The Surprisingly Simple Way Entrepreneurs Stop Procrastinating | 067

Profit doesn't happen by chance. It happens by design. Let's dig in, and today we are going to dig into some time elements that can make you really successful with my guest, Jennifer Takagi, welcome. Jennifer, Hi. Thanks so much for having me. Sharon, I am so happy that you're here. Jennifer is a

bright light. She is amazing at what she does. She brings so much energy and compassion and authenticity to everything that she does. I've known her for a little while, and I really just love being in her presence. So I'm really happy to bring her to the audience today so that you can get a little Jennifer Love

Jennifer Love Takagi. We'll brand that. There you go. I'll take it. Little bit about Jennifer. Jennifer is the 12 minute success coach, intuitive business and certified high performance coach, she helps women discover the power of their purpose by tapping into their truths, honing their

intuition and trusting themselves so they can have the clarity and confidence to create the next level of success they desire utilizing multiple modalities, she helps women Release what's holding them back from the life they are destined to live. She also helps clients achieve their dreams by breaking

them down. If you're breaking them down their dreams, breaking the dreams down, breaking the dreams down into simple 12 minute increments along the way, she's trained over 10,000 women's written six best selling books on Amazon, launched a podcast with over 27,000 unique downloads, and she says that

it's been an amazing ride, and she can't wait to see what's next, and we can't wait to hear What you have to say today. Jennifer,

Oh, thanks so much. It's, it's always funny to hear things like that. It's like, oh, wait, did I do that? Oh, I did.

Oh, it's, that's such an easy thing for us to do, to forget what we've accomplished. I know whenever I'm talking to my clients, I'm like, What did you get done today? Like, what did you accomplish this week? And they're like nothing. But if you actually go back and look at all

the tiny little things that you did, you've accomplished so much. And my whole platform is micro strategies, right? Because I believe that small changes, small steps, lead to big results. So yeah, I love that part of your bio in there. So Jennifer, tell us we're I promised everyone that we're

going to talk about time today, and you are the 12 minute coach. Talk to us about what is 12 minutes and why is 12 minutes the sweet spot for getting what you want?

Well, is the sweet spot because I did math like that. I got a calculator out on my phone and did some math. I was reading Jack canfield's book, The success principles, and I actually have it right here on my desk. It's big, it's thick. There's a lot to it. There's a lot to all

these principles. And the first principle is, take 100% responsibility for every aspect of your life. And if 100% is too much, take 5% more. Well, initially I was like, of course, I take 100% I am responsible for everything I like, run the universe of my family. Like, and then he said something really

judgy, like, if you've ever been late, you didn't take responsibility. You should have checked traffic. You should have left earlier. And I was like, dang, stab me in the heart. Like, I hate being late anyway.

Uh huh. But

it was like, Oh, that means I didn't take 100% responsibility. Okay, got it. Okay, okay, now I get it. So what

did that ever feel like? Overwhelming in just that realization that there's you know, you're where we think we are. We are so accomplished, and yet we're not taking 100% responsibility. How the How'd that feel in your brain, and how'd you work through that?

That felt terrible. I hated it, and it hurt a lot. But a simple example, as in being late. I'm in Oklahoma. We typically don't get a lot of ice and snow, but when we do, the whole state is paralyzed. People who are from areas that get a lot of snow, they don't understand because

they don't have ice. And when the streets are roller skating rinks or ice skating rinks like you can't get anywhere, you're just you're just trapped, and there's just not enough salt to put down.

You.

So a friend of mine, we had had some snow. It wasn't ice that time. It was actually snow. And she made the comment that she got to work half an hour, 45 minutes late. But of course, we do late arrivals because it's treacherous out there. And she had put into her Google Maps, or

whatever map she used like how to get to work that day, and it took her a different route than she normally would have taken. She took it. She went slow. All was well. She got to work safely, and one of her co workers got there, like, three hours late, and she said, Well, you know what happened, dude,

where have you been? Because I was stuck on the highway? Well, I saw it on the news because I turned the TV on to see what was going on that day. Thank God I didn't have to leave the house. And a semi had Jack knifed and blocked the whole highway, and so he got stuck in traffic and sat there for two hours until

they could open up lanes and get traffic moving. And he said, How did you get here so quickly? And she said, Well, I came down the side street instead of the highway. And he goes, Well, I'm not from here. I didn't know how to do that. And she said, I put it in my GPS, and it knew there was a wreck. It's like, kind of

live updates, and it sent me the other way. And so he was, he was kind of sad, upset, pissed, whatever that he hadn't thought of that like, right? But if you're going to take 100% responsibility of your life, and you're in Oklahoma, and you go to bed and it's snowing, you're going to get up early and figure

out a way to get to where you must be. And so that's part of that 100% responsibility. And I think in many aspects of my life, I've always done that. My mom just hammered into me. Winners are lit on time. Losers are late. Winners have a full tank of gas. Losers are on this side of the highway. She had

some really, you know, self affirming things, but they stuck with me,

uh huh. And

so as I'm as I'm navigating this 100% and what's 5% more? And then I was like, What is 5% 5% of what the best way to learn something is to agree to teach it or speak on it, right? Like that. Yes. So I had been asked to speak at an association luncheon, and it was kind of last minute. Somebody

had backed out and they, they had a little bit of time, like a week or 10 days. And she, this gal, called me, and she goes, Jennifer, could you please come speak? And I went, I'm working on a new thing. Yeah, I think I would call it step one on the path to success. And she goes, Okay, great. We have a title,

perfect. We'll see you then. And it was a place where they want slides and all that. So I'm creating a PowerPoint. Thank God we don't do that too much anymore. But I'm creating my PowerPoint, and I get to this 5% How am I going to stand in front of this group of business people, mostly women, and how am

I going to explain 5% if I don't know what 5% is like 5% of what?

Right?

So I did what any good entrepreneur would do. I began obsessing about it, and I went to bed thinking about it, and I woke up thinking about it, and I'd walk through the house, what is 5% 5% of what? And I went back through the training manual, and I find little, you know, kind of okay examples, but

nothing I could really sink my teeth into. And then it kind of hit me when I was in corporate, my day was broken up into three, four hour periods. For the most part. I had when I got to work at eight. So I had from eight to noon, and then one to four. And then when I got home, by the time my husband and I figured

out what we were doing for dinner, I pretty much had from six to 10 in the evenings. So I had three four hour blocks. And in a four hour block, if I took 5% of four hours, and again, this is where the calculator comes in, because my French degree did not make me take a math class, by the way, I put it

in there. And four hours is 240 minutes, and 5% of that is 12 minutes. So then it became the concept of, what can I get done in 12 minutes that I may not have gotten done at all. So at this association meeting, I was asking people like, what could you do in 12 minutes? And the hands are just flying up in the

air. This one was like, I've been exercising more. So I could do 12 minutes of jumping jacks, and somebody else said I could go. Through and clean out my email box like I could start my day for 12 minutes cleaning it up, and then I could do 12 minutes at the end of the day. And somebody else said I could

get my laundry folded. It may not get put away, but I could fold a whole basket of laundry. So people started coming up with great ideas of what get they could get done in 12 minutes. And I was talking about this on a summit, and I made the comment casually, like, in a year, that's a lot, that's a lot. And

somebody on Kimberly Crow's team actually put in the chat, Jennifer, that's 73 hours. And it was like, Oh my gosh. When was the last time I focused for 73 hours on one thing?

Wow,

how much can I get done in 73 hours? So as a business owner, do you want to write a book? Well, what if you start just doing little chunks of time instead of I need all the time in the world? What if you want to redo your payroll system just a little bit at a time? And then I started hearing

back from people on the things they started accomplishing by focusing on short periods of time, but 100% focused, no notifications going off, no phones ringing, just I'm going to do this and only this for 12 minutes. And at the end of 12 minutes, if you have a little more time, Fine, keep going.

What I love about that is that 12 minutes is so doable for everybody, every single day, it's not overwhelming, and having permission to do only 12 minutes sometimes releases that barrier to getting started. Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs, especially creatives, struggle

with that getting started, because there are 72 things I could be doing right now. And I, you know, I, which one do I do and how and we spit had that whole spin into like, what do we do now? And how do we how do we move forward? Because there's so much in front of us. By creating a tiny window of 12 minutes

actually makes that doable. And you could do if you only spent, if you have five things to do, you could spend 12 minutes on each of one of those of those five things, and you still are making forward progress.

Well, you are and so entrepreneurs, we are often in in the social media realm, I don't want to say you should do social media posts, but many of us do, and then we get caught up on what to say, what to do, what format should I use? Okay, pick your platform. One. When you get really good.

Add another. But pick one. Where do you like to play? Somebody said, Jennifer, you should be in LinkedIn. And I was like, Yeah, I hop on there and drop stuff every now and then, but it's just not my place. I play in Facebook. Why? I know how to use it, like I can put my stuff in easily. Instagram, kind of hard

for me. People are crushing the world in Instagram, it's just not my place. Pick your place, and then what do I want to say if I'm going to do just a post like, you know, a tile with words on it, make a meme and stick it up there. What do I want to say if you've got your timer set? And I did this at a

workshop, and everybody was like, wait, I'm on Amazon ordering me a kitchen timer so that they weren't dealing with their phone, right? Because their phone's on silent, right? And so, and then I, one girl sent me pictures of what she had ordered. But you set that timer for 12 minutes and it and you're

feeling the pressure of the clock, right? I have 12 minutes to do this, and you're going to get it out. You want to write an article or a blog or a long post, and you're like, Oh, what was me? I don't know what to write. Okay, great. Spend 12 minutes writing a list of what you could possibly talk about or

write about. The next time you come in for 12 minutes, look down and the first thing your eye falls on circle that, and that's the first one you're going to go with. You'll get to the others.

Yeah, just

start somewhere, because it is the starting people talk about exercise. And my big thing is spend 12 minutes getting your exercise clothes together. If you don't have the perfect shirt and pants and socks, much less finding your tennis shoes. You're not going to go,

right, yeah, and using that 12 minutes to get ready, then whenever it's time to do it, that was already done, that's that first step, like micro habits from James clear, right? Yeah, put the shoes on. That's all you have. Do if you don't get any further, at least you put the shoes on. But what

more, more than likely, what happens is, once the shoes are on, then you'll move to the next step,

right?

I do like that permission to do it for only 12 minutes, because a lot of times there are things that we're overwhelmed with. Like, I was just talking to a friend of mine, when he started his YouTube videos, he said he could do one sentence, and then he got sick, and he he had to build up

that whole ability to stay on camera for a long time, but he allowed himself to have that experience and do what he could, and then stop. And I think that's where we get confused and tie it up and and bogged down when we think we have to finish everything in a short amount of time, instead of giving us

ourselves that bigger runway to get things done, to get the experience and to have have the progression there in front of us,

yeah, and it's like, somebody called me one day, video, called me from the gym and said, I got in the car and I drove to the gym and I got in the parking lot, and I thought, I do not want to go in and I do not want to work out, but I'm here. I'm going to do 12 minutes on that stair master.

And when my phone rang, she was 17 minutes in and said, Okay, I'm here. I'm just going to say I think it was an hour in total that she did it. But sometimes it's the getting started and knowing what to do, and part of your 12 minutes is breaking down that big goal into small do doable increments. So my free

gift is an audio series on doing this, and it's more in depth, but like the first thing is, what are you saying to yourself that's holding you back? And start noticing those things. Oh, it's going to be hard, oh, it's going to take all day. Oh, I don't have time for that. And flip it into this is going to be

simple and easy. It's going to take 12 minutes and I can do this. And just having that mindset shift of, yeah, this is totally doable. And the next piece of it is, imagine that

before you go on to the next piece, I wanted to jump in on that. Because what we repeatedly do, we continue to do. So if the repetition is all of the excuses and the overwhelm and all the things that you're saying to yourself, that's going to keep you stuck, if you replace it then with I can do

this for 12 minutes, and resetting that to changing your the way you talk to yourself doing that over time, will clear that neural pathway and make that the place that you go to on the regular,

yeah, and make that your constant thing. I can do this. I can figure this out.

Success builds on success. Builds on success because your mind is looking for evidence of what you can do. If the evidence is always putting it off and avoiding it, then it'll keep doing that. If the evidence is successfully accomplishing something over and over and over again, then that's

what it will go to,

absolutely, absolutely. And the next part is, imagine the future. What do you want? What do you want? What do you want it to feel like, who? How do you want to experience it? I was working with a gal on manifestation, and it was the first of December, and I, one of my things was, I

want to enjoy time with my husband more and spend time on the water. And again, I'm in Oklahoma, winter hits. You're probably not going to be out boating much, right? Like, it's cold, it's miserable, and the wind comes sweeping down the plains, but I had that on my list, and it was Christmas week,

and I said, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to come to the lake. We had a little lake house, and he stays there most of the time because he doesn't want to come home. He loves it there. I said, I'm going to come down right after Christmas, and I think we're supposed to have nice weather. I want to go on

the boat for just a couple hours, like we don't have to spend all day, but a couple hours. And he said, Okay, it was 80 degrees on December 27 in Oklahoma City, and we went on the boat, and he we went on a nice boat ride, and we're headed back to the dock. And he said, I said, Oh, wait, can can we make

another loop around this area? And he goes, Yeah, why? And I said, I just wanted to be on the boat for two hours, and we got 20 minutes to go. And he was like, Sure, we'll make one more loop so that you can say that you're on the boat for two hours. But I wanted that, and I had been imagining that, like I

manifested. I want to have a really fun afternoon with my husband, and I want to be on the water and we it. It all came together. But if you don't have any hope or. Dream or imagination for your future that's a little bleak, so it can be little like I want to. We have a boat. It's on a lift. You

just lower the boat and turn it on. It's,

yeah,

it's not hard. So that's the imagine the future, and then the next steps are breaking it into 12 minute increments and never giving up. Just stick to it. Whatever your big goal is, if you just spent a 12 minute spirit section of time breaking it down into small increments and then doing them

like the world is your limit, like there's infinite possibilities

that's amazing. Um, just talk a little bit about, what if you're one of those people that, when you said, What do you want for your life? Like, what is your big dream? What is it? What if there's like, at that point in life where they're like, I don't actually know. I don't have a

dream. What do you say to those people?

Yeah, I have a blank slate. Jennifer, I got nothing. Yeah, well, so sometimes you have to start small, because I remember, four or five years ago, I was I always wanted a sprinkler system at my house so I didn't have to go move the the hose around. And they're way common now, but back

then, they weren't very common. It was like, I want a sprinkler system. So we move in this house 20, whatever, years ago, and it had a sprinkler system. Well, a couple years ago, part of it broke, and my front flower bed could not get watered. All my flowers were dying, and literally, I ended up with one

shrub that's, you know, probably the shrub from hell that won't die, that's still there, and everything else is dead, except for some weeds. And so my dream, and it may not be big to you, but it was big to me at the moment. I wanted all my sprinklers working. And by the way, it took me five years,

count them five to get a sprinkler company to come out here and fix my damn sprinklers. I wanted my sprinklers fixed and I wanted flowers planted. And I hate to work in the dirt and I hate to sweat. And so then I had to find somebody to go buy me some pansies and get them planted. So now I have

sprinklers and they work, and I have pretty colorful flowers in my bed. And when I drive up and see those pretty yellow and purple pansies, it makes me very happy, and I didn't have to do it. And so that was a dream of mine. I wanted to drive up and have good looking flower bed. And our last house we had it.

The people had already, like, pre done everything. We just had to keep it alive. This house, it was not quite the same, and it's taken me this long to get it. But so your dream doesn't have to be I want to cure cancer, which that'd be a good one. Somebody take that, like, please. Somebody

take

that and run with that. I want you. It's not me. I didn't take a math class. Like, you take that and run. But like, what? What would make your life easier better? Do you have things in your house that are broken? Getting things fixed and having everything work is a big deal.

It's so funny that you say that because we moved into this house and they had the toilet paper holder that is just like a hook. And the way it's installed, I keep pulling the toilet I have to learn to pull a little toilet paper the other direction. And I just have been frustrated. And then about

a month ago, I was like, you know, I could just change the toilet paper holder. So this weekend, we went out and we bought stuff to change the toilet paper holder so it can just be that small. And again,

insane.

What

toilet paper off, those kinds that fit like that,

and it

goes rolling, and you're like, but I lost hold of it. So now what do I do?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's awful. I haven't I had the extra sitting next, right next.

These are the things that make or break your day really sassy and hateful.

Alright? Jennifer, before you run out of time, you have a gift for our listeners. Tell us about that.

Yeah, it's a 12 minute gift.com. Super hard to find, and it's a three part audio series, and I go into more detail on my win methodology wire your brain for success. Imagine your future and next steps. Never give up. And so when you're out exercising for your 12 minutes, you can be

listening to my audio series,

perfect, perfect exercise and a show so you can get. Jennifer's gift by going to our portal, profit connect tours.com, dot club, that's profit connect tours, dot C, l, u, B, that's the website address. It's free to join, and inside there, you'll find Jennifer's information and her

free gift as well as all of our other podcasts and the gifts from those guests as well. And I have a question for you. Jennifer, what is the most unexpected experience that made you adjust your business, your adjust your approach to your business? So what's the most unexpected experience that made

you adjust your approach to your business?

I started learning energy healing modalities and techniques, and I thought they were only going to be for me, and I was working with a marketing person, and we were going to have a meeting that day on whether or not or how to include some of this in very strategic leadership

development. And I woke up that morning with just this solid, hardcore message and belief you do energy healing, you need to own that, and you need to get that out there. And so that just completely changed the whole trajectory of what I was doing. The 12 minutes comes into play with I do short 12 minute energy

healing sessions. I help people break goals down into 12 minutes, and it all came together beautifully. But it's listening to that inner voice, and when it tells you to make a shift, listen.

Oh, love that. Listen to that inner voice. I love it. Well. Thank you so much, Jennifer for being here. You have been delightful. As always. Remember, Jennifer, love Takagi. We're Brandon that for her, and thank you all for listening today. Build with clarity. Lead with purpose.

Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time

you.