Motivation, Inspiration

Get Shit Done — How To Easily Motivate Yourself

Here is a step-by-step guide to overcoming laziness once and for all.

Not in the mood for anything?! Every fiber of your body seems to be somehow “overtired”, even though you haven’t done anything particularly difficult and the motivation to do anything at all is miles away?

Does this scenario seem familiar to you and far too often you have the feeling that your inner bastard has almost become overpowering and forces you into complete laziness? If so, then this is the right place for you to read this article carefully until the end. Together we will get to the bottom of the topic “Lack of drive”.

You will not only get to know the psychological causes that cause laziness in most people without them even being aware of it, but you will also learn the best tips and steps to overcome the feeling of laziness once and for all!

So pick yourself up, stay tuned and let’s get going…

The Causes For Laziness

Actually, you had planned to do this or that, to finally tackle the new project or to do the long-overdue tax return, but somehow everything inside you seems to resist and you just feel like lying on the couch?

First of all: Stop judging yourself for it and stop beating yourself up. Loss of drive is a very common problem that everybody and every one of us has had to fight with more or less intensively.

Second: The basis for overcoming laziness is, as so often, first of all, a sound knowledge of what the most frequent (psychological) causes are.

If you do not know at all or are not really aware of why you feel so listless and unmotivated, you will most likely not be able to overcome this low level of motivation suddenly by yourself.

Therefore let’s first take a look at the 4 most common causes that create and furnish a lack of drive.

1. Negative thoughts, extremely high expectations, and self-doubt. You demotivate yourself and strengthen the feeling of listlessness because you often and unconsciously think negatively about future situations that lead to extremely high expectations.
2. No clear goals. If you don’t have a clear goal and route in advance, your motivation, energy, and strength to keep going will run out very quickly and we will end up in a state of helplessness and lack of drive.
3. Demotivating environment. The people with whom you surround yourself daily, without you even being aware of it, set the bar for your level of motivation, ambition, and drive.
4. No life vision. Your life vision forms the absolute basis of your motivation. To know what you want to have said, seen, experienced, and created in your life is a key element to overcome laziness.

How To Motivate Yourself And Finally Get Shit Done

Alright, now that we have taken a closer look at the 4 most common causes of laziness, it is time to take a closer look at some concrete tips, steps, and techniques to overcome your laziness.

1. Set Mini Targets And Take Baby Steps

A big mistake in terms of motivation, which many people who try to overcome their lack of drive, is to set themselves a utopian goal right away and then hope with their heads first to be able to achieve it in no time.

It is much smarter to first try to take a tiny little step out of laziness. To take baby steps! As a Chinese proverb says:

Never be afraid to walk too slowly. Be much more afraid of never taking the first step!

It is only a problem if we want to take a big step directly, but then realize that without practice and discipline it is very difficult, and as a result, we let the whole thing go and fall back into laziness.

Sure, at first you feel a little bit stupid when doing such “little things”, because our mind can’t directly see the connection, how this should solve the problem of laziness, but it’s just a matter of getting into motion without thinking about it much at first. That’s why I’ll give you an insider tip here.

The 5-minute technique. If you really don’t feel like doing something urgent, set a timer. Then you work on it for exactly 5 minutes. Now pause and think: Is this really as bad as my inner bastard made me believe in the beginning?

If you still don’t feel like it, you can stop now. But if you suddenly realize that this is not as bad/difficult as you thought at the beginning, you just continue. And no matter if you stop or continue: You can be proud of yourself!

This is how you trick your mind to overcome the lack of drive. This technique may not sound particularly revolutionary at first, but believe me, it’s really something. Try it out (preferably right now) if you really feel that you are being swallowed up by the lack of drive.

2. Give Yourself Feedback Or Record Your Progress

When progress happens in our life, it often happens at a speed in which we or our mind hardly notices this progress. For example, we do not notice how much muscle mass we have built up after 2 months of training because we have never documented the facts.

If we are lucky, the look in the mirror has changed so much during this time that we can clearly see our progress. But if this is not the case, our motivation suffers.

That’s why it’s so important that you learn to document your progress and capture it meticulously and visually. The best way to do this is to see them as often as possible so that you can recall your progress again and again. So you use the so-called priming effect to program your subconscious for motivation and drive.

You should therefore actively plan some time every 2–3 weeks to sit down and consciously think about the areas in which you have really grown or what progress you have made in the past few days and on which areas you want to focus in the next few weeks.

Use a feedback calendar. You hang somewhere a calendar up, clearly visible in your home, and record your progress in one thing you have set out to do every day. There is hardly a more effective idea to motivate yourself and stay on the ball. Just give it a try!

3. Sports And Exercise

You need to know that productivity of mind and body are separate from each other and at the same time, in certain respects, they build on each other or influence each other. You can still go to the gym after a long day at the office without any problems. If you feel tired, this is only because you don’t have the mental energy to actively participate in sports.

But physical exercise is incredibly regenerating for your mind! For example, if you are physically energizing yourself while jogging, you are building up the capacity of your mental battery, known as “willpower”, at the same time! With this newly gained energy and motivation is you automatically catapult yourself out of laziness with a snap.

Go for a run or walk outside. Enough with physical laziness. Use exercise and sports to relax your mind and build motivation. When you feel lazy, just go for a 5-minute walk around the block. You see where this is leading.

4. Create And Write Down Your Life Vision

Here’s the thing: If you have no plan for yourself, you will inevitably become part of another plan. And three times you may guess what other people have planned for you in their plan: Not much!

So really take your time. Go inside yourself and think about what you are excited about, what values you represent, and what you can imagine doing the next 1, 5, 10, and even 50 years of your life.

Then, write it down! Best done classically with pen and paper. Or even better: Get yourself a really good notebook and write down your life vision on the first pages. Read through this vision at least once a week and you will soon notice how the one exercise alone will increase your motivation massively and reduce your laziness.

Conclusion.

Rarely laziness also has a biological or hormonal reason as a cause. If you feel completely sluggish for months, you may need to contact your doctor and possibly have a blood count analysis done. Mostly it is an iron deficiency or an important vitamin that your body lacks to perform optimally. Things that you can take without further ado if you are aware of their deficiency.

Finally, I would like to recommend that you read this article at least once more in two weeks. Then you should reflect on what has changed during this time. Even if you don’t seem to have much to show until then, keep this in mind:

The first step is always the most decisive!

I had already said it at the beginning of the article, but I would like to repeat it: Don’t judge yourself if you are currently struggling against laziness.

On the contrary. First, build up an understanding and acceptance for it. We can never really transform and develop something fundamentally that we are in resistance to! If you are feeling particularly lazy and unmotivated at the moment, you will only get out of it when you first learn to say to yourself:

“I feel lazy and that’s okay for now!”

Only from such a level of self-love and self-acceptance, the concrete steps to overcome your lack of drive, which we have looked at in this article, will bear real fruit and you will soon feel much more motivated.

Use your potential!