I keep telling you – whatever your dream is, keep taking small steps forward! With small steps you won’t get tired and/or burned out which means you won’t give up and you’ll reach that goal! 🤩
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If you’re one of those people who need to do a lot to ‘feel like’ you’ve actually worked (gotta admit that I’m one of those people 😅) and that e.g. reading 15 pages a day is nothing to you, saving 5 USD a day doesn’t feel like saving and/or when you work 30min daily on your project you don’t feel like working at all remember:
🔸️15 pages a day (so about 30min per day spent reading) is 5475 pages per year so about 13-18 books per year – that’s quite a lot! Definitely more than the average 😉
🔸️ 5 USD saved daily will make 1825 USD in a year! 💰💰💰
You can buy quite a lot with those money!
🔸️ 30 min per day spent working on your project/business makes 10950 min in a year = 182.5 h !!! You can do/achieve so much in 182 hours!!! 😉
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Remember – small steps matter and can make a HUUUUGE difference!
Tag: motivating
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 20: Procrastination + sum up
They say procrastination is the thief of time—actually deadlines are 😬.
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New research from the University of Otago has found that if it is best not to set a deadline at all 😮. But if you do set a deadline, make it short 😉 (here we’re talking about a deadline of a short/small project or a deadline of STARTING some big project).
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Professor Stephen Knowles, from the Otago Business School tested the effect of deadline length on task completion 🧐.
Participants were invited to complete an online survey in which a donation goes to charity. They were given either one week, one month, or no deadline to respond.
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The study found responses to the survey were lowest for the one-month deadline, and highest when no deadline was specified 🙃.
No deadline and the one-week deadline led to many early responses, while a long deadline appeared to give people permission to procrastinate, and then forget 🤷♀️.
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Quite surprising, huh? Remember about that when planning some new project! 😉
It is also said that if something is said to take 5-10min of your time, do it straigh away. Don’t postpone it over and over again. For example, if you need to call your bank to ask for something or you need to buy something online – just go and do it! Procrastinating is the worst 🙄.
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And that’s the end of our Monday Motivation series! 🤗 Whenever you feel like you lack motivation go back to those steps:
➡️Remind yourself what motivation exactly is (step 1)
➡️ Why you may lack it (step 2)
➡️ Read again how to set a goal (step 3)
➡️ Successful methods to boost your motivation:
🔸️ visualisations (step 7)
🔸️ training your willpower (step 8 & 9)
🔸️ deferring gratification (steps 11 & 12)
➡️ Remember what may weaken your motivation (steps 10, 14 & 15)
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➡️ For practical tips to use in life (not only learning about motivation in theory) keep coming back to steps 18 and 19 – those are my ‘secret weapons’ how to get yourself to work! 😉
Happy planning your projects for this year and I wish you plenty of motivation and will to work!
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 15: Sabotaging thoughts
We’ve talked about different reasons why we may lack motivation: lack of „I desire” power (or it’s too weak 😔), being too stressed or too tired😴, mind traps etc… Today we’re gonna focus on sabotaging thoughts that often come to our mind and ruin our plans or desire to work 😬
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They often appear on a subconcious level so we might not notice them and that’s why we tend to think that they’re „stronger” than us 🤷♀️
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Try observing them while you’re fighting with some temptation or you feel like resigning from some important activity (e.g. workout). What do you notice? What happens then? 🤔
Mine are usually: „I don’t feel like it”, „I’m too tired” or „I don’t know exactly how to do it”.
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Don’t judge them but also don’t ignore them – take them seriously. Even if they seem silly, weird or without any sense to you carefully look into them 🧐.
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Sabotaging thoughts can:
➡️ Bring down your self-confidence 📉
➡️ Let you reject knowledge, good advices or hints from others 🚫
➡️ Increase general stress level (and that weakens your strong will! Remember!!)
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Keep observing your sabotaging thoughts (and when you notice them, write them down! 📝) while remembering to be good to yourself! 😉. Then for each sabotaging thought create a supporting thouht or helpful recreation 🤗. Now you’ll be able to not only notice a sabotaging thought but to stop and choose how you wanna react❗.
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 14: Mind traps
Try to think why you lack motivation 🤔 Maybe you’re too tired and need rest? Or maybe you don’t have a precise plan? 🧐 Or maybe you’re trapped in one of the mind traps : „everything or nothing” thinking, excessive pessimism or exaggeration 🤯
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If you are, create a list of counter-arguments that will help you look at reality without falling into those mind traps 🤗
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Come back to the source of your „I want” power, visualise your goal, try to find your motivation 🤩
Sit down and answer those questions:
➡️ What encouraged you to set this goal?
➡️ What will happen when you reach it?
➡️ What will you gain?
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If you want, find something that reminds you of important reasons why you started . It can be notes, picture of someone who succeeded and inspired you , some symbol of your motivation 💪. I always get most motivated by other people’s success 🤗.
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 13: Weakening temptations and strengthening willpower
How can we weaken temptations and strengthen our will to act? 🤔
Do you know that saying „out of sight, out of mind”? Turns out that scientific researches prove that wisdom when it comes to fighting temptation and empowering willpower! 💪
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Brian Wansink, american psychologist did an interesting research with James E. Painter that he describes in his book „Mindless Eating” 🧐
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Gentlemen gave their secretaries chocolates 🍫. Some of the sweets were in a box with a see-through lid where they could see all the chocolates and some of the sweets were in a normal not see-through box.
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What do you think, which chocolates tempted more to be eaten? 😅 Of course those with a see-through lid. Women that could see the chocolates were tempted 71% times more! They were reaching for chocolates 7,7 times a day while those women who had „hidden” chocolates reached for them only 4,6 times a day 😋.
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You see? Out of sight out of mind and it’s not only about sweets of course! If you need to learn or work late don’t do it in front of a TV, better yet, go to some quiet place 🤫, without TV, without any games or non-scientific books in your sight. Turn your phone off and focus on your task.
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Now how can we strengthen our will? 🤔 First of all write down a list of reasons WHY do you want to reach your goal, WHY do you want to follow that dream 📝. This so-called Benefit Card will help you a lot in a moment of crisis 😃
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If you’re wondering why bother writing them down and you think „I remember them all easily” I’ll surprise you: in moments of lost motivation it is easy to forget why you want to reach your goal that much 😉. When there is a temptation in eyesight (and within reach of a hand), you’re feeling stressed, tired and/or you’re in a bad mood, believe me, those reasons suddenly fly away and it is so hard to remember those 😬
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In those kind of situations Benefit Card might come very useful! Carry it with you everday and read it in any moment of weakness.
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 11: Deferring gratification
What ability do you need to learn/practice in order to empower your strong will and be able to stand up, take that first step and go work on your dreams/projects when you don’t feel like it? 🤔
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Please read and let me know if it sounds familiar 🧐. Your friend brings cake to work and you can’t resist. You feel lilke dropping everything and taking an evening off to watch TV instead of work (and you keep doing that everyday)…
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Your brain 🧠 demands a reward here and now! You forget about your goal and all the reasons why you wanted to achieve it. You succumb to temptation…🤭😜
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Or maybe…? With your last remains of strongwill you leave that cake from friend somewhere out of sight, you turn TV off and and work on your dreams thinking thay each hour spent working gets you closer to your goal 💪.
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The ability to postpone pleasures or rewards is called ➡️ ‘deferring gratification’ ⬅️ in psychology. It is crucial to realize long-distance goals because it helps you not to succumb to temptation each time 😉.
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Why is it so hard to defer gratification? Because seeing temptation or reward instantly launches more primitive and oldest part of our brain demanding gratification right away 😬. Luckily we also have prefrontal cortex (part of our brain 🧠) that can cool that instant rush because it is responsible for controlling our impulses .
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Task for today 📝: think how deferring gratification looks in your case? In what situations is it easier or more difficult to you? What helps you defer gratification?
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 10: What can weaken your willpower
3 mind traps that can weaken your willpower 😳
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➡️ 1.Thinking „everything or nothing” 😬
Have you ever thought „I need to do everything from my ‘to do’ list or drop everything”? 🤔
If yes, then you got into „everything or nothing” trap which can have huge impact on your actions and effects (or lack of them 🙄). Thinking like that you don’t see your failures as small errors that you can learn from, you see it as total failure and you might start withdrawing generalized conclusions about yourself like „I’ll never succeed”, „I’m a failure” etc. STOP! ⛔
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➡️ 2. Excessive pessimism or optimism „If I haven’t succeeded in 1 year I’ll never succeed” – that’s excessive pessimism when you have only negative thoughts about your future 1👎. Excessive optimism is when you ignore your past attempts and previous experience and keep thinking that „this time will be different, it will be perfect” 👍. For example, you wanted to workout regularly, you’ve had couple attempts at it and failed each time but now you think that you’ll have the willpower and you’ll workout 6 times a week for 3 months 😬. If you know what I’m talking about write all of such examples down. Now try to make each one of them more realistic e.g. „I’ll try to workout more regularly. I probably won’t be able to workout 6 times a week right away so I’ll workout 2 times this week, 3 times next week and keep improving”.
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➡️ 3. Exaggeration – You exaggerate all difficulties and make everything sound impossible 🙄. „I won’t make it”, „I never do anything right”.
If you do that write all of those thoughts down and write a counterargument to each one 👍
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 9: Training willpower
I’ve got good news for you – willpower can be trained! 😃
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It is often treated like something you either have or not but psychology researches show that you can train your strong will just like your muscles 😃. And nobody was born with a 6-pack, right? 😄
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It is great news because those who aren’t scrupulous naturally can train it. You’ve actually already started it by building your plan using your strenghts and weaknesses (steps 5-6) and by creating visualisation (step 7) 😉
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Since willpower works like a muscle it has limited source of energy and strength. There are things that empower it 👍but there are also things that weaken it 👎. Your goal is to get to know and, if possible, remove your obstacles to having strong will.
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Those most basic ones are stress, tiredness and lack of sleep 😴. It seems so simple, right? Yet you do not always see the connection between those factors and your willpower.
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Task for today: Observe and write down 📝(or analyze past experiences if you’re calm and rested today) how stress and tiredness have impact on your willpower: What situations are those? 🤔 What happens then? How do you react? 🧐
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 8: Willpower
How willpower actually works?🤔
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Willpower divides into 3 parts:
🔸️Power „I want to” – power to do something even though you’d prefer to avoid it
🔸️Power „I don’t want to” – power helping push temptations away
🔸️Power „I desire!” – power that remembers what you desire in long-term
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Willpower is what differs us from animals😉. By forseeing future you are able to not give in to impulses or instincts. We often want to delete lower impulses or some feelings but they are important too! 😉 For example disgust protects you from bad food 🥩, fear from danger ⚠️ and desires help you set goals 😊.
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If you want to improve your willpower it is not about fighting impulses but about using them to help you 🙃.
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Do you know that sometimes you make decisions on autopilot? 🤔 And that’s good because there are so many of them during a day that your brain would not be able to get to them all! 🤯
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Your task for today is to notice that autopilot and improve your self-awarness 😉. Observe and write down the situations when you need your willpower. What thoughts, feelings, impulses appear in those situations? 🤔 Which moments/elements are crucial to making a decision? Noticing them will help you stop that bad autopilot and prepare for those situations earlier. 🤗
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If you want to learn more about it I advice you to read Kelly McGonigal’s book „The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It”
MOTIVATIONAL MONDAY – STEP 7: Visualisations
You often hear that imagining success helps you get motivated 💪. Research shows though that it is not imagining success that helps but visualisation of process so imagining the path that takes you to your goal 😉. This way you practice in your mind the difficult path that awaits you and it helps you get ready for its all steps.
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What works best on you? A positive ending and what happens when you reach the goal 👍 or negative outcome and what happens if you don’t reach it 👎?
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➡️ If positive visualisation is for you (like me 🙃) imagine yourself working hard, reaching next steps towards your goal 📈. Imagine yourself with a strong will and e.g. staying home to work on your business, or whatever your goal is, instead of going to a party 😉. Imagine yourself making smart decisions like getting up 30min earlier in order to workout before work or to meditate 🧘♀️ to begin a new day with a calm mind. Imagine how you feel having picked those wise decisions 🤔
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Now imagine yourself at the end of the line, you’ve reached your goal! 🏅 Imagine your friends & family congratulating you on a fullfiled dream, imagine yourself giving some interview to a newspaper on how you managed to get where you are! 😎
So powerful! I usually am so pumped up after such visualisations!
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➡️ If you feel more motivated seeing negative outcome and what happens when you don’t succeed imagine yourself e.g. fatter, not earning as much as you’d want and not being able to e.g. give your kids everything you’d want to.
Imagine that your family and friends tell you that your laziness problem becomes more and more serious. You walk into a party and people look at you and gossip. Now imagine how you can avoid those situations. You work hard. You put your goals first. See with your imagination getting an award.
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➡️ Now think of your visualisations.
Decide whether you are more sensitive to punishments 👎 or to rewards 👍.
Imagine the proces taking you to your goal– make sure to imagine specific situations.
Write your visualisation down 🖊
Keep reading it when you need it
How to be HAPPY 