Getting Yourself Out of a Rut

So, you’re feeling stuck.
You have in mind things that you want to do or that are important for you to do, but you don’t seem to have the will power or the “time” to do them. You might even notice another voice in your head saying the following:
“Nahhh, it’s cool, take a seat, watch some TV, pop open a beer or that delicious tub of ice cream you’ve been thinking about all day… you had such a tough day at work, you’re tired and you need to decompress. You’ll get to all that other stuff tomorrow.”
SHUT THAT VOICE UP!
Just kidding.
The fact of the matter is that this voice is a part of you. It will always be a part of you. The more you feed it, the stronger it will become (if you’re reading this it may already be a massively juiced up bodybuilder by now). However, if you starve this part of yourself while nourishing the part that DOES want to tackle things of more meaning, things that will improve your short and, more importantly, long term quality of life, eventually the complacent and uninspired side will begin to lose more and more of it’s hold on you.
What will replace it?
The side of you that wants to be a bad ass. An achiever. A go-getter. Someone who doesn’t sleep walk from day to day. Someone who takes responsibility for their existence and does something meaningful and fulfilling with it. An individual who finishes most of their days with a feeling of accomplishment and goes on to the next day with a zest for life!
Notice I said “most” days because, realistically, nobody should expect themselves or others to be at the top of their game every single day. Some days giving it your best will look pathetic from an outside perspective. Some days giving it your best will get people looking at you like…
“Whoa! That dude/lady really has their ducks in a row! Those are some lined-up ducks!”
Alright, hopefully you get the point… basically, we are all human, and the events in our lives, the food we eat, the sleep we get, the people we surround ourselves with, the habits we develop, whether or not we are sick or healthy… all of these things will have an effect on what our “best” is.
That being said, here is a little list of some approaches that helped me when I felt stuck and wanted to get my act together!
Enjoy! :)
See You Later… Or Never
First and foremost, do what you can to remove things, situations, and/or people from your environment/life that got you into this rut in the first place and/or are directly and/or indirectly keeping you in the rut. Sorry for all the and/or’s… they seemed necessary.
If you are spending time with toxic people, are in a toxic relationship, holding onto a job that drains your soul and makes you miserable, wasting time playing games, watching TV series on repeat, spending hours of your day scrolling through social media… whatever it is, it’s all contributing to the current state of your life.
Take a moment to ponder this and you’ll quickly realize the types of things, situations, and people in your life that fit the above criteria.
Removing some of these things takes a lot of courage (relationship, job, any addiction, etc.), but a lot of them can be simple to get rid of. At the very least you can minimize or eliminate temporarily until you get some more wins under your belt and develop more self-discipline when it comes to indulging. Then you can think about reinserting whatever it is back into your life.
I found a great quote a while back that really drove this whole concept home for me. I actually had it as my wallpaper for over a year and it helped me a lot when I needed to make those tough decisions… now I share it with you:
“Respect yourself enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves you, grows you, or makes you happy.”
— Robert Tew
Think about that… Try not to read it and just move on. Pause and let it sink in a little. Then, do yourself a huge favor and spend literally a minute or two thinking about what you should walk away from or remove that isn’t doing you any good. Keep them in mind. Write them down even. Spend ten minutes tomorrow thinking about how you can go about removing them from your life, and start taking action.
Feel free to reach out to me on social media if you’d like someone to listen and/or offer you some advice on how to go about dealing with a more specific situation.
Oh! And here is the wallpaper if you’d like to use it! I used the very first one.
Slow Your Roll
Perhaps you can relate to this:
You’ve been feeling stuck lately, but then one day, out of the blue, you suddenly get hit by a burst of that ever-so-fleeting feeling we call motivation. You get super hyped and make a list or a mental note of eight different things you want to start working on.
You want to start reading this new book, listening to 300 podcast episodes, cooking more, hitting the gym nine times a week, learning piano, building a piano, etc.
You manage this for about three to five days, then something unexpected happens, like a late night at work, a long chat with a friend in need, you catch a cold, you run out of toilet paper, and everything falls apart.
You barely managed to build up any momentum and the friction of life slowed you back to a halt.
ALAS, A SOLUTION!
Try doing your best to be patient. Slow down. Dial it back.
To do so, pick one or two feasible and reasonably attainable projects/habits/skills/lifestyle changes/whatever that you want to work on. Make sure they are your top priorities. Feel that they are genuinely important and useful to you. Even better if they can be useful to other people as well! Directly or indirectly.
Make a commitment to only work on those one to two things until you feel like you’ve completed the project/solidified the habit/acquired the skill/instituted the lifestyle change/whatever-ed the whatever.
Again, keep it feasible and reasonably attainable.
If what you want to work on is part of something long-term, like starting your own successful business, becoming a master pianist, designing and building your dream home, etc. then a useful technique would be to break it up into smaller, incremental steps and work on it that way. Of course those long term aspirations will require a good ol’ fashion brainstorm session in order to break them down effectively.
For those, I invite you to sit down on your own, write out a plan, discuss it with someone close to you, and once you’ve hashed out the necessary details you can feel more clarity when getting to work.
The gist is to start small. Starting small is easy.
Writing a novel can be overwhelming when looking from the bottom at the hill you have to climb in order to complete it. A much less daunting approach would be writing a chapter, or even just a paragraph, or even carving out an hour in your day to simply write without any length constraints.
You want to create the least amount of resistance possible so that you can more easily develop consistency and gain momentum! So start small.
Environment and System Design
Consistency. Resistance. Momentum.
All of these are directly effected by your environment (everything that surrounds you at any given moment of your life) and the systems you have in place (those structures in your life that help you get to the things you want to do or that are important to you).
Many of us don’t take the time to think about or at least have not yet developed an awareness of how these two factors play a role in our success when it comes to getting things done.
So, what do I mean by “system design”?
Basically, it just means designing those “structures” I mentioned above. You’ve probably already designed systems in your life and just didn’t know the all-important jargon! Side note: There are also systems we create without much thinking that can be causing us harm, but I won’t get into that here.
An example of a system could be deciding that you’re going to go to the gym Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right after work for 30 minutes.
Another could be having an alert or reminder on your phone whenever it’s time to water your plants, do laundry, pay recurring bills, etc.
These are all a means of reducing resistance and increasing consistency with little repeated mental effort.
You aren’t left pondering what day you’ll go to the gym this week or what time or for how long. You have basically created a meeting/appointment with yourself and the thing you want to do with all the details already planned out. Same thing with the phone alerts/reminders. You set it so that it’s recurring at a time and day that makes sense to you and from then on you no longer have to recruit any psychic energy to remember those tasks.
Environment design is an additional layer meant for reducing resistance and increasing consistency.
For the gym example above, you could make a note to put out your gym clothes the night before work in a place you’ll remember in the morning. Better yet, you can have them in your car already! Now you can’t use that excuse on yourself. BAM!
For the plants example, have a spray bottle filled with water or a full water bottle in plain sight dedicated to watering your plants. For laundry, you could put your laundry basket by the laundry machine if you have one in your home. You could even put up little printed out calendar above your laundry basket that says when laundry days are, and you could have the pleasure of crossing off days when you complete it. Pure ecstasy. For paying your bills, you could have tabs already bookmarked in your browser to take you straight to the billing site.
There are an infinite amount of ways you can design your lifestyle. I encourage you to experiment with this.
Acknowledge failure as part of the process, learn from your trials, and try something new until you find what works for you.
ALRIGHT! There you have it, folks!
REMOVE anything that isn’t serving you, growing you, making you happy, or is otherwise preventing you from working on your priorities.
SIMPLIFY what you’re trying to accomplish down to one or two things, breaking your larger aspirations into small chunks.
DESIGN systems/structures and your environment with the intent of reducing resistance and increasing consistency when tackling your one or two aspirations.
REPEAT with one or two more things you want to accomplish once the others have been fully integrated into your life or completed, making sure to revisit them in the future if necessary.
If you felt some parts were too vague, or you would like me to elaborate on anything, PLEASE please please leave me a comment below or even send me a message on social media (links included blow) with your feedback. I would love to hear from you and I would love to help you in any way that I can.
If you would like my advice or think you’d benefit from bouncing your thoughts and ideas for implementing anything I talked about here it would honestly make me so happy if you reached out to me on social media so we could chat.
Until the next post! :)
With love and gratitude,
— Guy
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