How to Motivate Yourself (Part 7)
Having a life plan.
A vision for your future.
For some of my clients, having a lack of direction is a really common complaint. Sometimes it’s from their loved ones or themselves. It’s one that also has a simple (but not easy) solution. What’s neat about this tool is that the mental barriers or resistance that pop up from even attempting this task.
It’s the dreaded question that many high-school students, uni students, early graduates and those recently made redundant hates to hear. It sort of sounds like this:
“So, what are you going to do with your life?”
It’s odd. If you don’t have an answer to that question, you get a icky uncomfortable anxiety and if you did have an answer, you often feel it’s not good enough. Now, I don’t want you to avoid that anxious feeling. Actually, I want you to face it.
Source: Jean Frederic Fortier, Unsplash
Okay, set out a specific time for you to attempt to write down on paper what your goals are 3 years from now.
What are they? Have a look at them, are they what you really want? Are they realistic? Are they sufficiently specific?
A common error I see is that some clients will write down “I don’t want to be a failure”, “not a burden on society” or “I don’t want to be useless”. There’s a harsh truth, if you do nothing towards your goals, you’re going to keep feeling that way. So you need to reattempt until you can specify something clear enough to aim for. I won’t lie, for some of you this might be hard, it might take multiple attempts, you might always get that anxious feeling, but it’s necessary. Once you do, motivating goal-directed action are much easier.
The barriers are worth talking about:
Fear of failure: writing goals means you have to identify failure and success states, but the second you do this, you will feel anxiety. You might feel it because it’s so clear that you are not at your success state and that you closer to your failure state. Some people when they experience this, opt out of having goals, so that they never have to experience failure. Accepting failure is necessary part of pursuing meaningful goals is critical to unlock in your potential. In fact, if you’re not failing with some regularly, your goals probably aren’t ambitious or meaningful enough.
Holding onto your own potential: writing and pursuing goals often means trading unlimited potential and being highly regarding the label of the “person that could be anything” than the “person that attempted and failed”. Sometimes consistently choosing the “person that could be” makes choosing the alternative the “person that tried” so difficult, it might feel that it isn’t an option. “Potential” is not tangible, it’s not embedded in physical reality, you can’t feed yourself with potential and you can’t make progress to your goals unless you trade it and see the limits of it. For some, it’s the baggage they carried from childhood. Maybe they were the smart kid that got straight A’s when they didn’t try. Maybe that kid becomes a teenager in high school that passed because they didn’t try. In university, they failed because they didn’t try. “I could have done that if I tried” is such a vicious trap, because as you hold onto your imaginary resource, others have learnt from their attempts. Instead others have learnt not to rely on potential but on persistence, self-learning and action. Real world progress is better than imaginary progress, and a part of you already deeply knows this and that’s why you feel stuck.
Fear of locking themselves into wrong choice. Some people don’t want to pigeonhole their life and lock themselves into a direction. It’s a reasonable concern, by definition you have to give up all other directions to move forward in one. But it’s necessary. There’s a secret to this, it turns out as you commit to a direction, you gain competence and learn skills that accelerate your progress in all directions. It’s transferable. It’s the reason why those who competed as athletes often have some skills that are transferable to study and work. It’s the reason that if you finished a degree you are more employable than no degree. The cost of choosing and committing to direction is always outweighed by the benefits by the skills and learning from being competent in that direction. You are better placed to take advantage of opportunities, you will develop a network of supportive friends and associates, you’ll have more mental skills at your disposal, more expertise to offer your team and workplace, more experience to leverage, it’s magnitudes better than no choice. A “wrong choice” is better than “not choosing”. By the way, is it truly wrong if you made the best decision with the information you had at the time? Retrospective decision analysis is useful for future decisions but not really helpful for changing the past.
Multiple interests, master of none. For some people writing down their goals and committing to them means they can pursue multiple interests simultaneously. Now, for most people, it’s very difficult to get competent at multiple things at the same time. There are lots of reasons for that, you might need to overcome the learning curve of any skill before it gets useful. If you keep switching, it’s really likely that you won’t overcome that learning curve for it to be useful in other domains. For example, by the time you finish a degree, your knowledge or technical skills might be at a level that useful to someone else. If you are doing 3 degrees at a time, it’s not physically possible with the same resource constraints to get proficient and technically sound at all 3. Also some tasks are all or nothing tasks, for example, having one published book is better than 3 unfinished books (which is technically zero published books). It not useful a team if you’re only sort of useful to others. The other issue is that switching domains to practice takes time, it takes energy and effort. So switching often costs resources that you would have used, to get really good at what you had started out doing. Pragmatically, being focused on your most meaningful interest (or 2) is the only “efficient” way forward.
So - designate time to detail your life goals and see if resistance pops up. Then you’ll have to deal with that before you can progress. It’s often insightful to see what we are holding onto because it often holds us back.
Hope that’s useful and happy launching!