5 Ways to Take Action When You are Not Feeling Motivated
Happy week after daylight savings time has sprung us forward into an exhausted oblivion. Is the timing of this article a coincidence? That’s a hard no.
Read on for my suggestions for finding motivation — or more importantly ACTION — when you are feeling sluggish.
1. Think About the People Affected by Your Work
Could this also be called “Guilt Tripping Yourself”? For sure!
Regardless of your job, what you do impacts other people. When you are struggling to do your job, someone else is impacted negatively. When you are energized to follow through on your work tasks, someone somewhere is benefitting as a result.
Whenever I am flagging, I think about my favourite colleagues and clients. I think about how if I am dropping the ball, I am doing them a disservice. And it lights a fire under me to finish up tasks that could support them and their work.
2. Start with Something Easy
Have you ever noticed that the more you do nothing, the harder it is to do something?
Or when your day gets off to an active start, you find it easier to stay on task and time flies by?
If you are immobilized by your own procrastination, try starting with something really simple.
Reply to a couple neglected emails. Prepare an agenda for an upcoming meeting. Pick up the phone for a conversation with a colleague you’ve been meaning to check in with.
3. Protect Your Perspective
Do you have a colleague you love, but who tends to be more pessimistic or negative than you in their outlook? Do you find yourself uninspired and withdrawn after conversations with certain people?
Consider limiting your interactions with these people, wherever possible. Or just refusing to engage in conversations that focus only on the negative.
Over-sharing about your worst feelings about your job with a colleague is risky in more ways than one. Even if you share your colleagues views, try to change the subject to more productive topics. If this person cannot budge from negativity mode, then feel free to let some of their calls and messages go unanswered while you focus on protecting your mindset and attitude.
4. Make a List
There’s so much to do that your brain cannot settle on a single task. You go to start one things, which reminds you of another thing, then another thing. Your brain is a pinball being bounced from bumper to bumper, setting of jangling bells and flashing lights. STOP.
Making a list will help quiet your brain by externalizing all the information your mind is currently trying to hold onto.
Once you have your list, you can either do as I suggest above and start with something simple to get momentum going. Or you can complete an urgent task and stop your brain’s stress about unfinished, time-sensitive tasks.
5. Get Off-Screen
Tech enables us to do so much, but it also enables us to access myriad distractions.
Consider a walking meeting, an old fashioned phone call, or even breaking out your pen and paper to write that To Do List I mentioned above.
Even if it is not work related, a quick walk around the block, movement, and fresh air can all help you work out your restlessness and focus better upon your return to your desk. Or at least they help me… will add it to my to-do list to look up official scientific research on the topic.
Motivation is Fickle
People associate motivation with actively wanting to do something. We cannot always tap into that motivation, the glowing core at the centre of our beings that wants us to self actualize our most full and awesome potential.
On days when motivation is illusive, focus on action. Getting started with something will give you a sense of accomplishment, which will remind you of the larger dreams you want to accomplish, and then before you know it that powerful core of motivation is activated and time is flying on by as you get s*** done.
