The dreaded CEUs…If you’re a professional of any kind where you have to take continuing education classes you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you want to keep your licensure, then CEUs something that you’re going to have to deal with. I hate it. Don’t get me wrong, I love Eastern medicine, I love learning about emotions, resilience, performance. All of that. But taking those classes basically feels like a review. It can be just energy sucking. I catch myself sitting through the courses waiting for inspiration. Maybe, instead, I’ll watch a YouTube video on emotions. A TEDTalk. Something about running, which I already know I love, so that should be motivating, right? Nada. The only thing I’m interested in doing, which I’m not happy about, is taking action.
I know I’m not alone. For many of us, taking action before you’re actually motivated to take action seems counterintuitive. But what we forget is action, in and of itself, is simply energy in motion. And if we have the will to move our energy forward, even in something that we don’t want to do, what we find is that the inspiration can sometimes just follow the action itself.
Think about it.
If you were in college, did you ever procrastinate to do that paper that no one ever wanted to do for that professor or class. Finally the deadline was looming, so you had to just get it done. Maybe you yawned and sleepy-eyed your way through a paragraph or two, then a page or two, and then, as you were going further and further into it, you gained momentum. You knew that it was going to be done soon and maybe you got excited. Proud of yourself. You were able to put your own energy forward to do something you didn’t like, and that…is inspiring and motivating. The secret that people don’t tell you about is that when you motivate yourself to do something that doesn’t come easy for you, that doesn’t inspire you, that you would rather avoid, it is its own thing…
Renewable motivation.
Did I just come up with this word? I feel good about it!
Think about how easy it is to motivate ourselves to go out and do the things that we love. It’s a piece of cake! Honestly, I didn’t always love running. However, over the years of running a lot and wanting to achieve my goals with weight loss, marathons, ultra’s, Iron Man, etc… I began to love it. I love it because of the feeling it gave me and I knew that it was a renewable source of motivation. What I mean by that is that I realized the more that I did it (run) the better I felt about doing it. Not because I suddenly fell in love with physical pain, rainy days, or the common runner’s injuries. Instead, I fell in love with the fact that I could motivate myself, rather than having something outside of me be the impetus for my motivation. When you realize that, no matter how cruddy you feel, or the weather may be, you are still able to get yourself out the door for your run because you committed to yourself that you were going to do it, suddenly, you understand that you can apply that same skill to anything you need to do in your life (even the dishes or that dreaded school paper!). When you can build confidence that you have your own back like that, well…you’re gonna want to do that more and more. Hence the renewable motivation.
So, if you’re sitting there waiting for your motivation-fairy to ride in on a unicorn and wave its magic wand, you’re going to be waiting quite a while. But, take a moment and think about things you already do whether you ‘feel’ like it or not. Usually, this is something that, when you tell someone about it, their response is usually, “You’re crazy! I would never (fill in the blank)…” When you think about it, you’ll recognize you have an amazing tool that you’ve already built within yourself that is more magical than any fairy-tale creature: renewable motivation!
If you would like to learn tools and skills to help you improve your emotional aptitude, reduce your emotional isolation, lessen your avoidance of shame, fear, and anxiety, and enable yourself to reach your goals, break old habits, or create new ones, I can help. I provide emotional resilience coaching, so you can achieve your goals. We can meet either virtually or in person at my office in Waterbury, Vermont. Just click the button or the link below for a free consultation and let’s talk.
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