“Turn off the TV.”
“You can’t play until you do your homework.”
“You need to eat your vegetables first, and then you can have dessert.”
Phrases similar to these are uttered by parents everywhere. When you were a kid, if left to your own devices, you might have eaten junk food as your mainstay and spent the day playing video games or watching TV. Likely a parent limited your behavior and made you do what you needed to do, even when you didn’t feel like it.
But, what happens now as an adult if that inner kid comes out, and you don’t feel like doing what you know you should do?
Truth be told, there are many things you just aren’t going to feel like doing. For instance, people who exercise early in the morning don’t usually feel like getting out of bed when the house is cold and dark. We can have great ideas, moments of inspiration, or the desire to change something in our lives, but then when it gets hard, we get pulled back into our daily routine. Anything that is a change to our routine requires conscious effort and work.
The key to changing your behavior and gaining the strength to accomplish difficult things is to look with your “adult” mind into the future and see the happiness that comes from doing the hard thing.
Here are five tips to help you step up and get it done:
Decide what you really want. Sometimes the biggest hurdle is just figuring out what you really want and clearly imagining your desired future outcome.
Get to the heart of why you want it. Try a useful technique I call the “why” of success. Keep asking yourself “why” until you come to the real reason you want something. For example, you may say: “I want to lose weight.” WHY? “Because I want to get healthier.” WHY? “Because I want to be more active.” WHY? “Because, when I’m older, I don’t want to be like my dad, too overweight and out of shape to play with my grandkids. I want to have the energy to do what I want to do.”
When you have an idea or impulse to do something, write the idea down immediately. You may think you won’t forget, but you will, so write it down so you know what to act on later.
Use the 5-minute rule. When you don’t feel like doing something, tell yourself that you are just going to do it for five minutes. That’s doable. Just five minutes of bill paying, exercising, cleaning, writing, calling. Set a timer if that helps.
- You may want to extend the five minutes once you get into the task, but knowing you can stop after five minutes often gets you to chip away at something you don’t want to do.
Set a deadline for yourself.
- It is human nature to procrastinate hard things; procrastinating can create a sense of control. It may take a deadline to push you out of this stubborn mode. How many of us would put off doing our taxes indefinitely if they weren’t due April 15?
- One of the toughest jobs we have is parenting ourselves. It is difficult to push through that inner child and do what we need to do, even when we don’t feel like it.
- Decide to break through the lull of your daily routine to do the things you are destined to do.
- Aristotle once said: “. . . the hardest victory is victory over self,” but it is a worthy fight. So, don’t wait until you feel like doing the things you know you should. Go ahead and eat those vegetables, then enjoy your dessert.
Pamela Adams Henrie is the owner of The Success Choice and creator of “The Woman’s Success Planner” and “The Choosing Joy in the Journey Journal.” For more information, or to contact Pamela, log on to MomClick February 18, 2015.
To read the published article, CLICK HERE.