Tag: personal development

Feeling unmotivated? Here’s how to get out of that slump

I won’t lie, I am feeling pretty despondent at the moment. You know that feeling, where you just want to sit in your pyjamas all day watching Gilmore Girls and munching your way through a whole bar of Dairy Milk? Yep, that’s where I am.

Motivation comes in ebbs and flows. There are some periods of our lives where we feel like we can take on the world. We have all these ideas and energy for projects, hobbies and goals, and we are super productive. Then, maybe something happens – things aren’t going so well at work, or in your personal life, you hit a wall, or maybe it’s just bad weather…. and all the balls start to drop. Things you found fun and interesting are just boring to you. And you know that you should get up off your butt and do something about it but just…. meh.

When this happens (and it happens to all of us), it’s important to remember that these things are always only temporary, and we have the tools to jolly ourselves up again. How do we do this? I’ve come up with a few tips to beating that motivation slump and get yourself back to being a Proactive Polly in no time.

Recognise your patterns

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have gone through these slumps enough times to know what your triggers are. For me, if I’m feeling undervalued at work I tend to lose motivation. What are your triggers?

Make a list of the past few times that you have found yourself in a slump, unable to get your projects off the ground. What were the circumstances surrounding it? What was going through your head at the time? What happened last time to get yourself motivated again? Keeping a nice little piggy bank of memories is helpful so you can whip it out when you feel that dejection and exhaustion hitting hard.

Once you’ve got this list, you are better equipped to understand what motivates you and what gets you down – and up again – in terms of achieving your goals.

Allow yourself time to be lazy

Huh? What? But I hate being lazy! This is a stupid blog, I’m not reading this!

WOAH, hold your horses there and hear me out. Sometimes the mere thought that we should be doing something more, that there’s something wrong with us for losing motivation, can be enough to paralyse us in to doing nothing. Beating ourselves up is not the way. Instead, I propose this – let yourself watch TV in your pyjamas and eat junk food, and do all those things that you simply just oh my goodness SHOULDN’T be doing. Allow yourself to be lazy, and be mindful that you are the one in control here. You’re letting yourself do nothing.

Have you ever been a hermit all weekend? Seen no-one, talked to no-one, gone nowhere…. and by the time Monday morning comes around you are just GAGGING for human contact? In the same vein, soon enough, after a while you won’t in fact want to be lazy anymore. You’ll be bored. You’ll want to set yourself new goals and try out new hobbies. Sometimes you just need to let yourself wallow in that laziness before you can get there. So go on, I give you permission to watch re-runs of How I Met Your Mother. You’re welcome.

Don’t wait for motivation to hit

Yes, sorry. This is the unspoken rule of motivation – you can’t wait for it to come back around. Once that wallowing and self-indulgence in your lack of motivation is over, it’s time to get back to work. The motivation will catch up sooner or later. And sometimes, it can not be there for a long time, and things can be difficult. Sometimes it can be really hard to lift our head off the pillow in the morning and do the things because, well, who cares? It’s important to know and understand whether this is a typical cycle of motivation waxing and waning, or whether it’s a sign of something more permanent, however. How long have you been unmotivated for? Does it mean that you don’t enjoy what you’re doing anymore, that you’re not interested? If so, that’s absolutely fine. But give it time and don’t quit as soon as that motivation dies down. When we first start projects, we are fuelled by excitement and drive and ambition, but after a while that just isn’t there in the same way (much like ‘the honeymoon period’ in a long-term relationship). It’s there sometimes, but a lot of the time it’s just hum-drum every day life. Learning how to stick through those down times and still achieve is the true key to success.

And look at that – I made myself do this blog post even though I had no motivation, and I’ve taken on all my own advice – BOOM! It’s done!

What are your tips for dealing with a lack of motivation? How does this make you feel? Would love you to share your comments below.

C x

When ‘personal development’ becomes an obsession…

For a long time, I have been fascinated with personal development. Whether it’s reading self-help books, or motivational autobiographies, through to trying out the latest ‘self-care’ or ‘personal development’ fad, I’m there at the forefront of all the trends. To date, I have dabbled in daily meditation through Headspace, The Miracle Morning, Marie Kondo’s tidying tools, affirmations and visualisation, not to mention others. I have regularly started up new hobbies (netball, choir, volleyball, triathlons, half marathons, Spanish) and taken courses (yoga teacher training, a Masters in Sport and Exercise Psychology), all in the name of challenging myself, getting out of my comfort zone and developing myself personally.

To my family and friends (indeed, to the outside world in general), I look like a driven ambitious, confident woman who isn’t afraid to push beyond her limits. And don’t get me wrong, I really like that I want to do these things!

But if you look at the real story, it isn’t that pretty. It involves me starting big and difficult tasks, only to give up in despair. It means me taking too much on that I have no time for myself and eventually have to cancel something. You can find me berating myself, saying to myself ‘why are you so lazy that you can’t stick at anything? Why do you always quit things?’

Things are going pretty well for me at the moment, personal development-wise. I have a job where I’m pushing myself regularly and learning new skills. I teach yoga part-time. I have a blog where I’m posting new content regularly and developing my writing skills. I’m exercising regularly and setting new goals for myself. And yet, every now and then I find myself in an existential crisis where I say ‘This isn’t enough! You must do more! You’re only teaching yoga four times a week? That’s nothing – take on another one! And why aren’t you volunteering with a charity? How are you even contributing to the world? How are you even furthering yourself?’

I sort of came to the conclusion that the problem wasn’t how many things I was taking on, how much I’m furthering myself, how much good I’m doing for others and the world. I realised that my obsession with personal development came from never feeling like I was good enough. I realised that I could take on all of the things and run myself in to the ground and achieve achieve achieve, but I would still have that little voice in my head telling me that I’m not good enough just as I am.

That’s the balance that I – and all of us – need to strike. It’s really really good to push ourselves, to set goals and to do good for others. But when this comes from a place of inadequacy rather than an appreciation and love for ourselves, a capacity to say ‘no’ when we’re feeling overwhelmed, and the ability to feel proud of ourselves, it’s all for nothing.

I think a couple of things contribute to this. The first is social media. We can scroll through our newsfeed and find a handful of our friends who are pushing and challenging themselves in different ways, and we feel guilty for not doing that too. It’s important to remember that everyone is at a different stage in their journey and has different priorities. Also, there are a million and one different things we could to to develop ourselves; we can’t do them all! And the second is, for me, living in London. I am surrounded by people who do not stop, who pride themselves in moving and achieving constantly. It’s a lot of pressure not to feel lazy when you want a relaxed Sunday afternoon, when you know that there will be other people moving seamlessly with the fast-paced lifestyle that London demands of us. I think that this pressure to be ‘doing’ all the time can be really detrimental to our self-esteem and our mental health. I think of my parents, or indeed any of my friends who don’t live in London, and they don’t have this same affliction. I try to remind myself that living a fast-paced lifestyle is fun and awesome, but not sustainable, and that it’s important to kick back and be in the here and now regularly.

I’m taking slow and deliberate steps to be happy and thankful for who I am right now, and proud of myself for the things I achieve. I have cut down my time teaching yoga to 2 classes a week rather than 4. I make sure to only say ‘yes’ to the things I really want to do, and to tune in and listen to whether it’s coming from a place of fear, or love. When I find myself feeling inadequate, feeling like I should be doing more, I make a promise to myself not to schedule more things for myself until the feeling has passed and I can think rationally. Making a list of all the things I’ve accomplished in the past couple of months helps too.

I hope that I – and you – can strike a good balance between pushing ourselves and loving ourselves.

Do you have this problem as well? What do you find works for you? What is this obsession we have with ‘achieving’ all the time anyway?

C x