Vacations are an important part of your work year. Taking time away to relax, reflect, and recharge comes with several benefits.
Yet there are times when your vacation ends but your motivation to dive
back into work doesn’t follow. If you work remotely, it may be
particularly difficult to get back into your routine, because you’re not
around other people who have been working steadily while you were away.
There are many reasons why you might be having a hard time getting
work done after your vacation. Before you can take steps to energize
yourself, you need to understand a little more about why you’re having
trouble getting started. Here are three common reasons why you’re slow
to get back into the game — and what to do about them.
The Mountain Seems too High to Climb
Vacations take you out of the office, and that creates physical and mental distance from your work. As I’ve mentioned before, lots of research suggests that the more distant you are from something, the more abstractly you think about it.
When it comes to work, distance is a double-edged sword. It can help
you think about your priorities (we’ll take that up in the next
section), but it can also make the sheer volume of what you have to
accomplish seem insurmountable. If you have a big project to complete,
you may find it difficult to see how you’ll actually get it done. That
sense that a project can’t be done is paralyzing, because studies demonstrate
that your motivation to complete it is increased by both the importance
of the work you’re doing and the likelihood that you’ll actually be
able to complete it. In other words, if you don’t think you can get a
particular task done, you’re unlikely to muster the energy to work on
it.
That means you need to turn the abstract task into specific steps you can
complete. Go back to your to-do list and dedicate specific times to
addressing particular components of the bigger project. Get some advice
from others who have succeeded on similar projects if you need some help
determining the next steps you need to take. Also, reach out to
colleagues whose help you’re going to need to find out when they can be
available to do their part. Use their availability to help yourself set
deadlines for completing particular aspects of the work.
Nothing Seems That Important
A second thing that vacations do is change your perspective on your
daily life. Your engagement with tasks depends on the motivational
energy you put behind them. When you get into a routine of going to work
and doing the next thing that needs to be done — you attend the
meetings on your calendar, tick off items on your to-do list, and take
care of the requests that colleagues and clients make — the workday
probably goes by quickly. Then it’s followed by time at home that may
also be a blur of family responsibilities, chores around the house, and a
little time for relaxation. You don’t have a lot of time each day to
focus on the collected impact of the work you’re doing or to think about
the other ways you might spend your time.
When you go on vacation, you realign your priorities. Chances are,
you spend some time with family or friends and reconnect with other
passions like travel, exercise, or just lying around with a good book.
When you get back to the workplace, you may need to convince yourself
that the collection of tasks you’re doing is worth the effort. Take the
time to look at the work you’ve done over the past few months and
catalog what it has added up to. What are the big-picture things you’ve
accomplished? In what ways have you affected the lives of other people?
The real sense of mission in your work comes from that combination of
seeing how the tasks you perform are connected to a more significant
set of outcomes (even if you’re just one part of a much larger team).
And a lot of research on happiness in the workplace
suggests that when you feel like your work serves a broader purpose
that connects you to other people, you also feel greater satisfaction
with the tasks you perform. Coming back from vacation can help you focus
on the ways that your work isn’t just a job, but also a calling.
You’re Stuck in a Rut
Even if you believe deeply in the mission behind the work you’re
doing, you might still have trouble getting back into your work after
taking time off. It may be that you’re just bored with the set of tasks
you’re performing.
Work on concepts like flow
suggests that people are most engaged with their work when they’re
working right at the limit of what they’re capable of doing (that space
between a task being too easy and a task being too hard), and where each
action succeeds and naturally leads to the next. If you’re not getting
this sense of daily engagement, the job you’re in may no longer be a
challenge for you. Moving forward in your career (either with the firm
you’re with now or a new one) requires two key steps.
First, identify a role that would provide the challenge you want. It
might be helpful to work with a mentor to help you find new
opportunities that might be appealing. Second, think about the
additional skills you need to be a good fit for those roles. During the
pandemic, a lot of people put off additional training and education that
might enhance their skills. However, a lot of great training and other
classes from universities and other providers have moved online. There’s
also a wealth of degree programs and noncredit options tailored for
people trying to advance their careers. New knowledge and skills can
help you re-energize when you have trouble getting motivated.
The goal is to address the short-term and long-term factors that sap
your drive. By having concrete next steps that feel connected to a key
mission, you maximize your motivation to get work done. By thinking
about the next generation of skills you need to acquire, you also help
yourself maintain that motivation over the long term.
In July 2007, the Irish golfer Padraig Harrington won one of golf’s most coveted competitions, the British Open.
The story of how he did this, one of the most remarkable finishes in
golfing history, illustrates one of the ways confidence works.
The
Claret Jug – the Open’s famous prize – was within Harrington’s grasp as
he teed off at the penultimate hole of the tournament. He had a
one-shot lead on his arch-rival, Sergio García. He was entirely in the
zone – “I am literally the most confident person at that point in time,”he said later. Then, something strange happened – a twinge of doubtcame out of nowhere at the top of his back swing and he sliced the ball into the murky waters of the notorious Barry Burn river.
But,
still in the lead and his confidence intact, Harrington squared up at
the 18th tee. Disaster. He lashed another ball into the Barry Burn. His
confidence collapsed: “I’ve never experienced this reaction in my life… I
wanted to give up… I had thrown it away.”
Harrington
barely remembers the first 50 yards he trudged up the fairway of the
final hole to take yet another penalty shot. But luckily, he had his
caddy, Ronan Flood, by his side for that walk. Flood kept repeating to
Harrington that he was the best chipper and putter (the two strokes he
needed to stay in the tournament) in the world. “One shot at a time,
you’re the best chip and putter in the world. One shot at a time, you’re
the best chip and putter in the world.”Over and over, he repeated it.
As
they approached the ball for Harrington to take what would be his
penultimate shot, an attempt to salvage his tournament, Harrington’s
confidence had shifted again. He positioned himself above the fateful
ball: “I stood there, really excited about it, and I fired it in there,
nice and low. I don’t think I’ve ever been more in the zone than in that
chip shot in my life. It’s really easy to hit a great shot when you’re
feeling good… it’s really difficult to hit a great shot when you’re
feeling bad. I should have been feeling the lowest ebb at this point.”
Padraig Harrington says his caddy Ronan Flood’s encouragement was key to his 2007 British Open victory. Photograph: Matt Dunham/AP
His
caddy’s constant, almost mechanical, repetition of his conviction that
Harrington would do it had somehow reinflated the confidence bubble, and
he went on to beat García and take the Claret Jug.
But
that’s not the end of the story, according to one of Harrington’s close
acquaintances, to whom I spoke in Dublin. After the first, delirious
celebration on the green, the champion and his caddy parted for several
hours of ceremony and press interviews. They were reunited at the end of
the evening in the limousine, taking them back to their hotel. Padraig
looked over at his caddy:
“You know, Ronan, I thought I’d blown the Open – and so did everyone else in the world – except Ronan Flood.”
Flood started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Harrington asked, puzzled.
Flood replied: “I thought you’d blown it too – I didn’t think you had a chance!”
Flood was just saying the words on the fairwayto
try to rein in Harrington’s mind, away from thoughts of great prizes
and great failure, to a limited funnel of thoughts linked to a specific
set of actions that he knew he could execute. The words we say to
ourselves shape our attention, which controls our emotions, and the
result is confidence – or lack of it. The caddy’s astute understanding
of this process meant that he could get Harrington back on mental track,
despite his own fears that Harrington had blown it.
Research
backs up the lesson of this story, that the words you say to yourself
shape your confidence and, hence, your performance, no matter how fake
or cliched those words might feel.
Cycling on a
stationary bike until you are too exhausted to continue is a standard
test of endurance and fitness. In one study, young, fit men and women
did this, and cycled for an average of 10 minutes before having to stop.
Half of them were then taken aside by the researchers and taught to use
confidence-enhancing self-talk phrases, such as “you’re doing well”, “…
feeling good”, or “push through this”and then applied them during a second exhaustion test. Just as “just saying the words” worked for Padraig Harrington, simply repeating these confident phrases
led to the self-talk group boosting their endurance by 18%, from around
10.5 to 13 minutes. They also felt less strain during the exercise than
the other group, whose endurance time didn’t change at all.
Confidence is the colloquial term for self-efficacy– the belief that you can successfully do a particular thing. It is this link to actionthat
differentiates confidence from self-esteem (how good you feel about
yourself) or optimism (belief that things will turn out OK). When you
anticipate success, your brain releases a neurotransmitter called
dopamine, the chemical messenger that fuels reward and pleasure in the
reward network deep in the centre of the brain, according to research at
Michigan University in 2015. Researchers at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, showed in 2016
that feeling confident about your decisions activates reward networks
in the brain, while lack of confidence leads to increases of activity in
brain regions linked to negative emotions such as anxiety.
Researchers have shown that positive self-talk can boost sporting performance. Photograph: Kateryna Kukota/Alamy
Confidence
and anxiety are therefore competing rivals for your actions and
attention. Anxiety inclines you to retreat in avoidance of failure,
while confidence is a bridge to the future that impels you forward in
anticipation of reward. Most of us are slightly overconfident – men more
so than women – in relation to our true abilities. And that
mood-lifting, anxiety-reducing state of mind inclines us to do stuffthat
increases the chances of outcomes or encounters that do indeed lead to
opportunity and reward, and therefore acts as a virtuous positive
feedback loop.
So, confidence begets more confidence, and this is why the results of a 2020 mid-pandemic survey of 2,000 people in the UK aged 16-25
are particularly disturbing. The survey, by the Prince’s Trust, found
that 41% of respondents felt that their future goals now seemed
“impossible to achieve” and 38% that they now felt they would “never
succeed in life”. This is a more extreme example of a more general
finding, that 18-25-year-olds who live through an economic recession believe less strongly that they can get ahead through hard work.
Such
a dramatic drop in the confidence of nearly half a generation could
reverberate for decades in the social, economic and political fabric of
Britain, and elsewhere. Confidence in a population predicts many things,
including academic achievement. And the economic effects are likely to
be strong, too: between 2000 and 2014, for example, across 13 EU
countries, including the UK, Germany, France and Spain, the confidence
of individual consumers and company executives strongly predicted the unemployment rate in each member state.
The belief that you can dosomething therefore not only motivates you to do that thing, it also lifts your mood and lowers your anxiety,
which is one way confidence works – by helping you achieve small and
big goals. It also helps to explain why mental health is such a major
challenge during restrictive lockdowns.
We know
that lifting confidence improves performance, because many studies have
shown it experimentally. For example, in 2008, researchers at Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, made students more or less confident
about their physical strength by randomly telling some that they were
stronger, and others that they were weaker, compared with others –
irrespective of their true strength, measured using a handgrip
dynamometer, a metal lever which you squeeze tight against a resisting
spring. The results were striking:
the high-confidence group held the grip for 30% longer than the
low-confidence group. They also felt less pain and discomfort in their
hands.
Researchers in Grenoble used the same method with people aged between 52 and 91, first asking them how old they felt.
On average, they felt 8% more youthful than their real age. All the
participants then did the handgrip test, which in itself is a good
indicator of general vitality in older people. The average grip was
around 26kg. The researchers then boosted the confidence of half the
group, telling them that their score was better than 80% of people their
age. They told the others nothing, and both groups then took the grip
test a second time. The tired hands of those told nothing scored one
kilo lessthan on their first attempt. The raised-confidence
group score, however, was one kilo more. Strikingly, the
feedback-induced confidence also made them feel younger:
one 60-year-old said he felt like a 53-year-old and a 90-year-old felt
10 years younger, while the other group felt no different.
Young people who experience a recession feel pessimistic about achieving life goals. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA
Nowhere
is confidence more needed than when we face change, such as in the
aftermath of pandemic. Many people are grappling with life-changing
decisions, often forced upon them, about their careers, education, or
where to live. There are two potential states of mind in which we can
approach such decisions – deliberative, where we try to select a goal or
course of action, weighing up the pros and cons of each; and
implemental,where we have already selected our goal and are now working out what steps to take to achieve it.
The will-I, won’t-I, deliberative mindset widens our attention – for example, making it more likely that our eyes will detect a peripheral object on a background picture.
It also opens our attention to a broad range of potential good and bad
future possibilities and remembered past experiences. Because of this,
not only does it open up creative possibilities for ourselves, it also
lets in anxious, negative thoughts and memories which tend to diminish
confidence. So it is very important to avoid chronic indecision and too
much deliberation, and to keep it under tight control so that you can
enjoy its benefits without becoming paralysed by it.
On
the other hand, focusing on solving the problem of how to achieve an
already chosen goal narrows our attention to specific actions and so
reduces the chance of anxiety-arousing thoughts and memories entering
our consciousness. Women in particular benefit from the
confidence-enhancing effects of the implemental mindset, Cologne University researchers reported.
Though
under-confidence depletes our potential, extreme overconfidence – a
feature of male more than female behaviour – can have big downsides,
too. For example, experienced professional financial traders made poorer
choices than students because of their overconfidence in their hunches,
a 2006 Nottingham University study showed, while overconfidence increases the chances of leaders taking military action and starting wars, because it makes them overly optimistic about their own military strength and their chances of success.
But
in spite of its downsides, confidence is a precious mental resource
that we all need as we re-enter a dramatically changed post-pandemic
world. The words we say to ourselves will help harness our anxieties by
focusing our attention on achievable goals, just as they did for Padraig
Harrington.
Prof Ian Robertson is the author of How Confidence Works (Transworld, £20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
You’ll
be glad when January 1st gets here, so you can get started on 2021.
This year put you and everyone else through much change, deep thoughts,
and adjusting plans all at the last minute.
In
a sense, this is how life is in general but compressed into nine months
or so. You saw everything. People lost their jobs, businesses went out
of business, the stock market crashed only to rebound, and kids learned
via computers.
Governments
pushed out trillions of dollars in response, but it still wasn’t
enough. Unemployment is still bordering on above normal rates.
To
get ready for 2021, this is what you need to do. It’s time to pull your
game plan out and strategize for a new year. It’s time to reignite your
life.
1. Say good-bye to FEAR.
2. Plan like you are playing to win a chess game. Don’t play chess? Scrabble works as well.
3. Keep building your emergency fund in case your city runs into another round of the virus spreading.
4.
Learn to invest if you haven’t already. Investing is one way to build
your reserves. Government and work retirement plans are very
unpredictable.
5. Work off the virus weight you put on. A healthy body is a great way to avoid getting sick.
6. Cherish and spend time with your loved ones as best as you can.
7.
If you are in business or a writer, you need to focus on the next 12
months. Figure out what you can do that is different to set you apart
from your peers. What you did in 2020 was good, but you need to make
2021 better.
Final thoughts
You
need to mentally prepare to make 2021 the best year possible. This year
was tough, and you got through it. You learned some new skills,
persevered, and put up a good fight. Now it’s time to put all that
together for your comeback in this new year.
Start
the year strong and finish the year even stronger. A great deal of life
is mental, regardless of how smart or how strong you are. Your mental
toughness will prove that you came out on top.
You have this vague idea of a dream in the back of your mind, but you’ve yet to really do anything about it.
Either you’ve done nothing, you’re just at the beginning, or you’ve
worked at improving your life in fits, starts, and stops sporadically.
You’re
waiting for some magical moment of inspiration. You want to feel
permanently fired up like you feel when you read stuff like this, watch
videos with motivational background music, and listen to the latest
productivity podcasts.
But it never seems to last. Often, self-improvement seems like a crapshoot. Often, it is
a crapshoot. Take it from someone who’s used it and been through the
process. I preface almost everything I write with the notion that
getting self-improvement to work at all is difficult. And it takes an
immense amount of “positive brainwashing” to get there.
I’ll readily admit that. But some people do
figure it out. I figured it out. I started in a place where ever taking
action during my lifetime didn’t seem at all likely, but I managed to
do it.
Now, motivated is my default state. I don’t need an extra push to accomplish new goals.
You
can certainly get there, but the odds? Well, it depends. For some, it
will click at some point. For others, it never will. This is the cold
reality of life. If you want a shot at even reaching this point, you
have to understand the most important fact about motivation.
You Don’t Need More “Motivation”
You don’t need motivation, per se. In reality, feeling fired up doesn’t really do
much. I’ve been to highly motivational and aspirational self-help
seminars. You feel really, really, really good… while you’re there.
You
feel motivated. But what happens the minute you step back into real
life? Let’s just say you don’t find yourself jumping up and down
constantly chanting. It’s weird. Like, inspiration and motivation work, but they also don’t work. Rather, they work up to a point.
Inspiration
helps you take action, but the action itself creates what you’d
consider motivation. You’re motivated because you’re working hard. You
don’t get motivation to work hard, but you also kind of do, a little bit.
There are better words than motivation to describe what you need. You need clarity.
You need to find a direction to move in and move in that direction. Most, importantly, you need momentum.
If
you get those three things — clarity, direction, and momentum, you’re
most of the way there. Motivation is a bit of a nebulous term that
doesn’t mean much, but get the “big three” right and you’ll have
“motivation.”
How to Develop Mental Clarity
Clarity
means you develop a high enough level of awareness to understand what
must be done. Think of something like a mid-life crisis. Whether or not
you do something about your epiphany, you have one. You’ll often have
these little flashes, epiphanies, and sudden realizations. Those “What the hell am I doing with my life?” kind of moments.
But,
hell, often those aren’t enough! Usually, the mid-life crisis ends with
someone buying a corvette, getting divorced, or some other typical BS
that just changes the goalposts.
I’m
writing this minutes after giving a talk about using your inevitable
death as motivation. It was rousing, inspiring, and may have provided
people with a glimpse of clarity. But even with the best delivery, it’s
hard to get messages like that tostick.
Is
there a perfect remedy you can use to reach a sustained level of
clarity? No. But just do it anyway. Who cares if it’s cheesy? This is
your life. The cheesy and fuzzy cliches of life become deadly accurate
and painfully true over a long-enough timescale. Having this clarity is
worth repeatedly failing and fighting for.
That
clarity can mentally move you in the direction you need to go. Granted,
you don’t necessarily need to know exactly what to do next, but when
you have clarity about your own life, you’ll be ready to move in a direction.
Most of the blog posts I write and videos I shoot are about unlearning harmful concepts, narratives, and societal scripts.
With that process of removal, often what’s left is the answer you already know. But you need to do some unlearning to see the answer fully.
The answer basically boils down to the following truths:
You are completely responsible for your life, regardless of outside circumstances
You’re primarily limited by your mind. Almost solely. Your problems, perceived barriers, and obstacles are psychological.
You
realize that if you continue to live the way you’re living right now,
you’re not going to get the outcomes you want and you’ll regret it for
the rest of your life.
Clarity just means you’ve hammered the information home enough where it becomes extremely clear to you that you have to act.
You
understand the direness of the situation so much that taking action
seems to be an inevitable outcome. Granted, some people never get there,
but this is the first step. If you do that, do this next.
How to Find Direction
Just pick something and work on it, will you?
There is no secret sauce to avoid bumping your head against the wall
more times than you can count and making a ton of mistakes while trying
to get some path or project off the ground.
“I want to get my ducks in a row first.” Screw those ducks.
My goodness, you beautiful little neurotic creature you. “But what if I pick the wrong thing and waste my time?” You’ll have learned a valuable lesson and you’ll at least know. You’ll at least never have to wonder what could’ve been.
Yes,
it’s scary. But if you spend six months on something and it gets no
traction, oh well, it gets no traction. If your business fails, you can
always go get a job. And it will probably work out to a degree if you
just try hard. To a degree. You don’t have to change the world.
The
dreams I love are the ones involving the cute little grey-haired shop
owner in a small town. They’re not rich, they’re not changing the world,
they’re not making a dent in the universe, but they’re doing their
little thing well, they’re extremely proud of themselves, their work is a
place to place their soul, and they’re happy. I want you to have your
version of that.
I chose writing. Actually, like I’ve said many times before, a friend asked me to write for his website. But I stuck with it.
Now,
I didn’t know all the intricacies of building a writing career. I
didn’t know exactly which books I was going to put out. Hell, at that
point, I hadn’t even considered creating a book.
But,
I did make the decision that I was going to take my sudden level of
clarity and put my efforts into writing… something. Quickly, it became
clear that I was going to be writing for the foreseeable future.
You want to pick some project, path, avenue, lane, niche to go into. Something.
I’m
telling you. Picking something and merely sticking with it for 90 days
to six months will get you about 80 per cent of the way there. If you
want to write, write daily for 90 days. If you want to create a YouTube
channel, commit to shooting a certain number of videos per week for 90
days.
Starting a side project or business? Just pick a model and stick with it.
You
don’t need to have a perfect life plan. Yes, pick a direction, but it
doesn’t really matter where the direction is as long as its forwards. We
all jump sideways — shift departments “Oooh, 5% raise, better office,”
move to a new city but remain the same person, play musical chairs with
co-dependent romantic partners, shuffling the same deck of cards over
and over again playing a rigged game.
No, play a new game. Forward. Then, get this and keep it.
How to Gain and Maintain Momentum
Getting to the six-month mark should get you to some sort of sustainable level.
Six
months in, I had no books out, made zero money, had a very small
audience, etc, but I figured I could get things to ‘pop’ down the road.
Making
it to six months is basically your barrier to entry. After that, you
have a bunch of new things to learn. But you’ll learn them. I heard
something insightful from business expert Ramit Sethi once. He said
something along the lines of
“Once you develop a new skill, you have it forever.”
Each
time you collect a new skill, you add it to your reservoir. This builds
confidence. Take YouTube for example. About 5 months ago, I started
shooting videos from my webcam.
Take a look at the little habits and skills I’ve learned over the past 5 months of shooting videos:
How to format my page, create playlists, and add featured videos
How to research keywords to add to the video description and tags
Basic video editing skills using basic software
How to add little engagement tricks into my video
How to add links to my videos and end screens to share new videos
4k video editing with an upgraded camera
Adding graphics, music, captions, and calls to action in my videos
I didn’t wait until I felt like a YouTube expert before I started shooting videos. I just got started. Then I developed skills.
Now,
I have momentum. Starting my YouTube channel was easy and I had zero
anxiety about whether or not it would work out because now, I have a
macro level of momentum. Since my entire life has momentum, taking on
new and interesting projects isn’t as hard.
Get to this point, and the fun really begins.
Do You Want to Build a Snow… ball?
Work
on projects long enough, work on yourself long enough, and one day
you’ll look back at everything you’ve done. You won’t believe you did
it. Then the snowball effect kicks in.
One
day, you’ll reach a point in your life-path-career-business-thingy
where you’ll no longer need any inspiration. Your own efforts are your
inspiration. And then you’ll actually increase your pace instead of
resting.
You
think you want to reach an end-point. You think you want to arrive. No,
you want to build a massive snowball and just…keep building it.
What
are we all really doing here, anyway? Who knows the true meaning of
life? To me, creating momentum in a direction you genuinely enjoy and
continuing to do so forever is the closest thing to happiness and
meaning I can think of. If you have a better answer, let me know.
You
can’t see it now. But years from now, you will have gone from being an
anxiety-ridden doubt-filled “aspiring whatchamacallit” to a productivity savant.
The rest of your life will be your personal playground to create amazing stuff and shape reality in whatever way you see fit.
Deep down, many of us feel that we’re not as happy as we could be:
We feel stuck living a life we don’t want.
We feel ashamed for past mistakes, uncertain of how to let them go.
We feel caught in cycles of addiction and dependence, wanting desperately to move on but always seeming to fall back.
We’ve let go of our dreams and wonder if we’ll ever get them back.
We worry about the future despite knowing it does little beyond adding to our anxieties.
Unfortunately, simply understanding that you’re unhappy isn’t enough — you need to understand the root cause of your unhappiness to move on with your life.
While
I don’t claim to understand everybody’s unhappiness — not by a long
shot — my work as a therapist has given me some insights into ebasic
patterns of unhappiness. But these patterns can be difficult to see
because they exist on a barely conscious level — the level of core beliefs.
Core
beliefs are rules or operating instructions for our lives. They’re
often established very early in childhood and rarely identified or
updated, which means we end up carrying them into adulthood, along with
all the emotional baggage they contain.
In
the rest of this article, I’ll introduce you to three of the most
common core beliefs that are at the root of many people’s unhappiness.
If you can learn to identify them in your own life, it’s possible to
find a level of happiness you may never have known possible.
I need to feel good to do hard things.
Motivation
is a funny thing. When you’ve got it — when you’re energized,
enthusiastic, and really “feeling it” — it’s like you can do anything:
Go for a run at 5:00 a.m.? No problem!
Learn to play guitar? Let’s do this!
Order a kale salad for lunch instead of that burrito? Done!
Make some serious changes to my marriage? Yes, I’m up for it!
But, when you’re not feeling motivated — when you’re feeling sluggish, lazy, and apathetic — it’s as if you can’t do anything:
Literally getting out of bed and into the shower feels like a Herculean effort of will.
Learning guitar is a pipe dream I should have given up years ago.
Not only am I getting the burrito, but I’ll take extra guac, some chips, and that fudge brownie too.
And as for my marriage… What’s the point? It’ll always be like this.
For better or worse, motivation is a powerful force
in our lives. It can push us to literally achieve our wildest dreams
and its absence can discourage us from taking even the tinniest step
toward them.
But here’s a little secret most people don’t know:
Your
motivation problem has nothing to do with motivation itself and
everything to do with your beliefs about what motivation is.
Most
people believe motivation is a gift — something the universe generously
bestows on us from time to time, and more frequently, withholds. They
believe that with this gift, they’re capable of great things. But
without it, they’re destined to mediocrity or failure.
Of
course, it’s true that occasionally we do feel “hit” by motivation and
unexpectedly energized to take difficult action. But this is only part
of the story.
The
relationship between motivation and action is a two-way street: Feeling
good makes it easier to accomplish hard things. But doing hard things
leads to feeling good.
Happy people believe that motivation is built not bestowed — that’s it’s something largely under their control.
They
know that the best way to accomplish their most important goals and
aspirations — from losing weight to building a satisfying marriage — is
to generate a steady stream of motivation for themselves by doing
difficult but meaningful things regardless of how they feel.
As you’re reading this, you’re probably thinking to yourself:
Yeah,
yeah, that sounds like a nice idea — and sure, maybe it’s true — but in
the moment, it’s just too hard. I tell my body we’re going for a run
this morning, but my body says “like hell we are!” and rolls back under
the covers.
I get it: understanding
all this isn’t going to change anything. And that’s because changing
your core belief about the nature of motivation isn’t fundamentally an
intellectual problem; it’s an experiential one.
You need to prove
to yourself that it’s possible to do difficult things without feeling
motivated. And like any difficult challenge, you need to start small and
work up, gradually building your confidence along the way.
Here’s an example:
Let’s
say you want to work on exercising first thing in the morning. Trying
to jump out of bed and go for a 3-mile jog right off the bat is probably
not a great idea. Instead, just focus on getting up 15 minutes earlier
than usual — don’t even think about exercise at this point. Simply prove
to yourself that you can consistently get out of bed a little earlier
than planned.
Once
you can do that, get out of bed 30 minutes earlier. Then move on to
doing 5 pushups first thing in the morning. Then 3 sets of five. Once
you’ve got that down, try going for a walk for 10 minutes around the
block each morning. Then 20 minutes. Once you’re doing that, mix in a
couple 5-minute segments of jogging into your walk. You get the idea…
Happy
people set challenging goals and work toward them regardless of how
they feel. And they’re happy precisely because of their belief that
motivation follows action, not the other way around.
If you want to be happier, don’t wait around for motivation to strike. Learn to build it yourself.
I need to be tough on myself to be successful.
Many people grow up believing what I call the Drill Sergeant Theory of Motivation.
This
is the idea that in order to achieve anything significant in life —
from good grades to football championships — we have to be tough on
ourselves. And usually, this takes the form of harsh and judgmental
self-talk:
After getting an A- on a test instead of the A+ you hoped for, you immediately kick yoursef: I knew I should have studied for that extra hour. I’m so lazy. I better get my act together or I’ll never get into MIT.
While prepping for an interview for a new position at work, you say to yourself: You better not screw this up. This position only comes up once every few years. Don’t say anything stupid!
Following a rough day with the kids, you start berating yourself for being a lousy mom: Why
can’t you just be a little more patient with them?! If you were a
better mom, they probably wouldn’t be acting out so much and all of this
would be way easier.
When your core belief is that success only comes from being tough on yourselves, it’s easy to fall into a habit of negative self-talk and all the depression, anxiety, and misery that goes with it.
But here’s the thing:
Successful people are a success despite their negative self-talk, not because of it.
How do I know this, you say?
For
years in my job as a therapist, I’ve been working with high-achieving
folks who believe unfailingly that they need to be hard on themselves or
else they’ll “lose their edge.”
But
the price they pay for this belief is steep: A near-constant inner
monologue reminding them of how they’re not good enough and never work
hard enough, which is crushing them with anxiety and stress.
The
solution for these people is the same: I encourage them to experiment
(in small ways at first) with giving up this belief that if they’re not
hard on themselves they’ll stop achieving and being successful.
The results are striking:
Never once have I seen someone actually perform worse because they stopped beating themselves up.
In fact, the vast majority of the time, their performance (and happiness) increases sharply!
They
realize that not only are their fears of “losing their edge” unfounded,
but actually they have much more energy and enthusiasm to channel into
their work and lives when they’re not stuck under the weight of chronic self-judgment.
But
as is true of all core beliefs, letting them go is not an intellectual
problem; it’s a behavioral one. To change your core belief about
success, you need to prove to yourself that you will still be successful
without your inner drill sergeant.
But
for many people, that’s a terrifying idea. Because for years this core
belief has served as a kind of safety blanket, assuaging their fears of
being unsuccessful or not good enough. To take it off and strive for
success without it requires a great deal of courage.
And courage has to be built — slowly and gradually over time.
So
start small. Try thinking of little experiments you could run to test
out this idea that you’ll remain successful without all your negative
self-talk and self-judgment. For example, you might go into that weekly
sales meeting Monday morning without any of your usual “pep-talking” and
see what happens.
A sign of emotional maturity is that we let go of old habits that no longer serve us well, no matter how much we thought we needed them as children.
Let go of the belief that you must be hard on yourself in order to be successful and you’ll find happiness not far behind.
I need to be successful to be lovable.
Of
all the destructive core beliefs that hold us back from happiness, this
one is the most tragic — and possibly the most common.
For
all the very real benefits of living in an achievement-oriented
culture, there’s a serious psychological side effect most of us don’t
ever consider: We tend to bind our self-worth to our success —
especially our material success as defined by other people.
From
cradle to grave, we’re taught that hard work pays off and will lead to
success and then happiness. We’re nudged by all sorts of
well-intentioned family members, teachers, friends, and mentors to go to
the right schools and get the right career so we’ll become successful
and then happy. The problem is, as kids, we internalize this message to
mean — however irrational — that we’re only worthwhile and lovable if
we’re successful.
Working hard to be successful is an admirable aspiration. But believing happiness only follows success is deeply misguided.
This is a truly tragic way to go through life — believing that you’re only worthwhile if you’re successful.
Every
day in my clinical practice I work with many materially successful
people who believe becoming successful is the only way to be loveable
and happy. But being a neurosurgeon doesn’t make you very happy if you
hate being a neurosurgeon — no matter how many other people think it’s
impressive.
While
achievement certainly plays a role in our happiness and self-worth,
it’s dangerous to depend on it entirely. When you’re so driven and
obsessed with achievement that you fail to develop other sources of self-worth, you fragilize your identity.
The solution is not to stop working hard. It’s to diversify your identity.
How do you fix broken public systems? You spark people's competitive spirit. In a talk about getting people motivated to make change, public sector strategist Abhishek Gopalka discusses how he helped improve the health system of Rajasthan, a state in India home to more than 80 million people, using the powers of transparency and public accountability. "Motivation doesn't just appear," Gopalka says. "Something needs to change to make you care."
This talk was presented at a TED Institute event given in partnership with BCG. TED editors featured it among our selections on the home page. Read more about the TED Institute.
About the speaker
Abhishek Gopalka · Public sector strategist
BCG's Abhishek Gopalka advises governments on innovative approaches to deliver better outcomes for citizens.
Always keen to find articles and videos that help women advance in their careers, I thought this article might be of interest. I hope it gives women ideas on how to move forward in their chosen fields or find other paths more suitable to their ability.
As I often find when I look through these articles, there is information about other ideas and schemes. There is so much information now on the Internet that can help anyone who is willing to research to find their interests.
This article deals with the daily motivation that we need to have to do pretty much everything be it exercise, workout, study, reading, just anything that we want to do on a regular basis. Often we are too distracted by the slightest thing to put off the task we want to achieve.
The topic here is exercise but motivation transcends any undertaking that we want establish as a routine in our daily life.
Goal setting is vital in order to succeed in anything. Daily tasks done consistently will take you to your desired outcome. It is not always easy as there are so many distractions that can upset the routine but the reward of persevering is great. Many people have done it and if we motivate ourselves, it should not be too difficult. At the bottom of it all is the overwhelming desire to succeed.
