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
When
you put your hand on a hot stove accidentally, you remove it
immediately. The pain is so unbearable that you don’t need to make a
decision to move your hand. Imagine if you lived your life the same way.
Imagine what your life would look like if subpar results hurt just as
bad as touching your hand to that stove?
You’d live out Tony Robbin’s classic quote:
“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”
On some level, you’re okay with the results you have right now. Your life is tolerable. You start to live a life you tolerate because the things you’re willing
to tolerate accumulate slowly over time. You’re like that frog who sits
in a pot that slowly heats up until it eventually boils. But since it
happened so slowly you don’t feel the need to act quickly like the hot
stove.
How do you change this?
Instead
of feeling a dull yet tolerable level of pain and anxiety your whole
life, you find a way to rip the band-aid and make the changes you need
to make now. This is something you logically understand but find it
difficult to emotionally embrace. So is pretty much every other
self-improvement concept. Let’s tackle this from every angle and see if
we can find something that sticks.
Why Is a Life You Don’t Want Acceptable to You?
If
you’re living an amazing life with no room for growth, no need to read
further. If you’re someone who is just content with what they have, stop
reading. I’m not here to add fuel to the fire of self-help that seeks
to only criticize. I’m just talking to people who know deep down that this ain’t it.
Back
to the question, if your life isn’t the way you want it to be, why do
you tolerate it? You’re willing to tolerate certain realities you do so
because on some level you think you deserve to live
that way. I’ve had moments like that in my life like the time where I
tolerated a bad relationship because I felt it was the best option I had
and I was afraid to start over and be alone.
You
feel like you deserve to live that way because of the way you see
yourself. You see yourself a certain way because of your behavior, your
experiences, and your interpretation of both. This leaves you in a catch
22 scenario. Which comes first if you want to change your situation?
How do you change your identity to become someone who will no longer
tolerate your current reality when you’re currently tolerating your reality because you’re unwilling to change?
In
short, you fake it until you make it long enough to do the work it
requires to make that identity change become real. You have to tap into
that deeper understanding that you do deserve more deep down, but you
just haven’t done what it takes to become that person yet. You know that person is the real one. The person you know you’re supposed to become.
You
just keep it real with yourself. We live in this culture where you’re
not supposed to feel bad about yourself for any reason whatsoever. This
culture teaches you tolerance of everything when you definitely
shouldn’t tolerate certain aspects of your life. There’s nothing wrong
with looking at your situation and realizing you messed up — that the
results you have right now are just objectively subpar. That maybe you
should be upset with yourself for letting things get this bad. At this
point, you’re on your way.
Understand What’s On the Other Side
Seems simple enough, right? Get fed up with your situation and do what it takes to change.
But it’s hard. And you’ll have to go through a period of your life
where you face massive levels of uncertainty. And I won’t lie to you,
sometimes that period of your life will be brutal.
Using
my relationship as an example again. After finally cutting things off
and striking out on my own, I was depressed. Couldn’t leave my bed for
days. It took a month for me to really get outside into the open world
again. I had done the right thing by removing myself from an intolerable
situation, but the rewards weren’t immediate.
It
didn’t take too long to get back on my feet and the uncertainty I was
afraid of wasn’t all that bad. The same will be true for you most
likely. things will suck for a little bit when you try to start a new
path for your life, but you’ll get over it.
Where are the areas in your life that you don’t like, but you’re willing to accept because at least you know what to expect?
Where are the areas in your life where the fear of uncertainty keeps
you stuck? Those tend to be the ones you need to attack most because
they’ll lull you into a sense of complacency for years, decades at a time.
The
best remedy for this involves looking forward and thinking about what
your life will end up like if you let comfort and familiarity build a
cage around you. If you want to escape, it just takes the simple
realization that you just need to go through a period of challenge and
struggle in your life to get to the other side. That’s it. You just have
to deal with your emotions swinging up and down for a while. And then
you’ll have changed.
You’re Much Better Than This
You
tolerate a life you really don’t want to live because the story you
tell yourself about life maps better with your insecurities. Think about
it. How many times do you have doubtful thoughts vs confident ones? How
many times are you beating yourself vs lifting yourself up?
If
you constantly spend time focusing on the negative, of course, it makes
sense that you should be willing to tolerate certain realities. It
makes sense to have flawed areas of your life since you’re so flawed. In reality, though, you’re just telling yourself a story that’s blown way out of proportion and you know it.
You
get over that story by repeatedly reminding yourself that it’s BS. When
you remind yourself that it’s BS, and you believe it for just a tiny
bit, it gives you a window of time where you actually do
act like that person you’re supposed to be. The more you act like that
person, the more your identity changes. As it changes, you’ll no longer
tolerate certain things.
I
have so many things from my past that I’d no longer tolerate at all
now. I got there by slowly changing my story. I’d keep reminding myself
that I didn’t have to live a certain way, that I was capable of much
more, that I didn’t have to just lay down and watch the rest of my life
go by.
Have
that conversation with yourself. You’re better than this. You’re better
than working some crappy corporate job you don’t really like so you can
pay that $500 car payment. Screw that job and the car, go live your
dream. You don’t have to settle for that person you know deep down isn’t
the one. You don’t have to live in the shadows and be a wallflower on
the world’s stage to fit in.
It’s
okay to admit what you want from this life. Stop being afraid to ask
for it. And don’t let people shame you out of asking for it because
they’re afraid. Let them tolerate their existence. Consciously build
your life exactly the way you want it and don’t stop until you fully
make it happen.
