How To Make Yourself Do Something Even When You Don’t Want To

How To Make Yourself Do Something Even When You Don’t Want To

This is a backwards post.  It’s also a raw and honest post that lets you into the weird workings of my brain on an off day.

But, to make the post at least sort of sensible, and, hopefully useful too, the lessons are listed first.  You’ll see why when you start reading!

(You can also choose to ignore the Case Study and still have a useful and short list of lessons!)

The Lessons I Learned (And You Should Too!) 

1. Don’t be held hostage by the voices in your head telling you to go do other things. If you’ve planned and committed to do something, then you owe it to yourself to follow through.

2. The output from your efforts might not be anywhere near the quality and/or quantity that you usually produce, but, make tweaks, amendments and improvements and get it out there anyway. It’s not your job to assess whether it’s any good or not.

3. Don’t pay any attention to your ANTs. They will always turn up to help tear you down. What do they know anyway? Nothing!

4. The pain is real! When you’re fighting the good fight (aka, trying to do what you know you should be doing), you’re very likely to get a headache, the urge to go to the loo, a stomach ache or any other possible little health niggle to try to tempt you away. Ignore them. You can deal with them when your time is up (7 minutes to go!). Although they’ll probably disappear as soon as you’re finished!

5. You’ll feel much better for keeping doing what you should be doing, plus, you’ll get some or all of it done. And that’s great, because now the task is no longer on your to do list, but has reached your done list!

The Case Study

I’m at a loss for what to write about today. I’m feeling well and truly devoid of ideas. My brain seems to have shut down!

Do you have days like this? Days when you sit down at your desk to work and…nothing!

It’s like that today.

That’s not to say that I haven’t done any work at all. I have. I’ve already spent over an hour working on my marketing, but for that I work to a pre-planned schedule so at this time of the month there’s not much creative input required.

This is actually my second attempt to get this task going. I tried an hour ago to come up with a scintillating idea to write about, but again…nada.

So, I took myself out for a walk. A bit of fresh air, I thought, to get the brain cogs whirring and the creative juices flowing, but that didn’t work either.

So here we are, or should I say, here I am, since the Muse is hiding somewhere!

But of course, in my Making a Comeback post, I promised myself that if the Muse deserted me, I would find something to write anyway. So right now I’m just trying to entice the little trickster out of hiding by writing whatever comes into my head.

It’s no good wandering off either. I’ve scheduled this slot to write. So write I shall!

This morning, when I was doing my Morning Pages, I decided on my 3 MITs for the day. These are my 3 Most Important Tasks for the day.

They are driven by the need to prioritise the Important things I need to progress or get done that day. They are not driven by tasks I fancy doing, or tasks other people think I should be doing or easy tasks or nice tasks.

They are Important Tasks!

These are the tasks that move my goals forward in a meaningful way and play into the bigger picture of the life I’m creating for myself.

Because, of course, I am creating a life for myself right now. The things I do today have ramifications for tomorrow and next week and next year.

Similarly, and probably more significantly, the things I don’t do today also have ramifications for tomorrow and next week and next year.

Making the daily MIT choices and then following through on them is the good fight. And I must fight the good fight every day, because, in reality, there’s a much bigger part of me that would rather be doing the nice tasks and the easy tasks, or maybe today I would rather boost my own self-worth by doing the things that other people think I should be doing. Or maybe I just fancy doing some crochet…

29 minutes to go until I can do something else…hate that schedule today!

So who the hell do you think is going to read this anyway? Ah, hello ANT (Automatic Negative Thought…apparently you’re a “thing”). Thought you’d show up sooner or later.

It’s ok, no one needs to read it. I probably won’t even publish this one, but at least I’m writing.

At least I’m sticking with my hard earned values – be consistent, be persistent.

Yep, that’s me, well, the persistent one. I have to work much harder at the consistency one. That one’s in development. It’s a work in progress. I guess it might always be a work in progress.

What else? Keep writing. Don’t let the ANTs get you, and no, you don’t need another coffee right now.

I guess this is sort of coming together. I can see that maybe I could knock it into blog-shape with a little more effort.

I’m fast approaching 700 words. 700 words has always been a tipping point for when I’m writing blog posts. It’s the point where, even though I know it’s not finished, it has enough substance to be able to be developed into a sensible post.

Well this one might not be sensible, or maybe traditional might be a better word. Traditional in the whole blogging sense. This is more of a brain dump. In some ways it’s like a reflection or maybe a diary entry. Ha! This is the inside of my head readers…sorry!

If this one is going to be published, it’s going to need a lot of work to clean it up. OMG, you can’t put this one out! Why not? This is real and authentic, this is really what happens sometimes.

Sometimes, even when I want to write, as I do now, the brain is uncooperative. It happens at other times too, like when I want to eat healthily but my brain is craving chocolate. Or when I’m just so bored with a task that taking it forward is physically nauseating.

But hey, you just gotta do it, you know?

I’m not the only one who gets like this. Other people suffer with this too. I’m far from de-motivated, in fact I’m very motivated, but something is trying to hold me back.

Something is holding my little creative brain cells hostage today and the only way to get over it it seems, is to push right through.

That’s what this is. It’s like a tractor pushing everything else aside and I push on through regardless of everything else.

13 minutes to go…

So let’s get sensible.

What’s the lesson here?

Don’t be held hostage by the voices in your head telling you to go do other things. If you’ve planned and committed to do something, then you owe it to yourself to follow through.

The output from your efforts might not be anywhere near the quality and/or quantity that you usually produce, but, make tweaks, amendments and improvements and get it out there anyway. It’s not your job to assess whether it’s any good or not.

Don’t pay any attention to your ANTs. They will always turn up to help tear you down. What do they know anyway? Nothing!

The pain is real! When you’re fighting the good fight (aka, trying to do what you know you should be doing), you’re very likely to get a headache, the urge to go to the loo, a stomach ache or any other possible little health niggle to try to tempt you away. Ignore them. You can deal with them when your time is up (7 minutes to go!). Although they’ll probably disappear as soon as you’re finished!

You’ll feel much better for keeping doing what you should be doing, plus, you’ll get some or all of it done. And that’s great, because now the task is no longer on your to do list, but has reached your done list!

The End!

(Can I go to the loo now please..?)

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, then I commend you for reading through the weird workings of my brain!

But, the point of sharing this strange blog post with you was to show you that it is possible to make yourself do something even when you don’t want to do it.

For most of us, there are a number of things that we already do that we might not want to, like go to a job we dislike, wash the dishes or take the dog for a walk.  We do it out of a sense of duty or for the greater good and wellbeing of ourselves and those we love.

This tells you that you can do it.

So try not to give in to all the so-called ‘reasons’ that you can’t or shouldn’t do something.  You can do it and you will feel so much better once the task is done.

What to do next…

> Read another post – Making A Comeback
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