Motivation
3 Mind Hacks To Boost Your Motivation
The question I am always asked by the unmotivated is “how do others become motivated?” Motivation is created by both internal and external stimulus.
When motivated your energy levels increase, your interest in the task amplifies and your commitment to work towards your goals peaks. So, how can two people doing the same task have different motivational levels?
The reward for finishing a task is highly motivational, but this alone is not enough, as many people set goals with the reward in mind but never take action. The secret to motivation is knowing how to overcome personal procrastination to proactively take positive action.
Here are the 3 Mind Hacks To Boost Your Motivation:
Mind Hack #1: Trick the mind
The brain is a complex muscle that solves complex mathematical problems, creates innovative ideas that have put humans on the moon, invented the internet which changed the way we live and the mind gave us the intelligence to cure serious diseases saving countless lives. But the mind can be tricked
Read this statement out loud; “I Love London In The The Summer Time”
Did you notice the double use of word “the?” Most who read this didn’t. This same psychology can be used to trick the mind into Motivation:
- Think of a task that you need to complete but procrastination has stopped you in your tracks
- When thinking about this goal, do you imagine how hard this task is, the amount of steps you have to take, and do you second guess how you will fail?
With a focus on the problems and pain of the goal, your mind magically deletes the positives, the potential fun and your optimistic outcome:
- Picture again, the negative images that stop you from taking action
- Push this image away from your mind’s eye so you can imagine seeing it in front of you
- Turn the image into a black and white picture (if your image plays like a movie pause the movie)
- Move the black and white further and future away from you so it becomes smaller and smaller, until it becomes a dot on the horizon
- Replace this image by imagining a large, coloured film. This film is you at your best, enjoying each step towards your goal and the film ends with you seeing you achieving your goal and the positive effect it has on your life
Mind Hack – Focusing on the positives deletes procrastination
“All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.” – Walt Disney
Mind Hack #2: Mind the steps
Over thinking the required steps to any goal creates stress. Research has shown that when you are stressed the brain actually shrinks in size. Keep the steps required to your goal simple and small as this becomes manageable and creates motivation. Over thinkers make an easy task complicated by predicting too many problems;
Goal – Get a haircut “first I need to decide which stylist I should attend. I could go to ‘Anne’s Hair’ but there is no parking nearby, which means I will need to walk, if it rains I will get wet and I haven’t got an umbrella, I could buy one but I have no cash, so I will have to drive to a cash machine. My car is running on empty so I need to fill up first, hmmm that takes me away for the stylist, but I can get cash out at the petrol station, even though the card machine at that petrol station swallowed my card last time I used it, which would mean ringing up the bank, I hate that, they keep you on the phone for an age, asking you loads of security questions that I can never remember the answer to……..”
Even reading this gives me a headache and she hasn’t even considered the other two stylists yet! Keep the steps to your goal to a minimum by stacking small task under one heading:
- Goal – Get a Haircut; Choose a stylist within walking distance of my house
- Book appointment
- Attend appointment on date
Mind Hack – Manageable tasks create motivation
Mind Hack #3: The innovative mind
When working towards a goal you can easily become stuck due to a mental block. The problem or barrier your goal requires you to overcome is de-motivating when you can’t find the solution.
Once inspired to achieve your goal you can easily fall into the trap of overthinking the barriers you come across:
- Problem that needs solving
- You ask “What’s the answer? What should I do? I should know this!”
This common action creates a mental block because your focus kills your creativity:
- Re-ask the question from different perspectives as this will access your brains creativity
- Close your eyes, take a deep breath and relax. In this state your subconscious will find the answer and you will have an “ah-ha” moment
- Day dream as this allows your mind to focus on the motivation of your goal and will give you the solution, often in a metaphor form to your barrier
Mind Hack – Creativity solves the problem
Thank you for reading my article! What mind hacks would you add to this list?
Did you know that more than 57% of Americans hit the snooze button? That adds up to 3.5 months of our lives just snoozing! Why would we waste time snoozing when the intention is to actually get up to get things done? Is it laziness, a lack of discipline, motivation, or commitment? It doesn’t actually matter.
The fact is, you can’t be as productive as you want when you are getting out of bed late! That is the obvious part. The not so obvious part is how to actually get of bed, when every part of you is screaming to sleep a bit longer. Let’s create a bit of pain first, because I’m assuming you actually don’t see the downsides to snoozing, or you are being ignorant and ignorance will never get you the results you want.
Sabotaging Success
Did you know that every time you set yourself an intention to wake up early and you don’t follow through with it, you dramatically lower your confidence and belief in yourself? Your word to yourself start to mean less and less. You can say to yourself, I will do this, but you know you probably won’t.
Nothing will sabotage your success more than losing faith in your own word. You need confidence to get results in life! Are you somebody who follows through with their word or not? You either are or you aren’t.
The second consequence, is that you are losing income and awesome results you could be having sooner. Why choose the easier things now and have a harder life later on, when you can choose the harder things now and have an easier life later on? Don’t settle in life, this will never ever fulfill you.
4 Hacks to get out of bed when that alarm goes off:
1. Don’t negotiate with your brain
If you start negotiating with your brain, you will always lose. So don’t go there, don’t even start that conversation in your mind! If you have decided to get out of bed, then do it, follow through with your word. Why change your mind in the morning?
The ‘pleasure seeking’ part of your brain is always on automatic and it’s so strong, your ‘pre-fontal’ cortex doesn’t have much chance of winning this battle when you are half asleep in bed. Once you are out of bed, habit stack. It’s the 5 second rule – you are up already – don’t you dare go back. Do exactly what you would do habitually. Do you go straight for the shower or do you get a glass of lemon juice? Know what you are going to do already to take any thinking out of it!
“Lose an hour in the morning and you will spend all day looking for it.” – Richard Whately
2. Look at your identity
You behave according to what you believe. You believe what you repeat. Look at your own language, what do you say to yourself about getting up? Do you say things like; “It’s so hard to get out of bed in the morning” or “I’ve never been a morning person.” What you say becomes your reality of yourself and either motivates or demotivates you.
What you want to be saying to yourself is: “Just get out of bed. It’s easy, just get up. I can do this because I want to, I decide and control my actions. I am in control.” I can almost guarantee, if you struggle to get up when your alarm goes off, there is a part of your identity that believes this is who you are. If you change how you talk to yourself, about who you are, and tell yourself you can do anything, because you said so, your actions will be completely different.
3. Leaping out of bed
Unless I have a very compelling reason, I know it would be hard to get out of bed. We need to use our minds to motivate us into action, and the best way to do this, is to get excited the day before. Write down at least 5 reasons on a piece of paper; list why you want to leap out of bed tomorrow. This can take 2 minutes! The next morning, when your alarm goes off, look at that piece of paper, immediately so you know what awaits you and get up.
4. Use accountability and peer pressure
Create a game with your friends, family members, coach, colleagues, or business partner, I don’t care who it is, as long as you know that person will hold you accountable. Have fun with it, take a picture fully dressed and showered and send to your accountability partner, or call a ‘penalty’ if you don’t, like taking your friend out for dinner or spouse every time you sleep in. Get creative and use your support system. The point is, it doesn’t matter what system you set up, how crazy it might seem, what matters is if it works!
Remember, you don’t need to make big changes from the outset, if you feel like an hour or 30 minute change is too much, start with 5 minutes earlier each day or 10 minutes earlier each week. You must be getting enough sleep and not over sleeping either. You have one life and if you are a business owner, I know you are missing out on results and lowering your confidence indirectly too.
“Life is getting up an hour early to live an hour more.”
You can have the best intentions to get up earlier every day, but if you let that snooze button control you, you will never follow through with your intentions or get your results! It is the small changes that can give us the biggest results. Try one these hacks to finally get out of that bed in the morning and finally take back your time! Don’t allow it to be more powerful than you.
If you are not finding challenges that knock you flat on your back then you are missing out. A darker side of success that some have touched on is that you need to fail more. In addition to this, we should consider finding the challenges that punch us in the mouth and knock us unconscious.
The easiest place to be in life is one of comfort and knowing what tomorrow will bring. This brings little growth and requires very little effort because it’s safe. However, if we look at our role models who have done great things, then we will surely see that they have failed spectacularly.
Michael Jordan locked himself in his room and cried after he didn’t make his varsity basketball team as a sophomore. Walt Disney’s second business that failed miserably was called Laugh-O-Gram. JK Rowling was rejected by 12 literary publishers before she found any success.
Most likely you can think of some challenges that you rose up to beat in your own life. I would venture to say that the most difficult challenges that meant the most to you knocked you on your back right before you conquered them.
“Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache, carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit.” – Napoleon Hill
These obstacles are there for a reason. They are an important part of the puzzle for you. So if you find yourself in a place where you feel stuck or overwhelmed by a burden that seems insurmountable then this is a very good thing.
Life gives you everything you need
Life will give us everything we need, including the message that you have to get back up and go back at it with more determination, more will, and more fight than what you had before. Sometimes the moment we are down and out is the moment we have to regroup, reorganize, and come up with a new strategy to overcome those impending obstacles.
The reason the challenge knocks us down is because we need it. Just like an ocean wave knocks down an inexperienced surfer, it’s just a sign that the young surfer has to grow and become better.
Just like a surfer, the same is true for you and wherever you are at now. You have faced many things in your life which force you to become stronger for what is now in front of you.
However, what is most important in all this is having a challenge that can move you. For the surfer, the thrill of riding that perfect wave is worth the cost of getting beaten down by ocean waves again and again. For the man creating a business and putting his heart and soul into it, the reward of being a success and changing lives is worth battling each and everyday to get his enterprise up and off the ground.
For the woman who runs a marathon, the thrill of running across the finish line and having that experience was worth all the training and the grueling exhaustion she had to endure so that she could get to that point.
These experiences are the ones that can move you, but if your goal can have such a positive affect on you, then it can also have a dramatically negative affect as well. This is why you need challenges that can break you.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J. K. Rowling
Why you need failure
The surfer is devastated after breaking his arm and having to spend time away from his passion, but after his recovery he is reinvigorated. The business fails and the man is crushed, but he comes back stronger and more experienced with another business. The runner fails at finishing her marathon, but trains harder and comes back even better.
For this reason, failure is only feedback and something to be used as a positive for getting to where you want to go. If you get knocked down you might just need to rest and try again. Or it could mean that you should go get some help and try again.
Remember, failure isn’t final and success within failure is having the opportunity to try again.
You should only be alarmed when you have failed challenges that aren’t breaking you. This means that you are playing it safe and need something more compelling to propel you forward.
If the challenge breaks you then you know it means something to you. Even more importantly, you have the opportunity to go again, harder and even more determined.
How do you handle failure? Let us know in the comments below!
We all go through tough times.
A few examples of mine are:
- Multiple consecutive breakups
- Walking away from a business that could have made me a lot of money
- Having my career come to a grinding halt
- Dealing with mental illness
The list is very long and I’m sure yours is similar. It’s not about the tough times we go through though because they are guaranteed and you already knew that before you clicked this article.
What matters during tough times is what you tell yourself.
This is what I say to myself during tough times — well there’s actually four things I say to myself depending on the tough time I’m facing:
“This will pass”
No event in your life lasts forever. Today may be a really tough day, but that won’t last forever. We delude ourselves at times by saying in our head “I’m always going to be like this.”
“Why does this always happen to me?”
“Here we go again.”
These negative phrases tell our brain that things are never going to get better. When we say these phrases to ourselves enough, we start to believe them. During a difficult period in your life, in that moment, things will suck.
The way to get out of your head is to see the truth: this will pass. In one day, one month, or one year this tough situation will have passed and you’ll be onto the next part of your life.
Nothing lasts forever unless you allow your mind to trap you in the moment and believe a lie which is that this moment won’t pass. It will. You will come out the other side.
“I’ll be stronger having dealt with this situation”
When you reframe your tough times into strength building exercises, they take a whole new meaning.
All of a sudden, your current situation that may be wearing you down becomes like reps at the gym. The reps are a struggle and it hurts, but if you keep moving forward, you end up with mental toughness and strength.
“Exchange your tough times for mental toughness”
See this challenging situation for what it is. It’s the chance to come out the other end stronger.
Stack your tough times up like gold medals.
Have you dealt with cancer? Good, then you won’t take your health for granted ever again.
Have you lost a loved one? Then you’ll never take the rest of your family for granted and care for them more than you did before.
Did you lose your job? Amazing! Now you can work somewhere else and discover more of your hidden talents!
Without tough times, you won’t have the strategies you need to deal with the impossible. Your heroes are your heroes because they’ve used their tough times to become stronger.
Failure and rejection are the building blocks to whatever your definition of success is. Tough times make you hungryand that’s a good thing.
“Keep taking baby steps forward”
Tough times can feel like quicksand sometimes.
If you don’t keep moving forward though, you’ll eventually sink into the quicksand. The best thing you can do during the toughest of challenges is take baby steps.
When I battled severe anxiety, I took baby steps such as these:
- Walked 15 minutes a day
- Drank an extra glass of water each day to hydrate my body
- Read one book a month on anxiety
- Exposed myself to one small fear each day. It started with going two levels in a lift (something I couldn’t do before). Then I’d go three levels the next day and so on.
That last dot point is critical. Overcoming tough times requires you to take baby steps in the form of being uncomfortable. When you’re growing each day, you don’t have time to be too concerned about a particular tough time.
My battle with anxiety eventually led me to flying long distances (another thing I couldn’t do before) and then speaking on stages in front of a lot of people.
As you can see, the first few steps — like going two floors in a lift — are quite small. Then the steps get bigger and bigger until what used to seem impossible becomes a piece of cake.
Take baby steps.
“It only takes one person”
Tough times often require someone to believe in you. From my experience, you only need one person.
One person to believe in your idea.
One person to love you.
One person who has gone through the same tough times as you.
This one person exists. You have to go out there and find them. That one person for me was a team leader when I was working in a call center. He believed in me enough to take me aside and coach me one on one.
He believed I was going to go on and change the world through personal development. He was right and I did!
Don’t give up. Your one person exists as well.
<<<>>>
These four things are what I tell myself during a tough time. One of these phrases will always be the right one depending on the circumstance.
Believe that there is a way out and you’ll find one. It’s during the tough times that you’ll develop the skills and experience to help others.
What I’ve learned is that to get through the tough times, one of the best hacks is to focus on helping others. When you’re focusing on how you can serve, your own selfish problems become insignificant.
Seek out people who have even bigger problems than you do and listen to them. See if you can help them.
That’s how you deal with the tough times.
Tell yourself the truth. You deserve to hear it.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
I was sitting down last week with a friend for lemongrass and ginger teas — because that’s how we roll in Melbourne.
My friend was telling me his recent life challenges and why he’d stopped replying to everybody’s messages.
I’ll get to the point: he’d got stuck in the daily grind.
Your life is not this:
- Wake up
- Eat breakfast
- Go to work
- Have lunch
- Come home
- Ask your partner how their day was
- Play with kids (if you have them)
- Look forward to the weekend
- Go to bed
- Rinse and repeat
If this is how your life is, chances are you’re going to have challenges. Not because these daily activities are a problem but because there’s so much more to life.
When every day is the same, and you don’t know why, you become lost.
What do I mean by lost?
You go back to old ways. In my friend’s case, his mental health issues kicked in again. He started feeling sorry for himself. He lost his way.
For me, getting lost looks like going back to a state of negativity. A state where the world is against me and everything feels impossible.
Your life can be different if you choose it to be.
This is not hyperbole. Your life can be different.
How?
By not getting stuck in the daily grind. The way you do this is by being present. Noticing right now instead of looking down at your phone.
You can also break your routine. Don’t do the same thing every day. Add some small twists and turns to how you do things.
Your life doesn’t have to be boring and full of routines. Habits are good to have as long as they don’t become 99.9% of your day. Having nothing but habits takes the variety out of your day.
You end up thinking the same way day in and day out. This stops you from seeing the endless opportunities that are available to you if you can only see them.
There has to be meaning.
No matter how big or how small, meaning gives you a reason to wake up outside of just following some pre-defined routine.
My friend that was going through issues last week didn’t have a meaning. He’d forgotten why he came to work. To shake up his reality, I told him about the day before where I’d volunteered at the local homeless shelter.
He asked me why I did it.
I told him “It gets you out of your head. It makes you think and feel completely different. You stop feeling sorry for yourself. It reminds you of what it’s like to have a meaning.”
We make the mistake of thinking everyone’s life is perfect except ours.
“I get this all the time. People think I live some rockstar blogging lifestyle full of free lunches, endless high-fives, smiles and opportunities. The reality couldn’t be further from this fake idea”
I have the same battles and challenges.
I get stuck in routines too.
I sometimes chase productivity over meaning as well.
No one has a straight flush of perfect days where all their hopes and dreams come true. Rejection, punches to the face, and disappointment affect us all.
The way you choose the good life is to acknowledge and push through the difficult parts of life.
As hard as I try, some days just suck. Some days I don’t feel like writing or my career is in the dumps.
The only difference is what you choose.
For me, I choose to keep moving forward. I choose optimism even when nothing makes sense and all the chips are stacked against me.
There’s no secret hack other than choosing to not settle for a life of routine and one that contains no variety.
You get to make that choice. That’s the difference.
The life you want is your choice. It’s not made for you.
Choose to change things up.
<<<>>>
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
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The 3 P’s of Irresistible Leadership: Passion, Persistence, and Panache
If any of you reading this have ever studied the theoretical underpinnings of leadership, you will have come across several theories such as the great man theory and charismatic leadership theory. Over the decades, leadership has evolved more from an art of telling people what to do to that of subtle influence, suggestion, and rendering by example. (more…)
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Very good article, Chris! As a new NLP learner, I especially loved reading the first mind hack. I believe I will need that tip as procrastination is currently an issue which I would like to work on.
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Awesome article Chris! Loved it especially the second point because I’m kinda guilty of this. I can be an over-thinker sometimes. It’s amazing how unconsciously we tend to complicate things which can be treated in a simple manner and you hit it right in the head with that haircut example because it is indeed tiring to read, what more, actually do.
Thanks for sharing these tips!
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I think another mind hack for me, is to turn it upside down. If I’m pushing, but nothing is working, and it feels like I’m on a treadmill getting nowhere. I stop and do the opposite–go inside, journal, meditate, walk. When I come back to the problem , I see it from a new angle.
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Hi Cheryl
A great mind hack. Becoming introverted and relaxing your mind through mediation, yoga, hypnosis or exercising is a great way to take a new perspective. Some of the worlds greatest achievements came to light using this mind hack; Albert Einstein was an introvert and the founding father of the theory of relativity, Isaac Newton was day dreaming when the famous apple fell from the tree and authors such as JK Rowling go inside themselves and let stories come to them
Thanks for sharing Cheryl
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Hi Gideon
I agree the fear of failure causes over thinking which results in procrastination. I often use a technique with clients to get the client to change the focus from thier fear of failure to a focus of a fear of not taking action
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Comment:It’s the fear of failure that usually cause people to overthink on the task ahead of them. But to do something is to do it now. Great post Chris!
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These are some great minds hacks that can help everyone stay motivated. I resonate with second mind hack. Overthinking creates way too much stress, and usually when you overthink about something, you end up doing nothing. So, the best thing is to just do it. Know what you need to do and just do it. Great post!
Did you know that more than 57% of Americans hit the snooze button? That adds up to 3.5 months of our lives just snoozing! Why would we waste time snoozing when the intention is to actually get up to get things done? Is it laziness, a lack of discipline, motivation, or commitment? It doesn’t actually matter.
The fact is, you can’t be as productive as you want when you are getting out of bed late! That is the obvious part. The not so obvious part is how to actually get of bed, when every part of you is screaming to sleep a bit longer. Let’s create a bit of pain first, because I’m assuming you actually don’t see the downsides to snoozing, or you are being ignorant and ignorance will never get you the results you want.
Sabotaging Success
Did you know that every time you set yourself an intention to wake up early and you don’t follow through with it, you dramatically lower your confidence and belief in yourself? Your word to yourself start to mean less and less. You can say to yourself, I will do this, but you know you probably won’t.
Nothing will sabotage your success more than losing faith in your own word. You need confidence to get results in life! Are you somebody who follows through with their word or not? You either are or you aren’t.
The second consequence, is that you are losing income and awesome results you could be having sooner. Why choose the easier things now and have a harder life later on, when you can choose the harder things now and have an easier life later on? Don’t settle in life, this will never ever fulfill you.
4 Hacks to get out of bed when that alarm goes off:
1. Don’t negotiate with your brain
If you start negotiating with your brain, you will always lose. So don’t go there, don’t even start that conversation in your mind! If you have decided to get out of bed, then do it, follow through with your word. Why change your mind in the morning?
The ‘pleasure seeking’ part of your brain is always on automatic and it’s so strong, your ‘pre-fontal’ cortex doesn’t have much chance of winning this battle when you are half asleep in bed. Once you are out of bed, habit stack. It’s the 5 second rule – you are up already – don’t you dare go back. Do exactly what you would do habitually. Do you go straight for the shower or do you get a glass of lemon juice? Know what you are going to do already to take any thinking out of it!
“Lose an hour in the morning and you will spend all day looking for it.” – Richard Whately
2. Look at your identity
You behave according to what you believe. You believe what you repeat. Look at your own language, what do you say to yourself about getting up? Do you say things like; “It’s so hard to get out of bed in the morning” or “I’ve never been a morning person.” What you say becomes your reality of yourself and either motivates or demotivates you.
What you want to be saying to yourself is: “Just get out of bed. It’s easy, just get up. I can do this because I want to, I decide and control my actions. I am in control.” I can almost guarantee, if you struggle to get up when your alarm goes off, there is a part of your identity that believes this is who you are. If you change how you talk to yourself, about who you are, and tell yourself you can do anything, because you said so, your actions will be completely different.
3. Leaping out of bed
Unless I have a very compelling reason, I know it would be hard to get out of bed. We need to use our minds to motivate us into action, and the best way to do this, is to get excited the day before. Write down at least 5 reasons on a piece of paper; list why you want to leap out of bed tomorrow. This can take 2 minutes! The next morning, when your alarm goes off, look at that piece of paper, immediately so you know what awaits you and get up.
4. Use accountability and peer pressure
Create a game with your friends, family members, coach, colleagues, or business partner, I don’t care who it is, as long as you know that person will hold you accountable. Have fun with it, take a picture fully dressed and showered and send to your accountability partner, or call a ‘penalty’ if you don’t, like taking your friend out for dinner or spouse every time you sleep in. Get creative and use your support system. The point is, it doesn’t matter what system you set up, how crazy it might seem, what matters is if it works!
Remember, you don’t need to make big changes from the outset, if you feel like an hour or 30 minute change is too much, start with 5 minutes earlier each day or 10 minutes earlier each week. You must be getting enough sleep and not over sleeping either. You have one life and if you are a business owner, I know you are missing out on results and lowering your confidence indirectly too.
“Life is getting up an hour early to live an hour more.”
You can have the best intentions to get up earlier every day, but if you let that snooze button control you, you will never follow through with your intentions or get your results! It is the small changes that can give us the biggest results. Try one these hacks to finally get out of that bed in the morning and finally take back your time! Don’t allow it to be more powerful than you.
If you are not finding challenges that knock you flat on your back then you are missing out. A darker side of success that some have touched on is that you need to fail more. In addition to this, we should consider finding the challenges that punch us in the mouth and knock us unconscious.
The easiest place to be in life is one of comfort and knowing what tomorrow will bring. This brings little growth and requires very little effort because it’s safe. However, if we look at our role models who have done great things, then we will surely see that they have failed spectacularly.
Michael Jordan locked himself in his room and cried after he didn’t make his varsity basketball team as a sophomore. Walt Disney’s second business that failed miserably was called Laugh-O-Gram. JK Rowling was rejected by 12 literary publishers before she found any success.
Most likely you can think of some challenges that you rose up to beat in your own life. I would venture to say that the most difficult challenges that meant the most to you knocked you on your back right before you conquered them.
“Every adversity, every failure, and every heartache, carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or greater Benefit.” – Napoleon Hill
These obstacles are there for a reason. They are an important part of the puzzle for you. So if you find yourself in a place where you feel stuck or overwhelmed by a burden that seems insurmountable then this is a very good thing.
Life gives you everything you need
Life will give us everything we need, including the message that you have to get back up and go back at it with more determination, more will, and more fight than what you had before. Sometimes the moment we are down and out is the moment we have to regroup, reorganize, and come up with a new strategy to overcome those impending obstacles.
The reason the challenge knocks us down is because we need it. Just like an ocean wave knocks down an inexperienced surfer, it’s just a sign that the young surfer has to grow and become better.
Just like a surfer, the same is true for you and wherever you are at now. You have faced many things in your life which force you to become stronger for what is now in front of you.
However, what is most important in all this is having a challenge that can move you. For the surfer, the thrill of riding that perfect wave is worth the cost of getting beaten down by ocean waves again and again. For the man creating a business and putting his heart and soul into it, the reward of being a success and changing lives is worth battling each and everyday to get his enterprise up and off the ground.
For the woman who runs a marathon, the thrill of running across the finish line and having that experience was worth all the training and the grueling exhaustion she had to endure so that she could get to that point.
These experiences are the ones that can move you, but if your goal can have such a positive affect on you, then it can also have a dramatically negative affect as well. This is why you need challenges that can break you.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.” – J. K. Rowling
Why you need failure
The surfer is devastated after breaking his arm and having to spend time away from his passion, but after his recovery he is reinvigorated. The business fails and the man is crushed, but he comes back stronger and more experienced with another business. The runner fails at finishing her marathon, but trains harder and comes back even better.
For this reason, failure is only feedback and something to be used as a positive for getting to where you want to go. If you get knocked down you might just need to rest and try again. Or it could mean that you should go get some help and try again.
Remember, failure isn’t final and success within failure is having the opportunity to try again.
You should only be alarmed when you have failed challenges that aren’t breaking you. This means that you are playing it safe and need something more compelling to propel you forward.
If the challenge breaks you then you know it means something to you. Even more importantly, you have the opportunity to go again, harder and even more determined.
How do you handle failure? Let us know in the comments below!
We all go through tough times.
A few examples of mine are:
- Multiple consecutive breakups
- Walking away from a business that could have made me a lot of money
- Having my career come to a grinding halt
- Dealing with mental illness
The list is very long and I’m sure yours is similar. It’s not about the tough times we go through though because they are guaranteed and you already knew that before you clicked this article.
What matters during tough times is what you tell yourself.
This is what I say to myself during tough times — well there’s actually four things I say to myself depending on the tough time I’m facing:
“This will pass”
No event in your life lasts forever. Today may be a really tough day, but that won’t last forever. We delude ourselves at times by saying in our head “I’m always going to be like this.”
“Why does this always happen to me?”
“Here we go again.”
These negative phrases tell our brain that things are never going to get better. When we say these phrases to ourselves enough, we start to believe them. During a difficult period in your life, in that moment, things will suck.
The way to get out of your head is to see the truth: this will pass. In one day, one month, or one year this tough situation will have passed and you’ll be onto the next part of your life.
Nothing lasts forever unless you allow your mind to trap you in the moment and believe a lie which is that this moment won’t pass. It will. You will come out the other side.
“I’ll be stronger having dealt with this situation”
When you reframe your tough times into strength building exercises, they take a whole new meaning.
All of a sudden, your current situation that may be wearing you down becomes like reps at the gym. The reps are a struggle and it hurts, but if you keep moving forward, you end up with mental toughness and strength.
“Exchange your tough times for mental toughness”
See this challenging situation for what it is. It’s the chance to come out the other end stronger.
Stack your tough times up like gold medals.
Have you dealt with cancer? Good, then you won’t take your health for granted ever again.
Have you lost a loved one? Then you’ll never take the rest of your family for granted and care for them more than you did before.
Did you lose your job? Amazing! Now you can work somewhere else and discover more of your hidden talents!
Without tough times, you won’t have the strategies you need to deal with the impossible. Your heroes are your heroes because they’ve used their tough times to become stronger.
Failure and rejection are the building blocks to whatever your definition of success is. Tough times make you hungryand that’s a good thing.
“Keep taking baby steps forward”
Tough times can feel like quicksand sometimes.
If you don’t keep moving forward though, you’ll eventually sink into the quicksand. The best thing you can do during the toughest of challenges is take baby steps.
When I battled severe anxiety, I took baby steps such as these:
- Walked 15 minutes a day
- Drank an extra glass of water each day to hydrate my body
- Read one book a month on anxiety
- Exposed myself to one small fear each day. It started with going two levels in a lift (something I couldn’t do before). Then I’d go three levels the next day and so on.
That last dot point is critical. Overcoming tough times requires you to take baby steps in the form of being uncomfortable. When you’re growing each day, you don’t have time to be too concerned about a particular tough time.
My battle with anxiety eventually led me to flying long distances (another thing I couldn’t do before) and then speaking on stages in front of a lot of people.
As you can see, the first few steps — like going two floors in a lift — are quite small. Then the steps get bigger and bigger until what used to seem impossible becomes a piece of cake.
Take baby steps.
“It only takes one person”
Tough times often require someone to believe in you. From my experience, you only need one person.
One person to believe in your idea.
One person to love you.
One person who has gone through the same tough times as you.
This one person exists. You have to go out there and find them. That one person for me was a team leader when I was working in a call center. He believed in me enough to take me aside and coach me one on one.
He believed I was going to go on and change the world through personal development. He was right and I did!
Don’t give up. Your one person exists as well.
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These four things are what I tell myself during a tough time. One of these phrases will always be the right one depending on the circumstance.
Believe that there is a way out and you’ll find one. It’s during the tough times that you’ll develop the skills and experience to help others.
What I’ve learned is that to get through the tough times, one of the best hacks is to focus on helping others. When you’re focusing on how you can serve, your own selfish problems become insignificant.
Seek out people who have even bigger problems than you do and listen to them. See if you can help them.
That’s how you deal with the tough times.
Tell yourself the truth. You deserve to hear it.
If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
I was sitting down last week with a friend for lemongrass and ginger teas — because that’s how we roll in Melbourne.
My friend was telling me his recent life challenges and why he’d stopped replying to everybody’s messages.
I’ll get to the point: he’d got stuck in the daily grind.
Your life is not this:
- Wake up
- Eat breakfast
- Go to work
- Have lunch
- Come home
- Ask your partner how their day was
- Play with kids (if you have them)
- Look forward to the weekend
- Go to bed
- Rinse and repeat
If this is how your life is, chances are you’re going to have challenges. Not because these daily activities are a problem but because there’s so much more to life.
When every day is the same, and you don’t know why, you become lost.
What do I mean by lost?
You go back to old ways. In my friend’s case, his mental health issues kicked in again. He started feeling sorry for himself. He lost his way.
For me, getting lost looks like going back to a state of negativity. A state where the world is against me and everything feels impossible.
Your life can be different if you choose it to be.
This is not hyperbole. Your life can be different.
How?
By not getting stuck in the daily grind. The way you do this is by being present. Noticing right now instead of looking down at your phone.
You can also break your routine. Don’t do the same thing every day. Add some small twists and turns to how you do things.
Your life doesn’t have to be boring and full of routines. Habits are good to have as long as they don’t become 99.9% of your day. Having nothing but habits takes the variety out of your day.
You end up thinking the same way day in and day out. This stops you from seeing the endless opportunities that are available to you if you can only see them.
There has to be meaning.
No matter how big or how small, meaning gives you a reason to wake up outside of just following some pre-defined routine.
My friend that was going through issues last week didn’t have a meaning. He’d forgotten why he came to work. To shake up his reality, I told him about the day before where I’d volunteered at the local homeless shelter.
He asked me why I did it.
I told him “It gets you out of your head. It makes you think and feel completely different. You stop feeling sorry for yourself. It reminds you of what it’s like to have a meaning.”
We make the mistake of thinking everyone’s life is perfect except ours.
“I get this all the time. People think I live some rockstar blogging lifestyle full of free lunches, endless high-fives, smiles and opportunities. The reality couldn’t be further from this fake idea”
I have the same battles and challenges.
I get stuck in routines too.
I sometimes chase productivity over meaning as well.
No one has a straight flush of perfect days where all their hopes and dreams come true. Rejection, punches to the face, and disappointment affect us all.
The way you choose the good life is to acknowledge and push through the difficult parts of life.
As hard as I try, some days just suck. Some days I don’t feel like writing or my career is in the dumps.
The only difference is what you choose.
For me, I choose to keep moving forward. I choose optimism even when nothing makes sense and all the chips are stacked against me.
There’s no secret hack other than choosing to not settle for a life of routine and one that contains no variety.
You get to make that choice. That’s the difference.
The life you want is your choice. It’s not made for you.
Choose to change things up.
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If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net
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Sandro Falasca
Oct 25, 2016 at 10:03 am
Very good article, Chris! As a new NLP learner, I especially loved reading the first mind hack. I believe I will need that tip as procrastination is currently an issue which I would like to work on.
Noel Rosos
Aug 4, 2015 at 3:46 pm
Awesome article Chris! Loved it especially the second point because I’m kinda guilty of this. I can be an over-thinker sometimes. It’s amazing how unconsciously we tend to complicate things which can be treated in a simple manner and you hit it right in the head with that haircut example because it is indeed tiring to read, what more, actually do.
Thanks for sharing these tips!
Cheryl Bizien
Jul 15, 2015 at 6:39 pm
I think another mind hack for me, is to turn it upside down. If I’m pushing, but nothing is working, and it feels like I’m on a treadmill getting nowhere. I stop and do the opposite–go inside, journal, meditate, walk. When I come back to the problem , I see it from a new angle.
Chris Delaney
Jul 17, 2015 at 1:05 pm
Hi Cheryl
A great mind hack. Becoming introverted and relaxing your mind through mediation, yoga, hypnosis or exercising is a great way to take a new perspective. Some of the worlds greatest achievements came to light using this mind hack; Albert Einstein was an introvert and the founding father of the theory of relativity, Isaac Newton was day dreaming when the famous apple fell from the tree and authors such as JK Rowling go inside themselves and let stories come to them
Thanks for sharing Cheryl
Anthony Miller
Jul 7, 2015 at 10:25 am
hey loved this post. great info. learning how to think and not think is huge. ha ha.
Chris Delaney
Jul 2, 2015 at 8:14 pm
Hi Gideon
I agree the fear of failure causes over thinking which results in procrastination. I often use a technique with clients to get the client to change the focus from thier fear of failure to a focus of a fear of not taking action
Gideon
Jul 2, 2015 at 8:06 pm
Comment:It’s the fear of failure that usually cause people to overthink on the task ahead of them. But to do something is to do it now. Great post Chris!
Chris Delaey
Jul 2, 2015 at 8:26 am
Thanks for the comment Lawrence. I agree the best approach is to take action and just do it
Lawrence Berry
Jun 30, 2015 at 11:38 pm
These are some great minds hacks that can help everyone stay motivated. I resonate with second mind hack. Overthinking creates way too much stress, and usually when you overthink about something, you end up doing nothing. So, the best thing is to just do it. Know what you need to do and just do it. Great post!