Laziness — Motivation — Medium Day

Reflections and Takeaways — “Laziness Is Not The Issue”

Medium Day Conference Key Notes & Thoughts

I’m with Eric when he says ‘Laziness’ shouldn’t exist!

I watched the replay of “Laziness Is Not The Issue: How To Unlock Your Motivation,” with Eric Teplitz. I really like how he doesn’t like the word, ‘Laziness.’ He prefers not to use that term.

My Issue With Laziness

As someone who has received so much judgement from others growing up, being accused of being ‘lazy,’ when in reality I was anxious, ADHDing, debilitated by emotions, or low energy, I couldn’t help but whoop out a ‘Yay! Someone who gets me!’ when he said that.

Raise your hand if you have anxiety disorders, depression, ADHD, emotional dysregulation, adrenal fatigue/chronic fatigue syndrome, or any other mental or physical illness that may affect your motivation or ability to manage and complete tasks.

These conditions will affect us. But because people always accused us of being lazy or assumed that we were, we fell into patterns of repeating to ourselves what was said to us. The inner critic tends to do that. Thus we judge ourselves and assume we’re being lazy because we have learnt that being unmotivated, feeling anxious, having little energy, or being debilitated by emotions WAS laziness.

You want to know the truth?

Those are false beliefs. The people who judged us either did not understand what we were experiencing or truly believed they were helping us by ‘calling us out’ like that. The truth is, it is not laziness and is perfectly normal and okay to need time to address these things instead of doing other tasks.

‘By removing the word “lazy” we’re taking the judgement out of it and looking at it objectively.’

All Right, Back To Eric’s Advice

Eric says, ‘If we self-identify as lazy, then we take this to be a flaw in our character.’ Which he explains can be difficult to change.

He suggests that maybe laziness does not exist, but perhaps there are two actual realities. (Here comes the reframing. I’m loving this!)

• 1) You are motivated to do a particular thing;
• 2) You are not motivated to do a particular thing.

‘By removing the word “lazy” we’re taking the judgement out of it and looking at it objectively.’

This is something that I do with tapping therapy, reframing to remove judgement so that I can look at a situation more objectively. Sometimes, I need to assess my emotions too, but I like the idea of removing the word “lazy” when it comes to executing tasks and completing projects.

Reasons For A Lack of Motivation

If there is no motivation, Eric believes there are three likely reasons for it. He mentions this assumes these are things we want to be motivated to do but we’re just not.

• 1) This thing that you say is important to you, in reality, is not important to you. If you dig down and are really honest with yourself, it’s not important to you.
• 2) This thing is important to you but you’re avoiding it. Why? Because it brings up fear and anxiety or both. He reminds us, ‘If that’s the case, welcome to being a human being.’ We experience fear and anxiety when something might be uncomfortable or difficult to do.
• 3) You haven’t made this thing a priority. There are only so many things that we can prioritise at a time. ‘We can choose and rearrange our priorities whenever we want.’

I’d add overwhelm can be a major factor. In which case, it probably means we need to reprioritise. Also, everything I mentioned above, especially lack of energy, for those of us who have any health (physical or mental) related issues that affect our daily energy levels. Depression can be another factor too. Or simply being debilitated by emotions/emotional flashbacks. (Story of my life.) Fear, as in paralysing fear. ADHDing, daydreaming, drifting off (or in my case, imagining scenes in my head and then realising I need to actually write them down now).

I know for myself, I can become very hyper-focused on some things too, so definitely factor three comes into play a lot. I prioritise only one or two things at a time.

I listened to a video recently that explained how we each have a certain bandwidth of how many tasks we can actually manage at a time, and then mentioned that if we try to manage too much, we get overwhelmed. Some people can manage more — I am one of those who needs to manage less. And what I manage includes emotions, and thoughts, on top of tasks. This also is a factor that affects how I prioritise things or why I might be less motivated to do something, why I might procrastinate on something I do want to do, or feel unmotivated to do certain things.

Eric’s session was quite insightful, and after his explanation, he took questions live from folks willing to be on camera and be coached for free by him to parse out what might be going on with their un-motivation, in other words, the areas where they feel they’ve been “lazy.”

You can catch the replay as I did here.

Also, here is an article Eric wrote recently with a step-by-step guide (and full breakdown of each step) on accomplishing goals that’s rather insightful.

More stories on Healing and Emotional Freedom.

🌿If you fancy it, you can tip me with tisane on Ko-fi. ☕🌺😊