By guest blogger William Grigsby [see Biography]
[November 12, 2017] This article is for people who have lost all hope. Read this article if you are feeling a little burned out, and not if you are a fresh-faced and looking to take on the world. Most of the advice you read in this article was specially created for burned-out people, which is why much of it sounds counter-intuitive, but consider this: if you have tried everything else, maybe you should try something completely different, maybe you should be walking the counter-intuitive road.
1 – Forget About Timelines And Goals
Let’s run on the assumption that you have tried just about everything and you seem to become less and less motivated each time you try something new. Let’s assume you have read the works of Napoleon Hill, and you have tried goals, you have tried picturing yourself in the future, tried self-imposed deadlines, and a definite major purpose…yet it doesn’t seem to work, (or at least it doesn’t work anymore).
If this is you, then you need to remove all rules, timelines, and goals from your life. You have trained yourself to fail, and you keep punishing yourself for it when you need to let it go. Forget every rule, ignore deadlines, and forget about setting goals. Without goals to hit, you cannot fail, which means you cannot force yourself to feel bad about it.
2 – Do It For Somebody Else
If you are a highly motivated person, there is a good chance that you don’t mind going without something because it is part of the suffering required for success. However, making another suffer, or denying something to somebody else is a little harder to swallow. This is especially true if you care about the other person and that other person really wants something.
Instead of setting goals and deadlines for the sake of setting them, do something for somebody else and you may feel a surge of motivation. It is especially intense when you think of how disappointed the other person may be.
3 – Visualize During Your Frequent Breaks
You have probably read all about the benefits of taking frequent breaks. In addition, you may not be a fan of meditating because there are better things you feel like you could be doing. Why not strike a balance with a bit of visualization and auto-suggestion. Start every break by visualizing what you are working towards. You need only take a few seconds, just make sure you get into the habit of it.
4 – Re-frame The Task If It Is An Ongoing Task
If you are working on an ongoing task, then maintaining your motivation becomes increasingly difficult as time goes on. If you are really having motivation problems to the point where you are growing more and more in debt, you may need to undergo the tricky task of re-framing your ongoing task. Here is an example:
Ralf is a time-worn working dynamo. He can produce at a very high rate and to a very high quality, but he often finds himself doing around 30% of what he knows he is capable. He never reaches his targets, goals, or deadlines, and even though it worries him greatly, he has fallen into a rut of failure. He feels bad, so he turns to food for comfort.
Ralf re-framed his ongoing task by deciding to make his “Work” the thing he turns to for comfort. He came up with 22 new ways of making his work more fun and more comforting. Some of these things included employing attractive coworkers, funny co-workers and playing high-tempo trance music in the background to keep the energy up.
5 – Do The Bits You Love And Outsource The Rest
One of the reasons you may be procrastinating and/or going slowly is because there is part of your working process that you heavily dislike. For example, if you own a juicing machine, you may love the health benefits of juice, but you may heavily dislike the fiddly cleaning process; ergo, you make and drink less juice. If your kids want spending money, they should clean your juicer. If you have a spouse, maybe you can barter one chore for the chore of cleaning your juicer. You can apply this trick to different areas of your work. For example, as a writer, you may dislike writing about academic subjects, so you may outsource that part to assignmentmasters.org. If you like writing, but you hate proofreading, then hire a freelance proofreader to check your work.
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Biography: William Grigsby is a book addict and professional editor. He lives for literature and its seduction of Mankind. Whatever challenges he goes through, he has one motto to rely on: keep reading, keep writing. Check his Twitter.