How To “Snap Out Of It” & Get Motivated Again

There have been plenty of moments in my life where making some drastic changes was necessary for me to move forward in my life and improve my somewhat stagnant situation.  I aim to share some of what I learnt here.  I’m thankful for everything I have experienced as I know now, that it has shaped my behavior, motivation and direction. I’m well aware there are much worse things one can go through than my rough patches, that is the case for everyone, there will always be someone who can top your story. I will use this weeks article to educate you on how you can apply some basic skills and methods to any situation to cause a change in direction and get you out of that rut you are in.

Being “stuck  in a rut” might mean you:

• Are tired when you wake up in the morning
• Don’t get excited about going to training
• Can’t be bothered preparing meals in advance to take to work
• Snap at people because you are just “stressed”
• Don’t have good nutrition
• Cry at the drop of a hat
• Are frustrated with your slow progress
• Can’t prioritise your tasks/work/home organisation/jobs
• Find a negative in just about every situation and can easily ignore or disregard the positives
• You are lacking in motivation

It isn’t always related to health and fitness, even work or your sex life can suffer. It becomes easier to accept things as they are and just shuffle along and go with the flow. It seems like a good option for a little while, then the self doubt starts to set in. You start wondering why you bother at all, then you start making excuses to slacken a little further. Before you know it, you don’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning at all. You stop making the effort and just go through the motions. I will take you through some steps as a self improvement exercise you can do to snap out of it and get that fire back.

AWARENESS

What you dislike in others, is usually present within YOU.

While this is clearly not a 100% scientific fact in 100% of people, it is often a great way to get you in a space to determine what it is about your way of thinking, your habits, the way you treat others that needs some fine tuning. Your ego will tell you otherwise, often very cunningly! Don’t make excuses or beat around the bush.

• Do you hate laziness?
• Can’t stand it when people don’t give you a wave when you let them into your lane in traffic?
• Think that customer service staff ought to at least smile sometimes?
• Analyse your friends home/office/car and immediately consider the level of order and cleanliness relates to their personality?
• Think the fattie at Maccas in the food court shouldn’t be ordering the chips and should have a water instead?
• Hate being interrupted in a conversation?
• Feel like people aren’t really listening to you when you are talking?
• Want to yell out the window and tell the people walking that they better go faster if they want to lose some weight?

Observe when you form judgements of people in your life through your self talk, or perhaps quiet words to a colleague or friend. Even jot down a point form list. Have an honest look at yourself and see if you can correlate what it is you don’t like about what you are seeing or hearing to something YOU do. You may find more connections than you would like. It is important to do this as a regular little exercise for a few weeks because you will then catch yourself in the act so to speak. Once you are regularly observing it happening you can move on to being aware of how YOU are going about your daily life and start correcting some of your behaviors.

If you can create a sense of constant awareness around how you behave, think and act it will let you see how you got into your rut, and how to modify yourself to take things up a level and achieve some momentum in your life.

CHANGE YOUR ENVIRONMENT

If you are in a negative environment at home, work, the gym, your relationship, your fridge, your computer – you can bet your bottom dollar you have been coaching yourself into being an expert on being negative and it is probably rubbing off on the people you live with. Time for you to jot down what you need to change in your environment. This step is crucial – you MUST make a conscious effort to be physically in a supportive, motivating, positive, excited environment for your mental space to be able to change.

A new colour on the bedroom walls or doona might freshen that space up a little. Moving house (biggie but can be life changing!) to a nice neighborhood, city or town. Buying some new training gear for the gym. Go through your computer files and clean them up! Wash the car. Stop procrastinating and get around to doing those little odd jobs you have been putting off. Some other more detailed suggestions you could consider:

Stop watching or listening to the news. If you don’t believe me that bad news is in the majority, do a little tally over a week. Does hearing about another murder, suicide, plane crash, bombing, drug bust, politician bickering, child left locked up in a daycare centre do anything whatsoever to improve the quality of your life? Will you be any worse off if you didn’t know? It is so very refreshing to take this step, you will feel a lot lighter not carrying around those thoughts in your head every day. If anything “that” bad was going on in the world and it is crucial to your survival to know, I guarantee someone will make it their business to tell you personally.

Purge! If you can’t see your desk for all the paper, or the car doesn’t fit in the garage, it is time. Your stuff is not you, it isn’t even a representation of you, it is just stuff. It is easy to do one room per day over a week or two and completely purge your home. Stop holding on to things you haven’t used for years, haven’t worn for years. If something has sentimental value, give it the respect it deserves and display or use it. Find a way to integrate it into your life. Everything should have it’s place and the more things you can put away in a box in a cupboard the better. Be methodical and organised about it. Keep like with like. Label all boxes. If you can look around objectively you will probably find plenty of things that don’t need to be out, or even in the house at all. Have an ebay day or a garage sale, or donate some things. If worst comes to worse and you really did need that 9th screwdriver or the extra car mats, or the spare computer screen – just go out and get it when you need it secondhand or new. I personally got rid of a LOT of items when I moved last time. Haven’t missed a single one yet. Don’t hold on to things just in case you need it, we have internet shopping and express postage these days, you will get by!

Ditch friends who drag you down! If you are serious about changing your situation, you simply cannot allow yourself to be surrounded with people who are detrimental to your goals. If you have friends who smoke, and you want to quit – tell them, request they don’t smoke when you are around. If you have friends who tell you often they don’t get why you bother dragging yourself to the gym at 6am, or why you go to the effort or preparing your meals ahead for work – tell them outright that these things that seem a waste of time to them, are important to you, that you find it offensive when they make fun of your efforts purely because they are embarrassed that they can’t be bothered. If your mates are constant whingers or attention seekers, point it out to them, sometimes people really don’t realise they are doing it! It takes guts to do this but if you are serious about making a change in your life, you will find a tactful way to do it. Seek out people who are already doing what you want to do, working in a field you’d like to get into, exercising regularly.  Motivated, excited passionate people infect everyone around them. Use the internet to connect with people who are a few steps ahead of you in the chain and learn from them. The more positive people  you can have in your life or online networks, the more ideas and motivation you will get for free. You shouldn’t have to expend energy trying to bring other people up to your level, to understand what you are trying to do.

Be the instigator. If you are stuck in a relationship rut with your partner, friend, colleague, child or relative – suck it up and make an effort to improve it. Do something tangible. If you make a conscious, genuine effort to be encouraging, compassionate, a good listener, loyal, motivating and perhaps exciting with the people in your life, they WILL return the favour. You don’t have to do anything big – simply giving your partner a longer than 2 second kiss before you scoot out the door to work could be enough to keep them smiling all day.

Fridge and Pantry Overhaul. I am going to get pop my trainer hat on here and get a little nasty. I could easily write a book on this topic so will try keep this brief. If you have food in your house that is lacking in nutrition such as chips, lollies, biscuits, soda/fizzy drinks and so on, you WILL eat them! If your health is important to you, you need to do this and to educate and support other people in your household about it so they can cope too. I plan to write more detailed articles on nutrition, but here is a list of things I want you go go put in the bin right now. If you don’t think they affect your weight, your mood, your behavior, your fitness, your relationships,  be sure to check back for my other articles soon outlining this.

• Any foods with preservatives, added colours, flavours. I literally mean check every packet, jar, bag, box and read the ingredients. If there are any on there, throw it in the bin. This request will cover any nasty food in your home as that is one thing they all have in common. By only eating unprocessed, fresh foods you have solved the problem in one go!
• Out of date food

You can and will survive quite easily on preparing food with the following as a basic stock:

• Fruit/vegies
• Bread (home baked in breadmaker is easy and preservative free)
• water
• dark chocolate
• chicken
• fish
• small amount of red meat
• tofu
• nuts
• herbs (fresh/dried)
• coconut milk
• rice pasta/pasta
• brown rice
• fresh peanut butter (health food shops can usually make it for you while you wait)
• skim/low fat milk
• low fat yoghurt
• canned beans/chickpeas/lentils
• cheese

It is SO easy to make your own biscuits, dips, bread, muffins etc. They taste better and  you know what went into them! I only spend $90 to $120 a week on food and our household of 4 adults and 1 toddler eat a lot. Fresh food is cheaper!

EXERCISE:

Get a display folder – fill it with recipes you try and like for a couple of types of biscuit, dip, muffins and meals. Any you like as you go along should be copied or typed up and put in here for easy access so you are not flicking through a stack of books when trying to find a recipe. Try at least one new recipe per week in case it deserves to be in your folder!
Take a photo of your bag of food you are purging. I want evidence!

It can take a little while to get comfortable and organised enough to cook with fresh food all the time, but once you do, it is well worth it and can be just as quick as cheating! You will never go back once you start feeling the effects of being additive and preservative free!

CREATING NEW HABITS

So by now you should be at a point where you can identify aspects of your behavior and thinking that contribute to your lack of forward momentum. You have made the effort to live, and interact with people and spaces that contribute to a better sense of calmness, organisation, motivation and achievement. Now it is time to cement in some new habits to ensure you don’t start edging your way back to the dark side and taking the easy option all the time.

Put everything away – right away. Don’t be tempted to leave something on the kitchen bench and take it to your room with you later. Don’t leave the rubbish till the morning. Be strict with pushing this new habit for a couple of weeks. You will soon convince yourself quickly every time you see something that needs to go away, to do it immediately. Knowing you just have to do it later should be motivation enough. Also remember that if you can keep your environment clear, clean, unobstructed and organised, that attitude will flow through to all areas of your life. Respect the space you live in.

Say Thankyou! If someone gives you a compliment, thank them! Being comfortable accepting compliments will go a long way to helping you notice and be thankful for your little improvements you are making and build on them.

Educate yourself. It is easier to sustain new habits in your life if you know why it is worth creating them. If you want to eat better – jump online and go read up on what antioxidants are, or what protein does, or what foods contain essential fatty acids. The more knowledge you have the better equipped you are to combat the aspects of your behavior that got you into that rut in the first place. If it is depression that is making life not worth living, get online, even if you have to be in your bed, and seek out people who have recovered from depression and talk to them. There are plenty of blogs and forums out there on this topic, with plenty of people only too happy to give you advice. Whatever it is that you are driven towards or wish you could do, have or become – go learn about it. Connect with people doing it. Information truly is power, so make the effort to learn all you can so you can move forward in your life instead of staying stagnant and void of any motivation.

Stay aware. If you catch yourself engaging in negative self talk, or looking for excuses, taking easy options, nip it in the bud early. Take each day as it comes and stay on top of your thought processes. Relapses are not an option. Don’t let one slip up take you all the way back to the beginning. Just get up and pick up where you left off. Some things in life are 2 steps forward, one step back. You can’t control everything so be accepting of whatever gets thrown your way. Look at what you can learn from it, and move on. If you find it hard to stop something that you know is contributing to a build up of negativity, ask a person close to you to make you aware when you are doing it. They will find it much easier to notice than you doing it yourself.

Take baby steps. In the beginning,you will be fired up. Your motivation levels will dip and rise after the novelty of your new idea, direction, plan, diet, program wears off. Be reasonable about your goals, give yourself time to create new habits. Don’t expect or try to be bouncing off the walls with passion every second of the day. Accept that you won’t always be excited about slotting papers into their new folder or cooking that new stir fry recipe, or going for the early morning walk. As long as what you are doing, saying, learning or trying is contributing to your overall wellbeing, it is worth doing.

You officially have no excuses anymore. If you have made it to the end of this article, you now possess enough information to start the process. There is no such thing as tomorrow, you only have the present moment in your control. If you are already thinking to yourself, I might start next week on Monday,  or I will quit smoking after my birthday, you are just cementing yourself into that hole. Start TODAY, make some changes that can secure you a better future. You CAN change your ways, it is never too late! Every day you wait, adds another 24 hours to how long it will take to achieve your goals.