Blog

How to motivate yourself when you just feel MAH

Confidence, Making Decisions & Finding Passion

Some mornings I wake up feeling kind of MAH.

My muscles are ow, my limbs are brickish and I look at my bed with narrowed eyes.. should I get back in?

Most mornings I get up and meditate then leave the house to walk or run or do yoga. But some mornings I just don’t want to.

Working for yourself has a million upsides, but it does also mean you have to be self disciplined and self motivated.

And sometimes you just can’t be f’d.

But then I remember that what my mind tells me to do (or not do) doesn’t actually always serve me that well. I know I feel good when I get out and exercise, even if I don’t feel like it until I’m doing it.

Elite players don’t get good at sport by waiting til they “feel” motivated to exercise. They just get up and do it. Usually they have a coach to push them to do it, so I decided I’d have to be my own coach. Though Bloody Good Chap does a pretty good job too – he messages me – don’t forget to meditate this morning! It’s awesome.

We’re all waiting for a time in our life when we feel “ready” and “motivated” to make changes. But both these words are just made up in language, they don’t actually mean anything!

We rely on these abstract, intangible concepts to tell us whether we should do (or not do) things.

  • We wait til we feel “confident” before walking over and talking to a hot babe.
  • We wait til we feel “motivated” to go and exercise.
  • We wait til we feel “safe” enough to open up and let our guard down.

But what do these things even mean?

And why place so much weight on our feelings when we seem to have no control over them? Feelings are autonomous – they seem to happen to us automatically, without our input. There’s no power in that. This is something we cover in depth in Bloody Good Life 101.

In reality, our feelings come as a RESULT of our actions, or our non-actions, not the other way round.

So if our feelings are automatic, what are we doing waiting for them to change? We’re holding ourselves back, playing small, waiting til we “feel” ready before we make any changes. Many people wait their whole life to start living. And just before they get started, it ends.

So how do we get good at being confident, for example?

How do we get good at anything? How did you learn to ride a bike?

You were scared to ride a bike. You didn’t know how, and you didn’t feel ready to. But you wanted to badly. So you tried. And you fell. And then you tried again. Eventually you managed to ride the bike. And once you’d tried and failed enough times, you finally succeeded. And THEN you felt confident riding a bike.

So feelings don’t come first, actions do. And you have to be prepared to notice your feelings of fear, anxiety or nervousness, and keep taking action anyway.

This is something we work on extensively in Bloody Good Life 101.

It’s the ONLY way to create change in your life.

You will never “feel” that there is a right time. There will always be many reasons (thoughts, stories) why NOW is not the time to act on changing your life.

But of course the time is now, there will be no better time. The day when you feel “ready” will never come.

If you continue waiting to act, you’ll be waiting forever.

So here’s my insider tip for living a Bloody Good Life: start living the life you want to live NOW.

Don’t wait to feel motivated to do it, just do it.

If you want to exercise but you’re not feeling motivated enough, don’t wait to feel motivated, just accept that you’re not motivated and exercise anyway.

If you’re in a job you don’t love, don’t wait until you know what to do about it. Act now! Start exploring options. Apply for new jobs. Quit your job. Do what you’ve got to do.

No one ever gets clear on what they want to do in life until they do it.

You take action, you try something, it works, or it doesn’t work. Either way, you’re one step closer to knowing what does and doesn’t work.

We’ve got to get in the game.

Most of us are the spectators in the crowd of our own life yelling “kick the f#king ball!” to ourselves, but we’re not actually running onto the field and kicking it.

How do rugby players get good at rugby? Do they get good by thinking about it? By waiting to feel good at it?

No, they just run on the field and play. They fail and they win, again and again, until they fail less and win more.

If you want to win at life you’ve got to do the same.

So recently on a MAH morning, I kicked my own ass, put on my new Project Self coloured Nike Frees (I love them – they’re like turquoise bare feet and they make me feel like a baller). I biked down to the Yarra River where I spent half an hour sprinting (and nearly dying/ walking – some call this interval training but I do it my own way – lots of breaks!), up and down beside the river.

By the end of it I felt alive, motivated, excited about life!

Lucky I didn’t listen to my lack of motivation this morning, I would have missed out on a bloody good day!

Also, what the hell, why haven’t I tried Spotify running before now? It is awesome! It syncs your music to your running pace,

so you end up feeling like a ninja!

Also I found that I ran a lot harder and faster than normal because I wanted to keep up with the song!

Ps. I’m shit at selfies, but how beautiful is Melbourne!?

Ps — To learn more about regulating your emotions like the kind of legend that doesn’t throw coke at me, head over here to check out Bloody Good Life, an unconventional mind-taming program for overthinkers.

Pstt - enjoyed this blog post? Fab. If you have a hankering for more radical honesty delivered freshly to your inbox every week or eight-ish, subscribe over here.

Popular Posts:

Looking for anything in particular?

More bloody good blog posts...

How to stop a bad day in its tracks

Download the free bloody good g-book. Because we've all had enough of e-books