walkin on water
How to Do Something Even When You Don’t Feel Like Doing It
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grrphoto/ / CC BY 2.0
“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.“
E.M Gray
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.”
Jim Rohn
“With self-discipline most anything is possible.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Often you have to do something you don’t feel that much like doing. Such is life. Maybe it’s telephone call where you risk rejection in some way. Maybe it is finishing a report or essay for work/school. Maybe it’s just about getting those dishes done or going to the gym.
So what do you do? Do you get up off the chair and get going? Or do you procrastinate and decide to do it “another day”?
I do a bit of both. But I have found a few ways to improve my consistency – one of the most important things for any kind of success – pretty dramatically and make things easier.
Step 1: Accept it.
When you feel resistance within towards doing something the natural instinct may be to try to push that feeling away. To brush it off. I have found that doing the opposite and just accepting that it is there can do wonders.
Tell yourself: “This is how I feel right now and I accept it”.
This sounds counterintuitive and perhaps like you’re giving up. However by accepting how you feel instead of resisting it you reduce the emotional energy that you are feeding into this problem. It then tends to just kinda lose speed like a car that runs out of fuel. And oftentimes it becomes so weak after while that it just moves out of your inner focus and disappears.
This step may be all you need to reduce the negative feelings enough to be able to start taking action. If not, move on to the next step.
Step 2: List the positives.
After you have accepted how you feel list the positives of getting this thing done. Do it on
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grrphoto/ / CC BY 2.0
“The successful person has the habit of doing the things failures don’t like to do. They don’t like doing them either necessarily. But their disliking is subordinated to the strength of their purpose.“
E.M Gray
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.”
Jim Rohn
“With self-discipline most anything is possible.”
Theodore Roosevelt
Often you have to do something you don’t feel that much like doing. Such is life. Maybe it’s telephone call where you risk rejection in some way. Maybe it is finishing a report or essay for work/school. Maybe it’s just about getting those dishes done or going to the gym.
So what do you do? Do you get up off the chair and get going? Or do you procrastinate and decide to do it “another day”?
I do a bit of both. But I have found a few ways to improve my consistency – one of the most important things for any kind of success – pretty dramatically and make things easier.
Step 1: Accept it.
When you feel resistance within towards doing something the natural instinct may be to try to push that feeling away. To brush it off. I have found that doing the opposite and just accepting that it is there can do wonders.
Tell yourself: “This is how I feel right now and I accept it”.
This sounds counterintuitive and perhaps like you’re giving up. However by accepting how you feel instead of resisting it you reduce the emotional energy that you are feeding into this problem. It then tends to just kinda lose speed like a car that runs out of fuel. And oftentimes it becomes so weak after while that it just moves out of your inner focus and disappears.
This step may be all you need to reduce the negative feelings enough to be able to start taking action. If not, move on to the next step.
Step 2: List the positives.
After you have accepted how you feel list the positives of getting this thing done. Do it on