In today’s post, I wanted to talk about what you have to do when you start to lose motivation. This tends to happen once you have started to make some progress and the little voice inside your head starts telling you that for whatever reason it doesn’t want to take action today.
I experienced this tonight. I needed to work out. I’ve made the commitment to do it. I’ve been doing it for over 2 and half months now and there was that voice in my head. It said take tonight off. You’ve been doing good. It’s Thanksgiving. You deserve it.
Along with that voice was another one in my head that said, you know what. If you stop today, you might stop completely.
For alot of us, the voice that tells you to stop is a lot stronger than the one that tells you to move forward. It’s easy to listen to the voice in our head that tells us to take the easy path.
But while easy is the path of least resistance, there’s no reward at the end of that path.
What this means is that your mental strength is starting to break down a bit. It is sort of a plateau. It’s time to take a bit to let your mind get used to the demands you are starting to place on it.
If you have been following along, you know that I have been doing my thirty day challenges. I’ve been adding a few additional challenges and for the most part, I’ve been mentally strong enough up til this point to deal with it.
At some point, we all experience this feeling of running out of steam. And its for this reason that I recommend adding things slowly. If you try and make changes all at once, you risk running out of gas pretty quickly and you might find it harder to get started again.
However if you have added 6 changes slowly over time, and one month run out of steam to do the sixth one, it’s alot easier to keep doing the other five.
I compare it to working out with weights. Not because I am a body builder, but because I think it’s a good analogy between physical strength and mental strength. It’s easy to know when we run out of physical strength.
For example, when I was working out tonight, one set of exercises I just couldn’t get 3 sets of 10 reps done. I did 10 the first time and I could only do 8 the second and barely 5 reps the last time.
I ran out of gas.
I was only strong enough to do that many reps tonight. The reason could have been that I didn’t eat as well today or maybe stayed up too late last night and didn’t have the energy. I tapped out my physical strength.
Now, I know from personal experience that if I continue to do this exercise at the same weight and the same rest for many additional workouts, that it will get easier and I’ll do 10 easily for all three sets.
It’s the same for mental strength. When you start to hear that voice that says, I just can’t do one more thing. That’s when you have run out of gas to do mental work.
At this point, what you want to do is make sure that draw a line in the sand that you will not go back across. Like when I do my thirty day challenges, I continue them after the thirty days. This is my threshold I won’t go back on because I know I am strong enough to do it.
Then once you know how strong you are mentally, if you start to hit a wall, don’t add more mental work to the work load you have already been doing.
What you will find is that your mind will adjust to the workload. Once you don’t hear the voice again and the other voice that tells you can do it is louder, start to add again to your mental workload by adding additional tasks.