To make a long story short, I’ve always been inclined towards inertia in my life. I prefer to stay still and save effort; this plus a habit of impulsiveness and a general problem with motivation has caused issues in various forms in my life. Now it’s brought about an incident that has confirmed some fears I had about how certain coworkers think of me and my ability to do my job. While I don’t (yet) seriously fear being fired, being awkward and on tenterhooks is almost as bad to my psyche; besides which, I have a longstanding fear of “the other shoe dropping” and being the reason I can’t hold onto worthwhile things in my life.
But if I wanted to change, to really absorb some fundamental things I should remember by now, I would’ve done it before now, wouldn’t I? That, at least, is the immediate thought I have, especially with everything having gone down very recently, so I thought I’d ask all of y’all, who tend towards having more life experience around here, what a middle aged person like myself can do to make fundamental changes in habits and mindset and make them stick. For reasons already mentioned, I tend to fall back into comfortable patterns that take less effort, and/or simply not even think of doing things differently when I’m in the middle of doing them. But seeing as how this most recent incident will probably weigh on me for the rest of my time at this company, I figure it’s as good a time as any to try.
So any thoughts, experiences, and/or resources that have helped you do something similar would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
One advice I once read is that we often mistakenly believe that motivation has to come first before action, but oftentimes it’s the other way around - action leads to motivation. Otherwise we can be paralyzed by inertia for years or decades, waiting for the time when we will finally want change. So, taking the first few steps to do something then sparks up the motivation to continue.
Another more drastic approach that’s popular these days is to use psilocybin. Basically, do a safe shroom trip and use its newly-created neuroplasticity to do all the big changes you couldn’t previously. There’s a somewhat legendary Reddit instance of it. From what people who’ve tried it say, it gives a temporary window of days or weeks where all your usual mental barriers fall down and you can sort of brute-force-will yourself into change a lot more easily if you want to - which is why a lot of smokers are suddenly able to quit smoking after having done shrooms, for instance. I have never tried shrooms myself, though, since I have a bipolar-2 sibling and lots of sleep deprivation and it carries a risk of mania or psychosis if I do it.
This is a repost of something I said in a different thread in May. It was something I tried then that has had lasting effects for me; I hope it helps you.
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I’ve been on a positive jag lately. A couple weeks ago, I got fed up with feeling bad all the time, both physically and mentally. One morning, I said to myself, “Self, I’m going to do everything different today.” During every step of that day, I asked myself, “what am I supposed to be doing right now” or “what is a good thing I could do right this second” or “what could I do that’s better than what I usually do”, and then I did that thing. It wasn’t hard, because I was just doing an experiment.
Well, that was a good day, so on the following day I tried it again. I’ve been doing it ever since. Not perfectly, but that’s okay, because I make the rules and I can break them if I want to.
Result: I’ve been eating healthier food. Walking dogs every day. Drinking more water.
Listening to only happy music.
I got organized at work, which obviously has had some good knock-on effects of me being able to get some shit done. It’s also kept me from hovering over the news all the time.
I haven’t had any alcohol since last Saturday. I’m planning to have some tonight, if I feel like it, but for me that was a long break.
I’m pleased with the experiment so far and might continue to the end of May.
A couple of cliches that still hold some truth: (a) The difference between a groove and a rut is the depth. (b) The best time to [make a change/start something new] is [some random time in the past]. The next best time is today.
Changing habits is hard. Remember to congratulate yourself on incremental changes, no matter how small.
I have found David Cain’s stuff very helpful. He comes from a place with similar psychological traits to folks like you and me and understands why normal productivity advice doesn’t work for us. There is a link in his August post, My Best Advice for the Productivity-Challenged, that leads to https://howtodothings.co/ where you can a get a free pdf with some straightforward advice. He sells a more comprehensive course that I haven’t done but I have found all his stuff useful.
As someone who is sort of obsessed with this subject, I think the best method is to identify the change you want to make, create the lowest possible bar for clearing it as a daily habit, and do it every day. It has to be stupid easy. If your goal is to start flossing your teeth every day, then floss one tooth. Or even just remove the floss from the drawer and put it in your hand. Brains don’t like to do hard things and will always default to what’s easiest, so you have to trick your brain by making it think, “That? That’s nothing.”
And 9/10 you end up doing way more than you planned, because getting started is the hardest part. Just make the barrier to entry really low, and focus on building consistency vs. making huge dramatic changes.
In the hundreds of productivity books I have read, that’s the best advice I’ve found.
This is a good piece of advice. I tend to procrastinate a lot. I do find that, for some project or chore that I’ve been putting off and dreading that needs doing, I tell myself, “just do something”. Once I make a start, no matter how small or insignificant, it usually breaks through the inertia and leads to real progress.
Back in the day, I used a method which seems to be a distilled version of many of the recommendations above.
Default to “Yes”.
If a boss asks if you’d be willing to switch gears and work with marketing on some pie in the sky idea, go for it. Sure, Mary might be a perfect fit based on her crossover knowledge, but you have the opportunity to learn new things.
If a friend or acquaintance asked at the last minute if you’d join them for drinks or dinner, say “Sure”, even though you had planned to play the DLC that just came out for your favorite game.
If no one is asking for anything that you can say “Yes” to, go find it. You ask the friend to join you for drinks. You go looking for tasks at the office that you could help with. Go see how you can help as a volunteer at a local charitable org.
Once you get really good at saying “Yes”, then you need to learn to say “No” selectively. Not because of inertia, but so you find a balance that works for you and that you don’t get taken advantage of.
I’ve actually never seen that movie, nor “Liar liar” as far as I remember. I don’t watch much TV, but I’ll try to remember to give them a shot. Since it’s Jim Carrey, I’m assuming it didn’t work well for him.
It eventually does. Carrey plays a man who is withdrawn and depressed after a recent divorce. After attending self-help seminar, he adopts the “say yes to everything” approach to turn his life around, taking it hilariously too far of course.
There’s also the short-lived but hilarious show Review, in which the protagonist commits to trying and reviewing everything his audience proposes, no matter how outlandish.
My favorite (extremely cringey) episode is “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes. One star.”
It’s sort of hard to advise you given your OP is a bit vague and abstract. Like what exactly are you trying to change? You mention “inertia, “impulsiveness”, “motivation problems"“, and some negative impact at work, but that could take many forms.
Like are you trying to correct from some negative performance feedback you received? Or are you trying to be more effective at your job in general?
Or are you just trying to establish good habits for a more fulfilling and rewarding life?
My personal take on developing habits / qualities is that a lot of people focus on stuff like “what should I be doing to be more productive” or “what if I were to die in X days (or never)?” Like they get points or something for ticking off items on their bucket list or they’re studying for some big test.
IMHO, a better approach is to set realistic goals and objectives and then develop habits and behaviors to move you closer to those goals. But I think they need to be things you incorporate into your day to day life. But you should also assess whether those goals are aligned with your actual commitment to those habits.
Let’s take fitness for example. There’s a big difference between committing to health and fitness habits that lead to a healthy lifestyle vs that lead to being an professional athlete or MMA fighter or whatever. So unless hitting the gym 4 hours a day is something you really really love, it’s probably unnecessary and your time would be better spent focusing on developing other areas of your life.
Similarly, for my career, as a project manager and management consultant, I probably spend a greater than average amount time studying the behaviors and qualities that lead to work getting done properly. Really that’s what a lot of business processes and methodologies are. Creating frameworks for repeatable habits and behaviors so work isn’t some constant chaotic mess of putting out fires and reacting to changing whims.
For example, I would have a pre-meeting meeting (“standup”) with my team every morning before our morning “sync” with our client. The reason was we need to show up with 3 bullet points of “what do we need from the client to get our jobs done” otherwise she would be all over the place and focus on whatever inane minutiae caught her attention first. Then we’d spend 30 minutes talking about the shade of red on some Jira status dashboard and not address anything we actually needed to discuss.