When You “Don’t Feel Like It”
Sometimes you “just don’t feel like it”.
The work is unappealing and just about anything else is more interesting.
How do you engage?
When motivation is there, the wind in your sails, work glides by almost effortlessly. Hours pass as thoughts pour into the vision, bringing it ever closer to a conclusion.
“Why can’t I always do this?”
Sometimes you get there through the pressure of a deadline. Sometimes you stumble into it, having inadvertently done one or two bits of it and said, “I may as well do it since I’m in it now.”
But without such prompts, a frequent thought appears:
“I don’t feel like it”.
When trying to approach some difficult work, something we’d rather avoid, we might try to line up our mindset with the work. After all, it seems to be what’s worked so well before. In fact, we might even take it another level, believing that we *require* our motivation, energy, or mindset to match the work involved in order to start.
However, this misses the *process*. Getting into something is not something that instantly switches from off to on. There are movements and steps involved.
Whether it was the building urgency that crossed a line or the small steps that helped you stumble in before, there was a process.
TLDR: The next time you find yourself in the middle of a flow of work, consider taking a moment to write down, what steps got you there? You might find some that are reproducible.
– Kourosh
PS I’m deep in the weeds working on the “Getting Started” module of Waves of Focus. How is it that there is so much to say when the biggest thing to do is to simply *be* with the work?
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