The only seemingly logical way to think about self-motivation is that it’s something we need to have to be able to act the way we desire, yet the two can really come in either order. The exciting thing about this (at least if, like me, you get excited about ideas that can give you a leg up on improving your life) is the realization that it’s sometimes possible to do the right thing, even if it’s difficult, without being motivated first. The accomplishment then often produces a sense of satisfaction or well-being that creates motivation for doing more going forward.

Action before motivation
Here are some examples of ways to act before being motivated:

• Focus on the moment-to-moment steps without thinking too much about the overall intent. For instance, if you want to go out running but are having trouble getting motivated, think about changing into your running clothes, tying your shoes, opening the door, etc. rather than starting a conversation with yourself about whether or not you feel like running.
• Take part in a group where following along means you’re doing something you want to do. Go to a group study party instead of procrastinating that paper you need to research (but don’t let yourself be a distraction to your friends or vice-versa); join a support group; or get the whole family doing chores at once.
• Make a bridge to what you want to do by tackling easy preliminaries. For instance, you may not like filing but be fine with sorting papers. If so, you can start with the painless task of sorting. When your office is full of piles of carefully-sorted papers, filing becomes both easier and kind of necessary. (Better yet, adopt a system that lets you keep control of your paperwork all the time. I’d particularly recommend the one described in Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done.)

Motivation before action
As useful as the “action before motivation” approach can be, motivation before action also works well, and is sometimes the a more useful way to go. The key with this is to focus at first not on the task you want to accomplish, but on the much simpler task of getting yourself motivated. Here are some articles that can help provide that initial motivational boost:

• How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation
• Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow
• 6 Steps to Overcome Procrastination
• 4 steps for getting back on track when you feel overwhelmed
• 7 Tricks for Starting in on an Unappealing Task
• Self-Motivation Techniques for Starting (or Restarting) a Big Project You’ve Been Avoiding
• Relax, Goals, Choice, Tactics
• Tools for Immediate Motivation: Attraction and Distraction

Photo by kaneda99

There’s a common, natural tendency many of us have to think of a thing as more important if our attention is focused on it. This can both help and hurt us. The helpful thing is that this can offer an easy way to get started on a task, because the more we think about something, the more likely we are to do actually do it.

Where this instinct hurts us, though, is in situations where we don’t organize a piece of information because we’re worried about losing track of it.

The problem is that to keep on top of a variety of incoming information, we need to handle all of it, pretty much without exception, using the same system. For instance, if we’re using a Getting Things Done approach to organization and an important letter comes in, Getting Things Done tells us to process it immediately or put it in our inbox. But we may hold back, thinking “No, I have to be sure to remember to do this! I’d better prop it up in front of my computer instead.”

Or if using a clean inbox approach, we might get a long e-mail from a friend who’s been out of touch for some time and think “Oh, I’d better not file that in my Reply/Act box, because I don’t want to forget to write back as soon as I can.”

Unfortunately, continuing to do this leads to pieces of paper lying around all over the place or e-mails stacking up in the inbox, each one of which distracts us from our organizational system and is hard to keep track of on its own. It’s too easy to not trust an organizational system and to try to make exceptions for whatever’s right in front of our eyes. When we do this, the organizational system rapidly collapses, because organizational systems that aren’t used to handle pretty much everything aren’t much use.

If a task or message can be handled right away, though, the situation is a bit different: responding to something immediately may bypass priorities (for instance, you might spend a lot of time on the reply to that friend when it’s more pressing to follow up on a medical issue), but something will get done. The most serious problems come when something that can’t be dealt with right away is held out for special handling.

The essence of an organizational system, or at least of the kind of organizational systems I can recommend as being truly effective, is using it for everything and faithfully reviewing everything in your system often enough that you never lose track of anything that goes in. It requires a leap of faith as well as a change of habit–and so it’s no wonder that it takes some effort to make the transition from organized to disorganized. But when that transition happens, our efforts are richly rewarded not just by improving our productivity, but also by transforming scattered, anxious feelings into a measure of confidence and serenity.

Photo by nickwheeleroz

Some tasks require more focus than others. For instance, I can fold clothes while carrying on an involved conversation, but do much better writing these posts with few or no interruptions. Many more involved tasks can be done in flow, a state of full focus and maximum effectiveness.

The trouble with interruptions
“The High Cost of Distractions” describes what happens to us when we’re interrupted at a task that requires our full attention. In essence, our brain has to completely reorient itself to deal with the interruption, then completely reorient itself again to get back on task. In the process, we also lose some of the material we have in short-term memory. These effects are less than ideal, of course, and I talk about some strategies for working with distractions in “Locations That Prevent Distractions“, “Handling Distractions by Managing Responsibilities, Devising Rules, and Erecting Barriers“, and “Dealing With Distractions You Can’t Prevent“.

And we can interrupt ourselves just as effectively as other people and things can interrupt us. The way the Web is often used is a very good example of this: we might be doing something important to us and hit a difficult spot or begin to feel tired, at which point surfing the Web or checking e-mail is an easy way to feel like we’re doing something–even though it’s actually derailing our efforts.

Mapping out the task
Apart from dealing with the distractions or interruptions themselves as described in the above articles, the other useful way we can help ourselves stay with a complex task is to have a path forward. This usually involves writing things down, which is admittedly easier if the task is something on the computer, for instance, rather than waterproofing a basement or teaching children to swim. There is a simple technique that doesn’t require any writing down, however, which I’ll mention in a moment.

Having a way forward means at least knowing the next step you’ll need to take, and sometimes means fully mapping the task out, which is to say writing out each task needed in order. Looking at the task with this kind of breakdown in mind uses a different way of thinking than plunging into the task itself. For instance, if you’re cleaning out your attic, you could just throw yourself in, or you could come up with a plan and follow that. The second approach sometimes makes it easier to get started and is a good way to help protect against interruptions causing too much trouble.

Such a map, even if it changes as you proceed, provides something to return to when an interruption is over and you’re back at the “now, what was I doing before all that?” stage.

The “next step” method
The alternative to mapping the whole process out is to always know the next step. This requires going through the task thinking “OK, right now I’m weeding, and as soon as I’m done, the next thing will be to put in the new tomato plants.” When you get to the tomato plants, as you begin you think far enough ahead to know what the task after that will be. Always keeping the next task in mind makes it possible to know what to do when the interruption is over, much like the map does. It helps to remind ourselves of the current and next tasks just as an interruption is presenting itself, as this makes it easier to recall our place when that’s done. Afterward, simply getting started on the next task is often all we need to get back on track and into the swing of things.

Picture by Yersinia

Following up on last week’s articles “Dealing With Problems That Can’t Be Fixed” and “When Is It Time to Make a Change?“, today’s article takes a look at the possibilities and consequences of fixing a situation by leaving it.

When there’s no way to get away
Leaving isn’t always an option. For example, if the problem is affecting a place, person, or group of people you care about–say, your brother-in-law has a drinking problem, or your hometown has gone into a bad economic slump–then getting isn’t likely to help. Even when leaving the problem behind physically won’t help, though, it’s sometimes possible to leave emotionally, which is to say stop caring about the situation. Ceasing to care about things is often not a helpful approach, and even when it is advisable, it isn’t always easy. Yet ceasing to care can sometimes be the best choice, especially if an activity or relationship is involved that wasn’t that healthy or appropriate in the first place, as with ending a friendship with someone who’s been a destructive influence.

What’s lost, what’s gained, and what the break will cost
When leaving is an option, it can help to become clear on the three kinds of things that are affected when we leave a situation: what’s lost by leaving the situation behind, what’s gained by leaving it, and what damage (or benefits) might result from the leaving itself. For instance, leaving a job can be a way of ending an intolerable work relationship with a boss or coworker (a key cause of unhappiness at work, according to the Gallup Group’s investigations on well-being) but may cause uncertainty with your income, increase or decrease your commute, open up new opportunities, threaten rifts between you and others still working at or with the place you left, create a situation that will tend to make a spouse relieved or fearful, and so on. Not all of these costs and benefits may be apparent at the beginning, and some will not be predictable, such as unexpected opportunities and the emotional impact of the change.

Ways to think about leaving
One of the most useful things we can do when thinking about leaving a situation is to bring to light all of our fears, concerns, and hopes that may make us want to leave or stay and to try to find any broken ideas (thoughts that cause bad feelings by misleading us in subtle ways) that may be causing pain now, preventing progress, or threatening the future. Two good ways of bringing out these kinds of thoughts are writing them out on paper or on a computer or talking about the situation with a sympathetic friend who’s a good listener.

Some examples of kinds of thoughts worth looking at:

• Fears of what will happen if you do leave
• Fears of what will happen if you don’t leave
• Assumptions about your current situation that may or may not be accurate
• Concerns about how other people will judge a decision to leave
• Hopes for opportunities that might open up
• Overly-limiting ideas about who you are and what you’re capable of doing
• People who would be affected by a change, including whether it’s you or someone else who would be most affected
• What kinds of life complications would go away or be added by leaving

A “pros and cons” list can be useful, but it’s unlikely to provide an obvious answer, even if the list is much longer on one side than the other, since different items in a list can have very different levels of importance. Seeing the two sides of the issue laid out like this, though, can make it much easier to balance out the the possibilities the situation offers, provided all the key points are covered. One very useful approach is to spend days or even weeks coming back to the list and adding to it whenever new ideas occur, then considering both sides carefully and sleeping on it, letting a decision emerge naturally.

In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell says, “Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”  For reference, 10,000 hours would translate into (for example) 20 hours a week for ten years.

What 10,000 hours gets you
The bar for “true expertise” here is pretty high: Gladwell and the researchers he’s referring to are talking about being not just really good at something, but world-class–a Meryl Streep, an Arnold Palmer, a Yo Yo Ma, a Marie Curie. To put this in perspective, earning my first dan black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan at a rigorous Taekwondo school took me something on the order of 600 hours of practice, a far cry from 10,000 hours. The difference between 600 hours and 10,000 hours is the difference between me and Jackie Chan.

By the way, if you’re thinking “Practice is fine, but it’s no substitute for natural talent,” I direct you to my article “Do you have enough talent to become great at it?” The value of “talent” is surprisingly limited.

Beyond just practicing
Gladwell’s point is fascinating, especially when we realize how much research supports it, but Geoffrey Colvin offers a further insight in his book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else. In that book, he gives some of the same kinds of evidence Gladwell discusses for practice, not “inborn talent,” being the key to world-class performance, but goes further to say that not all practice is created equal. After all, if it just took 10,000 hours of doing something to become truly great at it, why isn’t every accountant who’s been working full-time for at least 5 years phenomenally wonderful at accounting? The key is what Gladwell and others refer to as “deliberate practice.”

[Deliberate practice] definitely isn’t what most of us do on the job every day, which begins to explain the great mystery of the workplace–why we’re surrounded by so many people who have worked hard for decades but have never approached greatness. Deliberate practice is also not what most of us do when we think we’re practicing golf or the oboe or any of our other interests. Deliberate practice is hard. It hurts. But it works. More of it equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.

In other words, if you want to become great it’s not enough to show up and do what you’re supposed to, whether we’re talking about hitting golf balls, reconciling accounts, or teaching seven-year-olds. To become great, we have to push ourselves, to seek out great teachers or sources of learning, constantly create new challenges, and pay close attention to what results we get. Colvin describes deliberate practice by example: “Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day.”

Examples of practice vs. deliberate practice
I can feel the difference when I try deliberate practice in my own life. When I’m studying Taekwondo, it’s the difference between just trying to get through a sequence of moves and pushing myself to concentrate on specific aspects of every single motion, like stance, breath control, or reaction force. For an example in writing, several years ago I joined The Daily Cabal, a group that requires me to create entirely new stories in less than 400 words, often on a weekly basis. For some of these I’ve pushed myself, practiced very deliberately–for instance, “A Is For Authority” took serious effort, concentration, and sweat–while “The Plot Against Barbie’s Life” practically wrote itself as soon as I came up with the title. (By the way, for writers who may be reading this post, as of July 27, 2010 we’re accepting applications for new Cabal members.)

Is deliberate practice always productive?
Note that deliberate practice doesn’t necessarily make a better immediate result. My short story “A Ship that Bends” was rewritten numerous times and eventually became a published finalist (but not a winner) in the Writers of the Future contest, by far the largest English language speculative fiction contest in the world. My novelette “Bottomless” (about villages on ledges deep inside a bottomless pit) won second place in the contest the following year and was another of those pieces that came out fairly easily. It’s probably worth noting that by the time I wrote those stories, I suspect I already had at least a thousand hours of writing practice.

The upshot is simply this: practice–even deliberate practice–may produce either good or lousy immediate results, but only long-term, deliberate practice produces the skills to consistently deliver great results.

If you were to carefully interview 1.7 million workers to figure out how people became successful, what do you think you would learn? This is exactly what the Gallup group (best known for their polls) did over 25 years. What they came up with from this massive research effort was a catalog of personal strengths and a rich understanding of how successful people use those strengths.

Strengths psychology
The Gallup research is part of a relatively recent branch of psychology known as “Strengths Psychology.” For many years, psychology as a field has been primarily directed toward identifying and fixing problems–phobias, anxieties, fixations, and so on. Strengths psychology (and other varieties of what has come to be called “positive psychology”) is much less interested in people for whom things are going wrong than in people for whom things are going right. The Gallup group identified 34 personal strengths amounting to general strategies for getting things done that can be successful in many situations. Some examples are mentoring others, competitiveness, and putting things in context of what has happened before. In the Gallup book Now, Discover Your Strengths and the follow-up Strengthsfinder 2.0, they offer a test for determining a person’s greatest strengths, concentrating on an individual’s top 5. The idea is that everyone has a small set of strategies that work best for them, strategies they adopted early in life and have used for many things since then. Knowing what strengths we have–and what strengths we don’t have–gives us an opportunity to choose tools we already know how to use to get things done.

A related strengths system called “Strengths and Virtues” offers 24 strengths that have much in common in some ways with the Gallup system. I hope to be able to talk about this system in more depth soon.

Increase strengths or fix weaknesses?
Significantly, Gallup’s investigation into individual success resoundingly supports the idea that really successful people are ones who make the most of the strengths they have instead of trying to compensate for weaknesses. There’s a limitation to this, which is that if any weakness is actively dragging a person down (for instance, if a person is so non-competitive that they are scared away from trying to succeed whenever they see someone else trying to do the same thing), it’s important to work on those until they are no longer creating serious problems. But apart from that, the recommended approach is that it’s completely unnecessary to try to do everything well, that some things are better delegated or left alone or done in a different way.

For example, let’s say you’re put in a situation where you’re expected to schmooze with a lot of people at a networking function–but you don’t like schmoozing and aren’t good at it. If you have strengths instead in areas like communication or coming up with novel ideas, you might find other ways to connect, for instance by coming up with an interesting freebie that advertises your business and that you can give out at the function, or by giving a talk rather than circulating.

In the end, each of us has specific strengths and resources to bring to bear. By looking at our tasks and challenges in the light of our strengths, we can steer more of our efforts into the areas where we’re most effective.

Photo by stttijn

Struggling with procrastination is common, and it often happens that the longer we put something off, the more awful the idea of facing it seems to feel. Here are a series of simple steps that can be used to overcome procrastination for one task at a time. If you follow them closely, you have a very good chance of finally making progress on whatever you’ve been putting off.

1. Schedule. Begin by scheduling a specific time to work on the task. Choose carefully: make sure it’s a period of time that you’ll actually have available. If distractions or alternatives show up when the time comes, say sorry, you have something to do. It’s important to consider this appointment set in stone in order to accomplish your goal.

2. Remind. Set a reminder to ensure you know when you’re supposed to start and are not busy with something else.

3. Relax. When the time comes to start, begin by sitting down and relaxing. Don’t worry about the task itself for now. Take some deep breaths. Don’t feel rushed: it’s an important thing to do, right? Then it’s worth taking a little time to get into a calm, focused mood. If you meditate, that can be a helpful tactic here.

4. Remember Your Goals. Now think for a moment about what you want to gain from completing this task. Visualize what you hope to accomplish with it, or remind yourself of things you like about it, or explicitly tell yourself why you were interested in it in the first place. If it’s something you don’t like for itself (such as, for instance, doing taxes or cleaning up someone else’s mess), think about what makes you interested in doing that, like having your financial ducks in a row or living up to your own ideals. Another benefit completion of many of these tasks offer is relief from having them hanging over us.

Don’t stop until you’ve latched onto at least one–and ideally several–things that make you want to finish this task, whether goals or positive associations. If you have no reason whatsoever to want to do it, why do you consider it important in the first place? If you really don’t need to do it, resolve not to and cross it off your list permanently. Otherwise, get in touch with your reasons.

5. List. List the first few specific, tiny tasks you’d need to do to get started. If you’re not sure, brainstorm, write, talk to yourself, or borrow someone you can depend and bounce ideas around until you have some idea.

These tiny tasks are not results: they’re really specific, straightforward things to do. For instance, if your goal is to file some insurance paperwork, then your first step probably isn’t “fill out claim forms,” but rather “Find Web site for insurance company so I can download claim forms” or “Gather all bills and documents I’ll need to fill out the claim.” You might even make it more specific than that. The point is to break down the first several steps–say, the first 15 minutes to an hour of work on the task, which for many tasks is all that’s required–into very clear, simple things you can do without a lot of thought.

6. Visualize. Picture yourself taking the first few steps. You don’t have to actually do anything just yet: just do a very good job of imagining yourself starting.

Then … begin!

How it works
Thinking about your reasons for taking the task on, making positive associations and picturing yourself doing the task should help prime your brain to make it easy to slip into starting to do the task. When you do, you’ll have specific, extremely simple steps laid out that you can tackle one after another: let them carry you through. If you run out of steps or have to reorganize, just insert a next step: “come up with more steps,” and use that step to work out the next 15 minutes to 1 hour of activity.

If you need the stronger stuff
If you find that even this process isn’t helping you get over your procrastination, it’s very likely you have broken ideas about it. Perhaps you’re telling yourself that you’re a bad person for not doing it, or that it absolutely needs to be done, or that not having done it yet is awful. These and many kinds of related thoughts can be worked out and made to stop bothering you through idea repair. Write down each negative thought you have about the task and work through the idea repair process with it. At the end you should find fewer obstacles and more motivation to move ahead.

Photo by Esther17

This is the fifth in a series of articles that strive to answer the question “How can I get myself to work harder toward a goal?” Today’s article tackles the problem of being worried about what will happen to you if you try.

In part III of this series, I talked about emotional conflicts–about both wanting to do something and not wanting to do it. Being worried about trying is a special kind of emotional conflict, and a common one. I realized the other day that I’ve been running into this problem myself. Lately I’ve been sending out magazine article queries (that is, proposing to write articles for various magazines), and in some cases getting assignments (success!). However, I haven’t been sending out nearly as many queries as I’ve been wanting to, and when yesterday I sat down to send out another, I also did some thinking about why my progress has been so slow so far. As silly as it is, it became clear that I’m just worried about rejection.

I say “silly” because for writers, rejection isn’t so much something to worry about as a near-unavoidable fact of life. For any given query, the editor who reads it could just not like the idea, could have bought something just like it, could decide that they don’t want to work with a writer new to them just now, or could reject the story for any number of other rational or irrational reasons. Whatever reaction the editor has, it’s out of my control: all I can do is send out the best queries I can manage.

But I haven’t done as much querying on articles as I have of submitting short stories and even work on book proposals and submissions. It’s more familiar and comfortable for me to pitch a novel, propose a non-fiction book, or send a short story to a good market than it is to query about a magazine article, just because I’ve done those other things more. And without even noticing it, I was letting my fear of not doing well slow me down.

Like most fears, the best way to get past this one is to both acknowledge it and ignore it. Yes, I’m likely to receive some rejections (or non-responses, which is how some magazines do things instead of sending rejection letters). But I’m also likely to continue to sell some articles, and so rejection ultimately doesn’t mean anything: what matters are attempts and successes. Any query I don’t send is one that has failed out of the gate. If I send it and it gets rejected, at least I’ll have some information with the failure–and if it gets accepted, I have both some information and an article sale.

It’s the same for anything. Yes, failure is always possible, and trouble can always arise: finally getting around to sorting out an old pile of mail might reveal an unexpected overdue bill (or unexpected uncashed check! Though I admit those are rarer). Asking someone out may lead to failure or even embarrassment. But since not attempting at all is a guaranteed failure, trying–while sometimes painful or scary–is almost always an improvement.

Photo by CRASH:candy

The previous installments in this series are:

• Plausibility (do you really believe you can achieve the goal?)
• What Matters and Keeping Score (meaningfulness and the role of being able to see your progress)
• Willingness (resolving emotional conflicts about your goal)
• Daily Involvement (working toward your goal even in small ways every day)

In previous articles in this series, I’ve talked about being distracted versus unenthusiastic and about whether a goal feels possible; meaningfulness and the ability to judge progress; and willingness. This fourth article in the series expands the topic from ways of thinking to ways of both thinking and acting.

The principle of daily involvement is based on a few important facts about how we become more or less interested in something. One of these facts is that we have an easier time getting involved in something that we’re used to, something that has become or is becoming habitual. There are fewer questions to answer, fewer preparations to make, and less confusion when we do things that we are used to doing regularly.

A second fact is that the more we think about something, the more likely we are to do it. In many situations, just thinking about doing something activates the same parts of the brain that are engaged when actually doing that thing. Thinking about an activitity is a lot like actually beginning to do it, and therefore creates momentum.

A third fact is that our brains can only really focus on one thing at a time. When we’re engaged in a particular activity, like budgeting for a vacation, certain brain centers are activated that have to be shut down or used in a different way if we interrupt to do something different, like stopping to read e-mail. Our brains then have to change around again when we go back to budgeting (if we get back to it at all).

Fourth, the more we think about a task, goal, or project, the more problems with it we are likely to come up with solutions for, the more ideas we’re likely to have, and the more clarity we’ll get on what exactly we need to do next.

Taking these facts together, we can begin to see how getting in the habit of thinking about project on a daily basis–and preferably more than once a day–can make it easier and more rewarding to work on that project, and how working on a project even a little on a daily basis makes it easier to continue working on it compared to, for instance, doing a lot of it at once and then letting it sit for a long time.

So one of the ways we become more focused on and enthusiastic about a project is to schedule in some time to think about it and work on it every day, even if it’s literally just for a few minutes. This practice keeps the project on the front burner in our minds and prevents getting hung up on starting the work. Staying engaged in the project like this helps direct our thoughts about it toward creative solutions and continued progress. And making progress daily, even if only a small amount, helps improve confidence and satisfaction. These good feelings about the project in turn change our associations: instead of anxiety and guilt, the feelings conjured up when we think of the project begin to tend more toward pride and optimism. Thus all of these factors support each other to slowly (or sometimes even quickly) make a change in the way we experience working on the project so that it becomes more interesting and enjoyable–just by getting involved in that project every day.

Photo by Tricky

The first article in this series talks about the difference between distraction and lack of focus or enthusiasm as well as the problem of not believing your goal can be achieved. The second article touches on how much the goal matters and whether or not it’s possible to track progress. This article will tackle another essential of being committed to a goal: willingness.

The question of willingness came up as a side note in my article the other day about whether our willpower gets used up on a daily basis. The idea was that people seem to usually be less willing to keep doing things that require self-control the more of them they’re asked to do. Repeated demands are one reason a person might find she or he isn’t willing to exercise willpower. Others include

• Feeling anger or resentment about having to do the thing in the first place, or being unhappy about some expected result–for instance if a person avoided cleaning an area up because they didn’t make the mess (even if they knew the mess-maker wasn’t going to clean it up), or if they were to hold off on doing certain work because they strongly suspected someone else would be getting the credit.
• Being uncomfortable with success, for instance when a person is scared of the life changes a new job would cause.
• Having a broken idea that someone else should be doing whatever it is, that whatever it is shouldn’t be necessary, etc.
• Focusing on short-term discomfort or interruption of pleasure, like not wanting to pull a splinter out due to anticipating that being painful.
• Feeling as though you don’t deserve to achieve your goal, for instance because of impostor syndrome.

Those are a few samples. The key point is that even when we have a desire to do something and recognize that it would be a good thing to do, we often still have conflicting feelings about moving ahead. To say that we simply want something or don’t want it is to imagine our minds being much simpler than they are. For instance, a person might desperately want to lose weight for reasons of both health and appearance, but also might want to feel free to indulge in eating as they like, might be worried about the discomfort of regular exercise, might feel protected in some ways by being overweight, etc.

Feeling conflicted is a natural result of being a complex human being, but when these kinds of conflicts prevent us from committing whole-heartedly to our goals, it’s time to address them and move past them. Broken ideas (including ideas about what should happen or what a person deserves) can be repaired, conflicting needs can be compared so that the highest-priority need can take precedence, discomfort can be faced in light of the greater happiness it will lead to, and so on. In the end, most barriers to willingness can be sorted out–and starting that process only takes asking ourselves this question:

“Am I really willing to succeed?”

Photo by Gavatron