Some days, you are just not feeling motivated. You don’t want to get out of bed. You don’t want to make that difficult call, engage with your boring co-worker, or do that silly little exercise from your therapist. You don’t want to do any of those things – and yet your obligations leave little wiggle room. Whether you want to or not, you will have to show up. And whenever you’re “not feeling it”, it helps to have some strategies that can give you a push in the right direction. Without further ado, here are six things you can try to give your motivation a boost.
Tip 1: Get Curious About Your Feeling
We rarely ever take the time to investigate our feelings, so let’s do that right now: Where in your body do you notice the lack of motivation? And how can you tell? Take a moment to really feel your feeling, until you can roughly locate it in your body. Does it change? Or does it remain the same? Don’t try to force it to change, and instead just let it be there. Watch it for a while.
Tip 2: Play Around With Self-Judgment
Chances are, you don’t just merely procrastinate, but also judge yourself for doing so. You may even have some insults ready whenever you don’t jump into action quick enough: “lazy piece of work,” “you can never get anything done,” or “worthless.” These thoughts can feel quite heavy, so let’s lighten them up. You could distill them into a single two-syllable word (like “lazy”), and repeat it as fast as you can for 30 seconds (e.g. “lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy…).
Tip 3: Get Up And Shake Your Body
Get up right now, and shake your body. Seriously, do it. You may even want to jump around a little bit, do some squats, some push-ups if you dare, and really get that blood flowing. When you sit at your desk for too long, you become stiff: not just in your posture, but also in your breathing, and in your thinking, and even in your feeling.
Tip 4: Find Your Personal Sweet Spot
Some people thrive under pressure, while others need loose guidelines. Some people require a freshly-brewed morning coffee (guilty), while others can only be productive late at night. The point is, there is no one formula for getting you into action, because it always depends on you.
Tip 5: “Why Even Bother?”
Why do you even bother in the first place? No really, why do you care? You may find that underneath every unwanted task, there’s something that matters to you.
Tip 6: Do Something Right Now
Motivation rarely works like people think it does. We don’t suddenly feel motivated to do certain things and then jump into action. Instead, it’s more likely to work the other way around: We get started doing something, and then we feel motivated to continue doing that exact thing.
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