How to change your life
Many changes take a lot of time. Perhaps you’re trying to lose 50lbs, or get out of debt. You might be working on a major project — like writing a book, or renovating a house.
Whatever your goal, you know it’s going to make a big difference to your life. You have plenty of reasons to achieve it … but that’s not always enough.
On a day to day level, it can be really tough to consistently take actions that lead towards your goal. For instance…
We all know that making personal changes can be tough. Even when we know that those changes will lead to greater success with our health, relationships and career, we still resist. It’s not hard to believe that the failure rate of self-improvement efforts in general is 65% to 90% (Sellman, D, 2009).
One reason for this astonishingly high failure rate may have to do with typical methods of self-motivation. Common tactics intended to get you in gear often backfire and foster self-sabotage. When you get into the minds of people with motivation issues, it all begins to make sense. Here are typical things people say to themselves with the intention of inspiring a state of inner go-get-‘em.
It’s easy to stay motivated when everything’s going well. But our plans don’t always go smoothly. Perhaps you’ve experienced a setback on your way towards a particular goal:
- An injury that stopped you working out and achieving the level of fitness you wanted.
- An unexpected bill that put a massive hole into your hard-won savings
- A rejection letter from the job that you really wanted
… it could be almost anything. Whatever the details, the setback was something that made your heart sink. Your plans were abruptly derailed.
‘Giving up smoking is easy. I’ve done it hundreds of times’ ~ Mark Twain
So your goal is to get up at 4am every morning, go for a 5km run and take a cold shower before meditating and writing a chapter of your new novel? I can’t say I’ve ever tried to do anything like this, but I imagine it must be hard to stay motivated.
For me, sticking to a routine like this would involve brute force – a never-ending battle of willpower over the desire to stay in bed. But this would go against my fundamental belief that life is not a battle. To me, life is not like climbing a mountain – it’s more of a downhill thing. Alan Watts, a great proponent of a Taoist view of life, called it ‘the watercourse way.’ Water will always flow downhill, of course, and yet its power is undeniable. So how can we apply the watercourse way to getting things done?
Today I feel great. I feel inspired. The words are flowing out freely as I write. It’s a nice change. Recently I have been in a bit of a rut in my life and I feel I lost my “blogging groove” temporarily. I don’t think the quality of my articles suffered at all, but they felt so much harder to write.
Given the change between how I have felt the past few days and how I felt last week I have identified 4 signs that I am in a motivated state:
