Get Motivated, Get Organized, Get Your Life on Track!

Get Motivated and Get Your Life On Track!

How do I get my life together? How do I get motivated? Why am I so lazy? Why can’t I accomplish anything? How can I become a self-starter?

In this video we’ll address these question and give you clear steps to get your life going on a steady course for success.

We’re not going to spend a lot of time on the why’s, not that those are not important, but at times people get stuck analyzing things instead of getting busy working on solutions. So we’re going to just jump into the steps to getting unstuck!

1. Get a journal; it can be a spiral binder from the grocery store, or a word file on your computer, it doesn’t matter but you need to be able to write down everything we’re going to work on as well as your progress each day/week/month.

2. The first thing you’ll do in this journal is to Vent out your frustrations; it’s ok to cuss, rant, rail, whatever; you just want to get it out. You can rave at yourself, your parents, the government, it doesn’t have to be rational or reasonable or appropriate. Just unload it all. This is your current miserable self letting it all go and is an important step so don’t neglect it.

3. Now write out your long-term goals; these don’t have to all be reasonable either; they can be as much dreams as anything else. Where do you want to be and what do you want to be doing in 5 years? Let your imagination wander and be free.

4. Now write a shorter list of long term goals that are doable and you want to commit to. Be specific. Be concrete. These are things you want to accomplish, and can see yourself doing.

5. Now chunk those down into shorter term goals; what would it take to get to your long term goals; what do you need to accomplish each year to get to that five years from now goal?

6. Now make a clear list of what you can do this month to move you towards those goals; be clear, specific, and really hammer out what it will take this month to move you in that direction.

7. Now look at what you can do each day this week to move you towards those monthly goals. This may be a lengthy list including applying for jobs, creating a resume, looking at schools/tech schools, specific work goals, contacting old employers for references, researching careers that you might be good at or find inspiring. Volunteering at a place to see if working in that field might be for you. Clear specifics.

8. These goals will be the driving force behind the rest of what we do so spend time on this project. Turn off your technology and take time to develop these ideas for yourself.

Next it’s time to structure and balance your life. Create a weekly schedule; you can be all excel-sheet about it or draw it out with a pencil, or even better, create a white board in your room you can fill in and color code.

So, in general the people who ask these questions that inspired this video, fall into a couple of categories; for some, they are in self-created careers and are struggling to self-motivate, and meet goals in their work from home; while for others, their lives are relatively empty; they are not working or are working below their potential; they are not socially involved, are not physically active, and are not pursuing school or are struggling not to drop out. It’s important to honestly assess your state of being at the current moment. As you start into this structure that you will create, imagine a life that you would feel good about; that would create some meaning and purpose and some sense of forward movement and progress. We don’t make changes all at once, but we have to be able to imagine the positive possibilities in order to begin to map out the way there.

So now plug in a schedule that creates a daily structure for you.

1. Put the things in your day that are solid, if there are any. if there is any work, school, commute time, other things that don’t change.

2. Then start to fit in the things that you have been neglecting; studying time, applying to a school that will help you get where you want to go, spending time creating or developing an idea, or just taking care of yourself. What are the things you know you’ve neglected?

3. If you are not working and not going to school, it’s important to put as many hours a day into your job or school search as you would working. Often people search a few minutes a day; it takes a solid morning and a solid afternoon, every day until you get the job or school nailed down. Don’t short this process; dedicate yourself to it and do it.

4. As a general rule when working on anything from home, Work for an hour and take a ten min break; work four hours and take an hour off for lunch. This should be consistent throughout your work time. Working less than an hour leads to too much distraction and inefficiency; it takes on average 11 minutes to get on track with something; if you’re distracted, it takes you 11 minutes to get back on track focused on it again. So eliminate distractions during that hour. Working more an hour without a break or working through lunch is too much and you will then want to quit altogether. Get into a rhythm of this work/break cycle, and at each break walk around, turn on some music, drink water, stretch, walk outside, talk to someone or your dog or whatever; give yourself a real break. Do NOT play video games or watch TV; the reason being, you can’t break free after ten minutes and it isn’t giving your brain the break it needs. But when that ten min is up, go back to work.

5. When you Tackle some things on your lists; always check them off when they’re done; it feels good and will train you to keep adding new items and checking them off. This is self-supporting as you will feel a sense of accomplishment and progress each time you check something off.

6. Any time you struggle with internal arguing or feeling unmotivated, go back to your bigger goals and remind yourself you’ve got to tackle each smaller goal to get to the bigger one. You can even go back to your rant to remind yourself of your misery when you were completely stuck. Keep your perspective on one step at a time, and also on the bigger picture. This two fold focus helps you not get overwhelmed and stay in the here and now, while also reminding yourself why you’re doing it.

7. Remember to take care of all of you!

Our minds don’t function if our bodies don’t feel well.

Assess your physical health; are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating healthy or unhealthy? Are you abusing drugs or alcohol? Do you get any time in nature, time outdoors, exercise? If you want to know the science of this watch the video on JOMO; the joy of missing out. If any of these areas needs work, patch time for those things into your schedule; time to make healthy meals, time to exercise, time to sleep at night, getting to bed before midnight on a consistent basis and getting up before 9am. I often find that people struggling with these issues have become nocturnal, staying up most of the night and sleeping most of the day; we are not wired to do well with that type of schedule; it messes up our brain chemistry and saps our energy and motivation. If you want to improve your life, you will have to address this and conquer it.

So now you have a normalized sleep/wake cycle and a schedule and structure for each day of the week. You’ve balanced your activities, you are moving towards your goals and beginning to see some progress. How do you keep the momentum going?

Journal your weekly progress at the end of each week. Note where you’re strong and where you struggled; note the things you checked off and the things you avoided. Make new goals and commitments for the next week. Make a new structure for the next week fitting in all of the new goals, the new focus and the new commitments. Give yourself an internal celebration/victory dance over even the smallest baby steps you’ve made. Recognize the small victories as well as the large.

Be a positive self-coach not a negative self-condemner. We don’t do well with that type of berating and degrading sort of internal talk. It’s not productive and is very discouraging. keep bolstering yourself from within and don’t give up. Tell yourself you did some things well, need to keep working on some other things, and you’ll get up that mountain one step at a time.