wasn’t gaining traction, maybe if I felt like I wasn’t growing the brand fast enough, I would’ve been more in a rush to get on TikTok because maybe I would’ve said like, “Oh, this is my big break.”
I watched that happen with—do you guys remember the Clubhouse app? Some people got really into Clubhouse. Some people never got an invitation. The app has way slowed the heck down, so if you’re clamoring for an invite, it has really changed. But the thing with Clubhouse is a lot of people said like, “I feel like this is where I’m going to—this is my catalyst for change. This is it. This is my opportunity for me.”
I hopped on Periscope—some of you don’t even remember that app—and it was a breakthrough for me. I mean, it was massive. I had a lot of desire to get my message out there and that happened to work really well for me.
Now why I didn’t rush to get on TikTok? It didn’t feel urgent or important enough to me. I did not have that desire. If I had been in a different place or space, I likely would’ve made a different choice, but it did not make sense for me to do so, right? It wasn’t where I decided to allocate my resources, like my time or my money. I was scared. I already admitted that to how I would’ve had to show up this, we’re talking years ago now, right? And then the lack of education, I didn’t know how to do it.
And so for all of these reasons, we procrastinate, we put things off. Whereas if I had said, I really need to get on TikTok but I don’t know how to do it, I don’t have the time or money, and I’m scared. I could have started with education, learned that the app is not just about singing and dancing, learned that I could create the videos in the time I already have. It doesn’t even need to take me more time and I’d be off to the races. I could have sat down and overcame every single objection and stopped procrastinating and I could have had a million views on TikTok right now, right? But instead I allowed the procrastination to take over just like I did with my laundry room and just like I did with my closet.
I invite you to think right now, what are the things that you’ve procrastinated due to lack of desire, lack of education, lack of resources, or fear, and what are some of the things you can do to overcome those things.
If you want to start this exercise, grab a piece of paper or the note section on your phone and make a laundry list, like a dump list of all the things that feel heavy for you right now. What feels like you’re never going to get around to it. What feels like Mount Everest in business? What’s that thing you know you should be doing, but you haven’t prioritized just yet? What is it that you’re procrastinating on?
Make a huge list, even if it’s 50 things and then categorize that list and say to yourself, “What are these things do I need more education about? Which of these things do I just not want to do? Which of these things do I not have the time and money for? And which of these things truly scare me?”
Even in going through that, you’re going to learn a lot. Now when deciding what to tackle first. Three things we want to do is schedule, delegate, and eliminate. You’re going to look at that master list and say, well, listen, especially the things you don’t desire, do you need to build desire around those things? Are they important for your life, for your business, for your family? Or can you just eliminate them and be like, “Let it go. I’m not going to do it. I’m okay with that. I’m going to let it go,” right? Like the Frozen song, let it go, crossed off your list. You’re good.
Now, some of the things that you’re like, “Well, I don’t have the education, but I know somebody who does,” do you have the resources to pay somebody else to do those things for you? Because in that case, you can delegate it out. Or in my case, when doing the housework, I delegated a lot of that out to my kids and that made such a huge difference for all of us, right? They got a nice clean laundry room that wasn’t overwhelming for them either and we got it all done.
What are the things you can ask for help on, delegate out, take off your own plate, and get it done?
Lastly, we’re going to schedule. Anything that’s left over of that list, make a plan to get it done. If you already have the Wealthiest Year Yet planner, you can just plop it right in there. If not, we’re releasing our 2023 edition very soon.
I hope that this helps you to understand why we procrastinate, how to get over it, to change your relationship with priorities and procrastination, and to actually make progress forward.
As I always say, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
