Monthly Motivation from Ready Resilience – October
GUEST POST BY WENDY JENKINS OAM, READY RESILIENCE
Ready Resilience helps organisations thrive during times of change and challenge, using practical neuroscience-based resilience tools that have been proven to offer in-the-moment solutions and long-lasting results.
October motivation
There’s a common self-sabotaging pattern that many of us repeatedly fall victim to: We wait to feel motivated or inspired before we take action toward our desired goals.
You want to get more fit, but today you “just don’t feel like it”. You’ve started working on a work task, but you’re “not quite in the right mindset at the moment”.
The truth is that we often wait until we are feeling inspired or mental ready before we act. However, making it a habit to act before you feel like it is a better approach.
Over a century ago, psychologist and philosopher William James explained this phenomenon:
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really actions and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
The best way to change how you feel is to take action. Create motion through action.
Your brain is designed to keep you comfortable and safe, so when you’re about to take action that will lead to the opposite, then you will face resistance.
Going to the gym will make you feel uncomfortable, so your brain triggers an emotional response in the form of laziness. Tackling a more difficult work task can seem too outside your comfort zone, hence your brain triggers an emotional response in the form of procrastination.
That’s physics. Newton’s first law of motion states that an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
When you find yourself waiting for a surge of motivation or a dose of inspiration to fall from the sky, remind yourself of this universal truth: An object at rest will stay at rest.
Instead of waiting to feel a certain way before acting, just act now.
