OK, you’ve set up your environment and you are ready to focus on the right thing … the problem now is that you might not feel motivated to do it!

How to deal with the problem of motivation?

It’s helpful here to talk about the distinction between “empowered” & “disempowered”:

  • Empowered is when you feel energized & inspired to take action. You feel you have something you can do to change things. You’re juiced up about your goal.
  • Disempowered is when you don’t feel like doing it, like it’s a burden or it’s trapping you. Or you feel full of complaint about the world, about other people. You feel like you’re failing and feel bad about yourself. Basically, it’s a feeling of victimhood: everything is a burden, people suck, I suck, there’s not much I can do about it all.

When you don’t feel motivated to do something, you’re feeling disempowered. If this is a common occurrence, you have a disempowered relationship to that something (to your task list, emails, your project, your boss, etc.).

The magic is in taking the power back. Getting empowered. Creating a new, empowered relationship to whatever you’re unhappy about or unmotivated about.

This is a big topic, but in brief:

  • Focus on what you can control. If it feels out of your control, can you take more ownership to bring more of it under your control? For example, instead of “they always do X” … can you take ownership with “I can have a conversation about them doing X, and create an agreement about it”?
  • Connect to your possibility. When you aren’t connected to this, the task will just feel like a chore. If you’re connected to possibility, it can feel like an opportunity to create that possibility.
  • Bring some joy into it. You can bring curiosity, wonder, love, music and more. It doesn’t have to be joyless.
  • Look for the opportunity — to grow, to play, to learn, to get better at a skill, to create something exciting.

What can you do today to feel more empowered?