What does eat the frog mean? | Time management strategies for mental illness

What does eat the frog mean? By the end of this video, you'll know exactly what it means and why it's one of the most popular time management strategies for beating procrastination and anxiety.

Watch the video below, or read on for the full transcript.

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Inside my group coaching membership, Accountability Muse, instead of a private Facebook group, I have a private discord server, and one of the most popular channels is the eat the frog one. So let's dive into this unique and fun productivity tool.

Simply put, eat the frog means to do the thing you're avoiding the most first. Get it over with, rip off the band-aid, volunteer as tribute. Your frog is the task you've been avoiding, putting off, procrastinating on. It fills you with dread and resistance. You avoid it at all costs while simultaneously beating yourself up for avoiding it. To eat the frog is to do that thing you've been avoiding as soon as possible after you wake up in the morning. Now, since I have absolutely no interest in sounding like Nike telling you to "just do it," let's talk about some nuances.

Eating the frog is not easy. In fact, it's really hard. The main benefit is that if you manage to eat your frog for the day bright and early in the morning after waking up, you get to experience the rest of the day free from the anxiety and shame that you would have experienced if you had continued to put it off. That feeling is priceless and is the reason why eating the frog can be so powerful and freeing. But again, that doesn't mean it's easy. Eating the frog is a muscle that you can develop, making it easier and easier over time to tackle the tasks that bring you anxiety. But right now your frog eating jaw muscles are likely weak and that's okay.

What if I have more than one frog on my plate? Making matters harder is that most people aren't lucky enough to have only one frog on their plate at any given time. Some of us may feel like we're facing a veritable buffet of frogs. So what do you do then? You decide on the smallest frog and you eat that one first. Then the next day you pick the next smallest frog and eat that one and so on and so forth. By the time you get to your larger frogs, you'll have built up more muscle to tackle them. Comment below and tell me about the biggest baddest frog you've got on your plate right now and what you can do to tackle it as soon as possible.

Yeah, yeah, I know. But what about deadlines? If you've got a buffet of frogs with deadlines, it's time to triage. Which deadlines are the most pressing and which ones would have the most impact on you if you didn't meet them? When you have deadlines, it becomes a game of prioritizing the deadlines that matter the most to you and giving yourself permission to put less pressing deadlines on the back burner for now. And then usually you end up having to eat more than one frog each day. And yeah, I know it sucks, but you owe it to yourself to show up messy and to try, and to prove to yourself that you can do hard things. Only when you're able to do that consistently can you develop the self-trust needed to live your life on your terms and prevent frog buffets from accumulating over and over again in the future.

Now we come to the part that nobody talks about. When the time comes, how do you get yourself to actually eat your darn frog in the first place? I could literally spend hours on this topic as it's the primary focus of my coaching. So instead of doing that, I'm going to recommend two of my recent videos for you to check out next:

• Discipline Doesn't Work If You Have Mental Illness, Here's What To Do Instead

• Three Steps To Become More Focused On Your Work, Spoonie and Neurodivergent Edition

Go and watch them after this video to learn some of my favorite approaches for getting yourself from not doing, to doing as quickly and painlessly as possible.

And lastly, if you want to know my number one weapon against procrastination and resistance, I highly recommend checking out my free master class, where I teach you three mindset shifts and one simple three-step system to help you kick procrastination to the curb. All you have to do to get access is go to this link and sign up.

If you liked this video, hit that like button and subscribe and be sure to share it with your friends. I'll be back next week with another video. See you then. Bye.