Tag: motivated

5 Ways to Get Energized and Motivated When You Feel Lazy

“Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.” ~Benjamin Disraeli

Although laziness is common and a natural part of life, it has the potential to completely consume us.

I personally have times where laziness causes me to feel trapped. No matter what I do, I cannot seem to shake it off. I feel tired, fall asleep constantly during the day, sit around a lot and feel unable to be active, avoid doing anything productive, and put on hold things that I want to accomplish.

I believe there are two kinds of laziness. First, there’s the kind where you have been working your butt off for weeks and finally, after all your hard work, all you want to do is be lazy and do nothing.

But then there’s the kind of laziness where you struggle to find motivation. Every time you think of something you would like to do or achieve, you cannot find the energy or drive to work toward it. This is the kind of laziness that I am talking about.

Being lazy is actually quite draining and depressing. I know because I regularly find myself feeling so lethargic that even the simplest task seems like a challenge. I’m sure I’m not alone in this struggle.

I have found five effective ways to overcome my laziness that I want to share with you so you can win your personal battle too.

1. Focus on just a few things at a time.

We often create a big list of things that we want to do and achieve. Focusing on two or three things at a time will allow you to feel less overwhelmed. Instead, you will feel motivated, as your goals will now seem so much more achievable.

Out of the two sets of six-month goals below, which set gets you more motivated?

Learn to play guitar, do well at work, and get fit.

Learn to play guitar, do well at work, get fit, build big muscles, get better at singing, get top marks at school, learn how to draw better, and write a book.

When I see the second list, I feel overwhelmed. When my life looks a bit like this, I usually don’t know where to start or if I can succeed at anything I’ve set out to do.

People feel motivated when they feel they have a good chance of success.

This has been a big learning curve for me. When success seems like it is just around the corner, suddenly I get an amazing rush of energy where I feel liberated and excited to achieve bigger things.

Set yourself two or three easy to achieve goals at a time and you will notice that you will naturally gain inspiration and motivation.

2. Exercise.

Exercise is the simplest way to overcome laziness. A lot of the time, we feel lazy because completing a task seems too difficult. With exercising, you don’t have to figure anything out. You just have to make that one big decision to literally start moving your body (jump up and down, go for a run, or start doing lunges in your living room).

This has been a big revelation for me. Sometimes I get so fed up with feeling lazy and lethargic that I literally just start running. I have learned that if you can overcome physical laziness, your mind will naturally follow.

You will find that you will become more willing to think about complicated things, such as working on a project or doing something that you have been avoiding. Exercise will help you break through that barrier of inertia and will help you feel motivated and more willing to put in effort.

3. Allow yourself time to relax and do the things you enjoy.

Sound’s ironic, doesn’t it? Overcoming laziness by relaxing! But it works.

Often, we become lazy because a task seems too difficult. By relaxing and doing the things we enjoy, we allow ourselves to feel satisfied. When we are satisfied, we are more willing to take on bigger tasks and achieve bigger things.

By relaxing and enjoying yourself, you also allow yourself to think about things, reflect, and feel inspired.

For example, I often feel uninspired to write articles. I get a mental block. Writing and researching becomes an overwhelming task, so I retreat to laziness. I completely block out anything that requires hard work.

I have learned that as I relax and do things I enjoy, my mind is encouraged to reflect again. It is not scared of becoming overwhelmed because it knows that I am not going to push it to do something productive if it does not want to.

This is how I gain inspiration again. When I relax, I suddenly find myself thinking of all these great ideas and I regain inspiration and motivation.

4. Get organized.

Your physical surroundings have a big impact on how you feel. If your house is a mess, you are likely to feel even more overwhelmed—both because clutter creates a sense of chaos and because having to clean your house adds to your giant list of things to do in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Clean your house and organize your physical surroundings and you will naturally feel motivated to be more productive and active.

You will be making life simpler and easier to manage.

Once you’ve organized your home, you may feel motivated to get organized in other areas of your life and tackle tasks you’ve neglected.

As I mentioned earlier, laziness is often our attempt to avoid difficult or unpleasant tasks. Ironically, once you start tackling them, it will all feel less difficult and overwhelming and you’ll likely feel a lot less tense.

5. Be aware of and monitor your internal dialogue.

Our internal dialogue (the way we speak to ourselves) has such a big impact on how we feel and what we do.

Anthony Robins, world famous motivational speaker, explains that if we want to feel ecstatic, all we need to do is adopt a point of view that creates that emotion.

For example, picturing in your mind the things that make you feel that way, change the tone and content of your internal dialogue and change your posture and breathing to create that state in your body.

This has become my personal motto, and I am genuinely amazed at how much more positive I feel just by choosing to have a positive outlook.

Every time I have a negative thought, such as “today is going to be a long, hard day at work,” I immediately challenge that thought by telling myself something like this: “I have so much to be grateful for and today is going to be fun and enjoyable!”

I then make a choice to get rid of my slouchy posture and tell myself that I have lots of energy.

Just thinking that way makes me feel excited and gives me a big boost of energy.

I once learned that we have over 50,000 thoughts a day. Even if only 10% of them are negative, it equals a total of 5,000 negative thoughts a day. When I heard this, I realized that we have way too many negative thoughts and it helped make sense of why so many of us struggle to feel motivated.

Being aware of and monitoring your internal dialogue is so important, and will inevitably impact on how lazy you feel and how easy it will be for you to overcome that laziness.

These methods have helped me incredibly and continue to help me everyday. I am sure that if you apply them too, you will experience a big boost of energy and motivation in your daily life.

April 15, 2014
How To Keep Yourself Motivated When You’re Not Feeling It

“A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.” ~Unknown

I’m great with short-term goals. In fact, I prefer them. Work my butt off for a few months to reach a goal? I’m down with that. I’ll give up a social life, down time, spending money, eating yummy food (read: sugar), drinking alcohol—whatever it takes, for the short-term. Long-term goals… ugh, not so much.

Despite this preference for pretty immediate gratification, I have followed through with many long-term goals in my life (school and various trainings, long-distance relationships, starting and re-starting businesses, to name a few).

There have also been quite a few of these goals that I’ve dropped that I wished I hadn’t.

I, like many of us, have noticed a pattern of finding it much more difficult to stay engaged once the initial excitement of starting something new has worn off.

Through this learning process of motivating myself to follow through with longer-view goals, I’ve come up with a few steps that have really helped me to stay focused and on track. Here are three steps that can help.

Remind yourself that you’re in charge.

There are loads of reasons we get off track with goals. Self-doubt, fear we won’t succeed, and concern that we are not setting realistic goals are just a few of them.

This is really important to remember: You can change this goal if you want. You can keep going, you can revise it, or you can dump it altogether.

When we are experiencing doubts, it’s easy to feel like we have no power; it’s easy to feel like we don’t have a choice. However, most often, we do.

I find it helps to simply remind myself that I’m in charge. Many times, when the going gets tough, we begin to feel like the choices we made (sometimes long ago) are not our own. Sometimes a reminder to ourselves that we are the ones who originally set this goal is a good way to rev the engine.

When I first started acupuncture school, I was pretty young, but it had been several years since I’d been in school. I’d been living on my own, partying it up, and doing whatever I liked.

I saw pretty quickly that I had to get serious, stop staying out late so often, and learn to organize my time and resources far better than I had been. In short, I had to get productive.

Well, the meltdown that ensued was not very attractive. I didn’t want to give up my young, single, and independent lifestyle! I didn’t want to trade late nights with my friends for late nights with textbooks and manuals!

That went on for about a week, until a wise friend (who was tired of my whining), said, basically, “You wanted this. Get with it, or quit school.”

It was the kick in the butt I needed to stop complaining and remember that I did want it. I was very driven to be an acupuncturist, because it’s an amazing modality. And I strongly desired (and continue to desire) to live a life of service.

I won’t say it was completely smooth sailing from there on out, but my productivity and focus were certainly much improved.

Look back at all you’ve already achieved.

If you have been taking steps towards your goal for a while, then it can be great to take some time to consider all that you have already accomplished. All long haul goals take multiple, incremental steps to attain. Pat yourself on the back, and remind yourself of these achievements.

The thing is, once an incremental step is attained, it can quickly feel like not quite so big of a deal. It becomes commonplace, and it’s not as exciting as it was when we first accomplished it. That’s normal, and understandable, and it’s great to look back occasionally and remind ourselves what a big deal reaching that step really was at the time.

When I’m frustrated about what feels like a lack of movement toward a goal, I sit down and make a list of the steps I have already enacted to reach it, and what the results of those steps have been. I am almost always surprised at how much I’ve produced. This clarity helps in releasing those feelings of frustration.

Explore the reasons you’re going for this goal and remind yourself often.

While I was in school, there were many times when I simply wanted to quit.

I had student loans (that were growing!). As I mentioned, there was little time for a social and personal life. I was learning a technique that required a very different perspective (energy medicine vs. the physical body) than I had previously.

Besides that, I was starting to sweat the idea of running my own business. Would I fail? Could I make it work? Maybe I was nuts to think I could succeed at this at all!

When I’d start to get too caught up in all that noise, I would literally sit down and remind myself of the reasons I’d chosen the path I had.

I loved acupuncture; despite fear about being self-employed, I craved that independence; I resonated strongly with the concepts of energy I was learning, even if the vocabulary was new.

Taking the time to have these talks with myself helped to re-invigorate me, to renew my focus, and encouraged me to continue.

To really follow through with a longer-term goal, we have to have solid reasons that make sense to us.

That said, goals aren’t set in stone. Like everything in life, it’s good to approach them with flexibility and open-mindedness.

If you can’t successfully remind yourself of your initial reasons for going for the goal, and get re-ignited about those reasons, then it might be time to re-assess.

Only we can decide what is best for us, and that can change over time. It’s so important to give ourselves permission to go for goals with full-on focus and gusto, or to change them, or put them aside for a while, or whatever else we decide is right at that time.

What techniques do you use to keep yourself motivated on your goal-getting journey?

December 8, 2013
4 Massive Motivation Killers and How to Overcome Them

“Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.” ~Robert H. Schuller

For the entirety of my life I have had an external source of structure.

I’ve very much thrived when both guided and held accountable by others. You could say that I’m a “systems” friendly person and have always felt safe and secure when I can simply follow the guidelines or instructions and then arrive at the intended destination.

The only problem is that I didn’t always create the “intended” destination. In fact, it usually wasn’t even where I wanted to be. It was where I thought I should be. So I decided to change all that.

Since starting my own business I have both felt the power of freedom, control, and expression as well as experienced the terrorizing fear of … freedom, control, and expression!

Nobody is telling me what my schedule should look like anymore. No one is checking in on me to make sure I’m staying proactive in marketing myself.

After being a corporate “yes man” for years I have finally obtained the independence that I have always wanted, and yet I swear that many times I would just prefer my old boss tell me what to do and crack the whip when I am slacking.

Parents, school, sports, work—the structure has always been built in for me and now I struggle daily to find the motivation from within. In response, I have worked hard to identify four of the biggest motivation killers out there.

1. Fear of Failure

For all the perfectionists struggling with procrastination, it’s actually pretty straightforward what the underlying road block here is: the crushing weight of expectations, the proverbial gun to the head mentality.

How many times have you been defeated before even taking on a task or challenge because of the overwhelming unknown of whether or not it’s going to be executed to your (or someone else’s) high level of expectations?

I can justify putting off just about any chore or task by telling myself that I don’t have the time or resources to get it done right.

This mindset leaves me feeling paralyzed. I have found that it’s better (more often than not) to take the jump, regardless of whether or not circumstances are optimal. Regardless of whether or not rejection is a possible outcome. Regardless of whether or not other people will appreciate or understand your actions.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t put your best foot forward, but you do have to realize that at some point you’ll need to start taking steps forward.

Even though missing the mark is uncomfortable at times, most happy and successful people that I’ve interviewed or read about have all gotten okay with taking shot after shot until they finally hit their target.

2. Lack of Clear Goals

We can mitigate the overwhelming fear of failure by focusing on rewarding, enjoyable, and achievable goals.

Ultimately, living out a productive, inspired, and motivated life requires us to make choices. We simply can’t have it all. But sometimes we get so caught up comparing our own situation to that of others (what others have and where others are in life) that we sabotage any chance we have of making the choices we really need to make to get to where we really want to be.

And worse, whenever we feel that our hand is forced in our journey, our intrinsic motivation is killed. Dreaming about what you want and then actually believing that you can achieve it (even during times of adversity) is the only way to really find motivation from within.

While big picture goals are important in order to understand where it is that you ultimately want to go, overcoming inertia (remember that heavy weight of expectation?) and making movement by knocking out a smaller plan of attack is a perfectly viable option when you are moving at zero miles per hour.

Whether it is by creating your to-do list and schedule the night before or creating a flow chart of how to get from point A to B, it’s remarkably more fun, effective, and rewarding to create and implement daily strategies to get what you want out of life.

Without more tangible realizations of your dreams, wants, and goals (no matter how big or small) you are going to struggle knowing where to start.

3. Ignoring Your Health

As a personal trainer, this is more my area of expertise, and yet I still struggle to follow my own advice at times. And much like depression, physical neglect will rob you of feeling pleasure for any activity.

One of the biggest battles I have on a regular basis is getting enough sleep. If I consume caffeine too late in the day, or decide to reflect on life at 10pm, there is a good chance I’m going to toss and turn till 2am, leaving me with little time to mentally rest and physically heal by the time my 5:30am training rolls around.

The entire next two days I will be tired, so I choose to consume even more caffeine to stay peppy for clients, thus creating a vicious cycle and yet all the while wondering why I’m so lethargic!

Poor hydration, lack of exercise, and large amounts of insulin in the body (primarily from overconsumption of carbohydrates) will also leave you riding the motivation roller coaster (with mostly drops) thus killing self-esteem, leading to depression, and in turn creating a whole new vicious cycle of negative thoughts and negative energy levels.

You need to stop the cycle at some point. Recognize this and get off this ride immediately!

4. Loss of Core Identity

How can you possibly handle any of the above three challenges effectively, let alone find the intrinsic motivation to even try, if you do not know in your heart who you are? Or more importantly, who do you want to be?

I’ll never forget my first private therapy session as an “adult” and how shocking it was to fail to articulate an answer to the above questions. At the conclusion of our first meeting all I could dejectedly muster was “I don’t know even know who I am.”

It took (and still takes) a lot of work to uncover and stay true to my answers to these questions.

If there has been one best practice I would advise anyone to perform it would be journaling. There’s rarely a moment after being truly honest and fair with myself that I haven’t been able to dial up some immediate intrinsic motivation and be okay with “doing me.”

Because for me, having a stronger sense of self, combined with re-committing to loving, humble, and honorable principles has kept my world from collapsing when something doesn’t go my way.

This is such an empowering feeling and makes risk taking so much more exciting, goal planning more identity congruent, and proactive health care a worthy and top priority.

—

All four of these productivity and happiness assassins seem to work together in an effort to kill my momentum. Sometimes they still win. But more and more these days I realize that I’m in control over them. It’s been the battle of my life, and it may be yours. But our lives are worth fighting for.

October 23, 2013
The Secret to Staying Motivated (and Motivating Other People)
“Don’t be pushed by your problems; be led by your dreams.” ~Unknown

As the founder and owner of Samovar Tea Lounge in San Francisco, I’ve gone through my share of ups and downs over the past twelve years.

One of the hardest challenges I face every day is how to create motivation. How to motivate myself to keep going, even when things get hard. How to motivate staff to serve and lead with enthusiasm. How to motivate vendors to work with me. And the list goes on.

No matter who you are, everyone is trying to motivate someone. Parents try to motivate their children to practice piano. Bosses try to motivate their employees to work faster. People try to motivate themselves to lose weight.

Unfortunately, motivation sucks. It’s an external force that requires either a threat or a reward. But once that carrot or stick is removed, everything falls apart. Or it may work for a while, but soon you’ll need an even bigger carrot or stick to keep it going. It’s a downward spiral, like a car spinning its wheels in the mud, only to become even more stuck.

On the other hand, some people and social movements have such momentum that they seem to soar effortlessly. What’s the difference?

For us at Samovar, the secret is not an external force, but an internal superpower: inspiration.

How to Create Inspiration

1. Find a mission.

Inspiration is the fire that wells within. When you’re inspired, you’re filled with life. You don’t need an alarm clock to wake up; you wake up before the alarm ready to dive into a new day. When you’re inspired, you don’t need to be told what to do at work; you’re already thinking of ways to make your work even better.

How do you create inspiration within yourself or your company? It comes from doing something that matters, and knowing that you’re a part of something bigger than yourself.

At Samovar, our mission is to create positive human connection. It’s not about selling tea; it’s about creating a movement. Find a mission that resonates deep in your heart, and you’ll find a deep well of enthusiasm and energy.

2. Share the mission, not the action.

It’s much easier to share a mission than make a demand. When I let go of the need to “manage” staff, and instead empower them to fulfill this vision, then the magic happens.

Instead dealing with of a bunch of robots that need to be monitored closely to make sure they meet the minimum work requirements, I’m surrounded by passionate ambassadors of the company vision.

Sharing a mission is also more effective than demands. My staff face a million different scenarios every day, most of which I can’t anticipate.

It’s impossible to make a protocol for every single issue that pops up. But if my team truly believes in our mission, they can solve problems creatively, using our core vision and principles.

3. Fuel your inspiration.

Inspiration is contagious. When you hang out with inspiring people, you become inspired. And unlike motivation, which requires increasingly bigger rewards, inspiration is a self-propelling force that grows bigger and bigger.

I also fuel my inspiration by reading books by inspiring people. Here are a few notable authors with insights on inspiration:
- Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within by Osho
- Let My People Go Surfing by Yvon Chouinard
- Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin
- Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow by Chip Conley
- Pour Your Heart Into It by Howard Schultz
4. Breathe.

Sure, I still have tough days when I feel discouraged. But at those times I simply pause. I brew a pot of tea and take a few breaths (the word “inspire” comes from the Latin word meaning “to breathe”).

Breathing gives me space to reflect and remember. Every satisfied customer who leaves with a smile on their face, every staff person who shares their excitement about the connections they created, and every meeting I have with inspiring people buoys me up.

Find a mission and share it. Breathe it in, and breathe it out until it infuses every cell of your body. Soon you’ll be filled with life, passion, and joy that no carrot-or-stick motivation could compete with.
August 28, 2013
The Time to Act Is Now: Get Out There and Seize the Moment

“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you won’t do anything with it.” ~M. Scott Peck

For most of my life, I thought I had no ambition.

To be fair, I thought it because it was true. Don’t get me wrong. I had ambition to keep living, to shower daily, and to seek out entertainment at the end of my miserable days working in customer service. Still, regardless of how miserable those days were, I wasn’t motivated to change my life path.

I used to wish for ambition, in that vague sense that was part fervent desire and part dismissal. I wanted it, but thought that it wasn’t part of me. If I didn’t have enough ambition to become ambitious, what was the point?

Then I got cancer, and I realized that sometimes things come to us in the most strange and horrible ways.

I was 35 when I was diagnosed. I had an associate’s degree and worked at a dead-end job, answering phones and writing down messages. All of a sudden, I had this…this disease, and what had I done with my life? What did I have to be proud of?

I was proud of one thing. I had an amazing son, and since the day he was born, I had poured all of my life into him. At 14, he was already fiercely independent, and didn’t need me like I needed him.

With cancer, my motivation didn’t need to kick in immediately. All of the decisions were made for me. I had an advanced grade of tumor, and although I was Stage One, my oncologist insisted that I needed chemotherapy, followed by radiation.

I didn’t realize overnight that I had motivation. It was a slow dawning upon me.

At first it just felt like I was doing what I needed to do to get through every day. Losing my hair filled me with resolve to become an advocate and show others what beauty from within could look like. I very deliberately didn’t wear my wig because I felt that hiding behind it sent a message of its own, one I didn’t want to endorse.

Cancer woke me up to the possibilities my life still had. The one thing I got out of it was that I wanted to live, and living now meant doing everything I had never realized I really needed to do.

I began chemo in March 2011, and followed it with 33 radiation treatments. I thought my breast was going to fall off on its own by the end, but I finished in July and hit the ground running.

I went back to college in August, received my bachelor’s degree in May, and was accepted to graduate school that fall. I began the program in January of this year, and applied for and got a graduate assistant position. I also manage a movie theater for my second job.

When I went for my enrollment appointment with my advisor, she expressed concern that I was doing too much, that I was pushing myself too hard.

I couldn’t explain to her what it felt like to sleep through 35 years of life and suddenly feel like you were awake for the first time. I couldn’t explain that there was no such thing as too hard when every day I felt ecstatically, unbelievably alive.

Today, I have all the motivation I ever thought I wanted and then some. I beat cancer, and if I have a recurrence, I’ll beat it again. I have a lot of time to make up for, and every single day is a gift.

Do I still have lazy days? You bet I do. But my days are filled with purpose now instead of longing, and for that I am so glad.

I was talking to a friend recently, and I told him that I was grateful to have had cancer. He couldn’t believe I said that, and frankly, neither could I, but as I said it I knew it was true. Sometimes we get answers to wishes that we didn’t even know we wished for. Sometimes those answers feel more like burdens to bear.

But cancer was what I needed to survive to realize that life was too short to be miserable. Do I recommend that everyone get cancer to get through life? Of course not, but there are themes that apply to everyone.

Overcoming obstacles.

Powering through in the face of adversity.

Getting up and going when all you want to do is rest.

My favorite saying is “You have to get there yourself.” You absolutely do. There is no one or nothing that can force you to do that which you do not want to do.

You might be drifting in your own life, and thinking that you want a change. I can’t tell you how to do that.

If you’re a fellow drifter, my best advice is to work on giving up your limiting beliefs about what you’re capable of doing.

No matter who you are, how old you are, what your health is like, you are so much stronger than you realize. I spent 35 years wishing that I was different, and that got me nowhere. The time to act is now.

Now get out there and seize your moment. And when you’re done with that, seize another.

Photo by Lauren Manning

August 15, 2013