Gail Kraft is the author of The Empowering Process, a motivational speaker, writer, and empowerment coach discusses some signs that you are losing motivation and what to do to bring it back.
When you have no clear target, get overwhelmed, or live life in a rut, step back and take a look, assess the situation, and take steps to consciously choose what you can do and what you cannot do today.
Transcript:
Hey everybody, welcome back to the Empowering Process Podcast with your host Gail Kraft. Just as a reminder, we’re going to be talking about things such as your purpose, your power, and being present right in the moment, so hopefully you’re ready to get to work because I’m ready to work with you and for you.
Let’s talk today about staying motivated. I don’t know about you, but if you’re anything like me, there are times where I have looked so forward to doing something, I’m so excited and believe me, I get animated when I decide I’m going to be my biggest cheerleader.
I’m on a project or something that I want to do and then what happens is I get into it and in a week sometimes I’m thinking, “oh I have to do this again,” right?
I get this feeling of dread.
I might get up in the morning, “Here we go once more,” whereas when I started, I was so so excited.
Well, that’s not unusual.
And here are some of the things that might happen or might be the cause of losing motivation.
We’re going to talk a little bit about a few of the causes. There are so many of them. And then a few things that you can do to get your mojo back because you may want to have those juices going. I know I do because the more excited I am the better results I get.
So, one of the major causes, and there are three major causes of losing your mojo, is lack of clarity of your purpose. When you’re not really clear as to what that looks like, or where you’re going.
If you don’t have a nice guiding light to latch on to and to look into, if you can’t step into an emotional state of what that could be, then you’re going to start to lose excitement. You’re going to start to lose direction and you might not be able to get it back. Right?
So, when you’re not clear as to why you’re doing something, what it’s going to look like when you’re done, and how you play a role in that; if you’re not clear, then you’re working in a fog and that can get frustrating, and you definitely will lose your mojo.
I know I have lost mine when I’ve been off the target. I love that, right?
I do know many of you who work in corporate right now have projects or things you’re supposed to achieve and then they get lost. Right?
- Let’s change the target here.
- Let’s change the target there.
So, be clear about your target.
My favorite drain of motivation is the feeling of being overwhelmed, right? What causes overwhelm?
I did a training session one time and I talked about what happens when people are overwhelmed, and they focus on:
- I’m so overwhelmed.
- I don’t know what to do.
- I’m so overwhelmed and I focus on overwhelmed.
And they get overwhelmed about being overwhelmed, and because they’re overwhelmed about being overwhelmed, they become even more overwhelmed.
And as you can see, they’re not getting out of being overwhelmed.
- They’re losing their breath.
- They’re hyperventilating over being overwhelmed.
- They can’t think.
Their mind gets cloudy around being overwhelmed and so many people just stop, and it’s too exhausting.
So they think:
- I can’t do it.
- I am overwhelmed with what I have to do right, and so I think about being overwhelmed.
We want to step back a little bit here.
Step away. You need to. You know, you get so make different choices when you step back. So, step back from you’re feeling of overwhelmed.
Step back, take a breath.
Now take a look at what it is that you are doing.
- Do you have too much on your plate right now?
- Are you expecting too much of yourself in a given moment?
- If you made a list, look at what it is that you don’t need to achieve out of what you absolutely need to achieve.
- What are the one or two tasks you can absolutely do today and the rest you can wait until tomorrow or just let go, right?
What you absolutely can get to today, not maybe I’ll push it, but can absolutely accomplish. Because when you start feeling a sense of accomplishment, and that accomplishment might be just making the list and putting it in priority order and choosing, that might be all you can do today, which is fine. It’s starting to take steps towards controlling the overwhelm that’s controlling what needs to be done and then, maybe, does it need to be done at all?
If yes, does it need to be done by you?
Probably not.
- Who can you call in to support you to help you?
- Who can you talk to for guidance as to best practices?
- Who can you consult to kind of give you a sense as to reality, what’s not more important than this?
- My experience has been blah blah blah.
Call on your resources. Use your resources and if you have no resources, leave it to God. Leave it to the Universe, leave it to whoever you want to call it, but leave it ‘till tomorrow and do only what you can absolutely accomplish today.
And then the next morning, celebrate the fact that you got something accomplished. Right? That you actually got past overwhelmed. That’s an amazing thing!
Congratulate yourself, I know I’m proud of you for doing that.
And then the third cause of losing motivation that I’d like to talk about today is you’re in a rut.
So, you started something that you felt was exciting. You figured out the best way to get there. You have a little process and guess what? You now repeated that process over and over and over again.
It becomes a rut, right?
So, what do you do when you realize you’re just bored, just bored with the choices that you made? You still are happy with the goal. You’re happy with the purpose. You’re happy with what it is that you want to achieve.
Just that getting there is boring. You’re over it.
It’s just so boring.
Well, odds are how you do one thing is how you do everything and you’re in a rut around some other things too.
I have another training that I do called Living an Endlessly Delicious Life and one of the things I talk about in that training is getting out of your comfort zone every single day.
Just a little bit.
I don’t want you to be scared, I want you to change up the comfortable things, such as if you drive to and from work every day or drive to and from the store once a week. go a different route than you typically go.
Find a different route, go way out of your way.
If you live in a place that’s seasonal, go out and just take a look at what nature is doing today because everyday nature is doing something different. Nature is not afraid to do something different.
Go see what nature is doing and revel in the fact that nature is not afraid to change it up to get out of his comfort zone or her comfort zone. So definitely, get out of your comfort zone!
Maybe you can take walks. Sometimes getting out of my comfort zone means I take a left instead of a right. It’s different than what I typically do and it just kind of shakes me up just a little bit.
So just think of some of those things that you do normally, like normally before I get up, I have my little gratitude session, then I get up and I might pull a few clothes together, but then look at who needs to be fed. The cat needs to be fed. I need to figure out what am I going to be eating this day because I am careful about what I eat. And I might put the coffee on.
Well, maybe instead of putting the coffee on, I’m going to have tea today. Or maybe instead of putting the coffee on, I’ll have my first glass of water and, you know, start reading my book first and start the coffee a little bit later.
Usually if I delay the coffee, I don’t have it. If I have had something else, I don’t have to have it. But the point being is I’ve changed my routine to get out of the rut. So not huge steps.
None of these are huge steps. Right, you need a target.
You need to be clear about your target.
You need to love your target.
You need to feel your target in order to have clarity, you need to really get out of your comfort zone in order to get out of out of overwhelm.
And if you’re overwhelmed, you’ve got too much to do. Look at the 80/20 rule. What are the few things the very few critical things that you can do today to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish?
And again, this is Gail Kraft from The Empowering Process Podcast, and if this resonates with you, absolutely go ahead, and subscribe so that you don’t miss any sessions. I have so many lined up.
Share it out with friends, people that you think might also get something out of this. Please, please, please do share it with them, I would love it.
And leave a comment below, especially if you have an ask me anything comment of something that came up for you during this conversation.
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I would love to hold a conversation around what’s important to you.
After all, that’s what this is all about. The Empowering Process Podcast is to give you tools and techniques that give you the ability to find a process to get out of whatever it is that’s holding you back from the greatness that you are.
Thanks again, and I look forward to talking to you soon.
Gail Kraft – The Empowering Process Podcast.
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