Feeling stuck?

By Rania Sa’adi
Licensed Rapid Transformational Therapist and Clinical Hypnotherapist

We’ve started another year with a long list of goals and achievements to pursue. And although one’s motivation is on a high, we may lose most of it sooner than we would like! So, how can we keep our motivation going and move forward with our plans to avoid procrastination?

You may feel demotivated for the simple reason that you don’t know where to start from. Setting up specific achievable goals and breaking them into smaller ones is key. Taking one small step at a time towards that goal, will make achieving it more attainable, thus motivating you to achieve tasks at hand.

Enjoy the journey

Fixating on the end goal sometimes makes one feel demotivated and overwhelmed. The best way to achieve goals is to enjoy the journey of arriving there, with its ups and downs and arriving there without any expectations. The end goal can be changed and adjusted along the way.

Being fixated on the goal sometimes, without the necessary adjustments and changes, be it personal or circumstantial, may make you feel disappointed in yourself if whenever you don’t reach it. This may demotivate you and hinder you from achieving any future goals that you seek.

Moving on

When we feel failure and disappointment in ourselves, we put ourselves down quicker than anyone else does. Eventually, we may feel demotivated and lose interest in moving ahead.

One of the main reasons why people get demotivated even before they start a task, is the fear of failure. The worry of not getting it right from the first attempt keeps one from starting, and hence procrastinating. However, readiness is an illusion, because how can you be ready and sure that you will do it right, without even trying?

Allowing ourselves to make mistakes is the first step into learning; keeping in mind that any outcome may not be the desired one “yet”, but nevertheless is a result. We can thus learn from it and apply what we learnt the first time round into our next attempt. Remember, FAIL is an acronym for “First Attempt In Learning”. We need to fail, in order to succeed.

Finding motivation

One of the best ways to find motivation is through your own self-talk. Using what we call the “Thinking loop” is one of the best tools: thoughts lead to feelings, and feelings lead to behaviours.

So, when you change your thought, you feel better about the situation and therefore do better.

Thinking about any task that you want to achieve by saying to yourself “I can do it, I choose to do it, and I love doing it,” makes you feel motivated, excited and thrilled to go ahead and do it. And eventually the behaviour will be of you taking action towards achieving it. Looping back and confirming the same thought that you started off with “I can do it”.

Now use the same example to say to yourself “I don’t feel like doing it, but I have to” and experience what it feels like: pressured, discouraged and demotivated. The behaviour or action you take in this case is no action at all!

The more it becomes a belief

Because the mind learns by repetition, the more we repeat a positive thought, the more it becomes a belief. Remember that first we make our beliefs and then our beliefs make us.

One of the habits of successful people is that they do what they need to do in order to achieve their goals, and they do it first. There is a certain amount of energy associated with doing any given task, and when we spend the time thinking about that task, rather than doing it, we are already wasting some of this energy. Thus, the quality of our achievement is affected.

One thing to understand is that motivation comes from taking action, not from inaction. So, go on and start and you will become motivated. 

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine