What Is Motivation? How Do We Choose Our Path?
The mojo we feel we need when we’re working on our food stuff. Our food issues.
How can I always feel motivated enough to do this?
Will I ever want to eat salad every day?
How do I stop eating the cookies at work and just eat Nutritarian?
When will this get easier?
I tell you, the secret all lies in the thoughts we have and how we respond to and work through those thoughts.
And sometimes, it seems like it’s just that motivation comes back. But I believe that motivation is maybe actually just a combination of rest and thought work, masquerading as motivation.
I was on the phone with my coach today, and she and I were talking through my little blip there, and the time I needed to take off.
She knows me really well. She was hypothesizing that possibly my overwhelm and burnout had come from the idea that I started to push myself too hard to move on to a new project before I was ready.
She is totally right. We explored this more and saw that my thoughts about where I wanted to be weren’t ringing true for me by taking a new action. That I would be better off continuing with the actions I had been taking, and just getting those perfected.
Taking my time before moving on.
She offered that I could check in with myself and answer a few questions when trying to decide whether or not to do something:
Will it feel satisfying?
Will it feel energizing?
Does it spark joy? (note the Marie Kondo reference!)
When I asked myself what I truly wanted to do based on those questions, it brought up the thought, “I want to get really good at what I’m currently doing before I move on, no doubt about it.”
And I realized that by jumping ahead to a new thing to work on was what was causing me all the grief.
Sometimes it’s not making a decision that causes us pain.
Sometimes it’s choosing something that doesn’t ring true with our goals that causes pain.
Once I’d looked at my possible decisions and found which one would truly gave me that joy, the decision was easy.
Amazing how sometimes it just takes someone to offer perspective to push us through.
What is a decision that you are currently grappling with or have grappled with in the past, and how did you end up coming to the right decision for you?
