part0023

Negative feelings such as self-doubt, shame, embarrassment, and vulnerability can destroy our best-laid intentions and plans. Examine your negative feelings up front, before you start working on your goals. When we begin with feeling like we don’t know enough or that our work won’t be good enough, we effectively limit our chances of being able to produce good work.

Practice neutralizing your negative feelings by temporarily ignoring them, replacing them with positive feelings, or challenging their validity. When you learn to remove emotional obstacles, you’ll be able to focus better and start your work more quickly.

Infuse positive emotion into the task in front of you. Turn it into something enticing and appealing. Find the best, most joyful reason to engage with it. If the most positive idea you can come up with is “I will be free of this when I am done”—use that. All that matters here is that you find some point of motivation to begin.

We sometimes slow ourselves down by thinking things need to be “perfect.” By trying to attain perfection in our work, we can get lost in the details and feel frazzled and exhausted, too. We can forget that most everything in life is both transient and not so important.

So instead of spending your valuable time fretting about whether your font looks good, figure out how you can finish your work faster. The easiest way to do this is to use a timer. Using a timer will immediately put you in the mode of doing actual work—at a quick pace!

Getting started is easier when we make it a habit. When we do one action in a structured, consistent way, regardless of how we are feeling, we have a habit. We can make habits to suit our needs, like promising ourselves we will do at least one load of laundry every morning before breakfast. Developing simple habits and routines, which are habits strung together, will create more ease in your day.

List three actions you will do every day this week to establish new habits. This exercise will show you how you can build habits day by day, so you won’t have to feel overwhelmed by the idea of doing everything at once.

Include assorted words and images that are uplifting to you and notice how you feel as you continue to sketch. Your drawing will be a great reminder of how you encouraged yourself to see beyond any feelings of resistance or lack.

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When we dwell on how everything seems impossible, we make it more difficult to think about what we can do. Think about what is possible instead. Make it your mission to look forward to finding answers, solving problems, having breakthroughs, and proving that anything you want is possible to achieve.

Write down three self-limiting or negative thoughts you are currently struggling with. Then think of three positive self-statements to provide a new outlook for yourself. See how your mood lightens as you do this exercise. Practice remaining in this more positive emotional state as often as you can.

If you are planning a complex project or if you have many tasks to take care of, chances are you’ll benefit from making a checklist to keep yourself organized. Checklists take lists one notch higher. Checklists add a layer of quality control, as we need to confirm with a checkmark that items are done. They also provide the wonderful feeling of reward and accomplishment with every box we check off.

For this exercise, sit upright but relaxed in a chair. Get centered by taking a few breaths in and out. Then place one hand over your stomach and the other hand on your chest. Start to breathe again, but this time breathe in and out using your diaphragm. To breathe with your diaphragm, try to have your stomach area move in an out as you breathe instead of your upper chest area. You can see if you are doing this correctly by checking that the hand over your stomach is the only hand moving as you breathe in and out. Take slow breaths by counting to four in your head as you inhale and counting to four as you exhale. Repeat five times or until you feel more relaxed.

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