If You’re Feeling Unmotivated, Try This.
Does this scenario sound familiar?
You’ve been working on your career transition for weeks. You’ve identified your values, figured out what you want to do, reworked your resume and LinkedIn profile, and started applying for jobs.
And you recently took your first real vacation since the pandemic started. It was glorious!
Now you’re back and feel stuck like a frozen Zoom image.
It’s been two weeks. You know you must start looking at those jobs you saved. But you feel unmotivated. And you’re beating yourself up for being “lazy.”
This was the situation a client found herself in. She said, “after getting back from vacation, I have so much to do in my current job and in my personal life. I just don’t want to do any of it.”
Here’s the essence of how we worked with this:
I asked her: If you were to give yourself permission to feel lazy and bring kindness to yourself, what would happen?
At first, she struggled with this. She’s used to pushing through, no matter how she feels. She was concerned that showing kindness would lead to worsening laziness.
If your body was trying to send you a message, what might that be?
She reflected on everything she’d done over the past two years. She recognized how tired she was and needed “more downtime”. Her body wanted less DOING and more BEING.
Then she found kindness towards herself.
She wanted to honor where she was at. To bring more balance by listening to her body’s need for more downtime AND to start taking small steps to re-engage with her tasks.
Here’s what she took away
A reframe on her situation.
She was not unmotivated, but her body needed more time to relax and restore. For her this meant more “being” time to allow her body to relax. She also planned to loop in her partner and take more walks on the weekend.
- She recognised how far she had come in the past year. She needed space and time to digest it all.
- She examined everything on her To-Do list, including what to say NO to.
- She prioritized her To-Do list
- She created a DONE list.
- She remembered her core value of kindness.
What about you?
Have you had a chance to recover from stress and growth experiences over the past two years?
What’s stopping you from allowing yourself to feel “lazy” and “unmotivated?”
What is your body trying to tell you?
A Thought To Remember
“Every problem, every dilemma, every dead end we find ourselves facing in life, only appears unsolvable inside a particular frame or point of view. Enlarge the box, or create another frame around the data, and problems vanish, while new opportunities appear.”
Source: Rosamund and Benjamin Zander in The Art of Possibility.
(I recommend the audio version – the music significantly enhances the listening experience.)
