Staying Motivated – Step 1: Uncovering Your Biggest Self-Doubts

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(This is a post in the continuing 30 Hours a Day Project series.  To see all available articles, click the Table of Contents link above.)

Now that we’ve covered the introduction, it’s time for Step 1 – we’re going to start uncovering all of the deep-down fears, uncertainties and self-doubts that have been holding you back from making progress at mastering your time.  While that may sound like a tall order, it’s actually a pretty simple process (the hardest part is really just showing up and doing it, but we’ll address that in step four).

But despite the fact that it’s a simple process, I know from hard experience that we can easily create massive internal resistance to facing our problems and shortcomings head on because it’s a seriously uncomfortable task.  The pain of staying where we are is greater than the pain of unpacking our emotional baggage, so most of us stay where we are until the pain ratio changes due to a life crisis or a major “a-ha” moment.

I don’t want you to wait years to get there by chance, so I’m going to step you through a simple series of questions that will make the process as painless – and as quick – as possible.

These questions are really all about creating awareness about what’s going on in your head when you’re feeling fears, uncertainties and doubts about whether something is going to work out (or whether you have what it takes to make it work).  We spend too much of our lives playing victim to subconsciously rehearsed conversations in our head that make us believe we just can’t do it.

Awareness Can Be Curative

The good news is that sometimes awareness itself is enough to start breaking the power of these self-defeating beliefs.  Haven’t you had one of those experiences before where you had to explain to someone the reason why you did something, and even though it seemed like a good reason when it was in your head, when it came out it was, well, kind of stupid?  It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but once it was out in the open you could see how it just didn’t make sense.

Well, we’re going to duplicate that experience, except instead of waiting for someone else to explain things to, we’re going to have you explain it to yourself so the limiting beliefs can be weakened right now.  As you look at the things that are causing you anxiety, and you get them down on paper, they are going to begin to lose their power almost immediately.

Remember, your brain is a powerful computer, and it loves solving problems.  It loves fixing things, improving them, making them better.  I mean, that’s what brought you to where you are now, reading this.  You’re paying attention because you believe that there are solutions to your problems, simply because I told you there are.  And that means that you’re viewing the situation as fixable, that it really does have a solution – and once your brain believes that, it’s ready to take action.

Belief Is The Tougher Part

But you see, the problem that’s attacking your motivation right now is that in a lot of areas, you don’t necessarily have that belief.  Whether you consciously decided to or not, on some level you feel like some of your problems are permanent, and that you can’t put a solution in place that is really going to work.  That’s what leads you to think or say things like:

• I wish I could do that, but I just don’t have the time …

• I wish I had the willpower to do this or that …

• I just haven’t been able to make that work in the past …

These are the kinds of conversations that we all have in our own heads, and the reason they have such a hold over you is that they tend to trail off like in the examples below rather than force you to really think about them.  They acknowledge the problem, and maybe they even acknowledge a possible solution, but these thoughts dismiss the idea that this solution is accessible to you.  These mental scripts, these limiting beliefs are what we’re about to start taking apart, one by one.

And we’re going to use three simple but powerful tools to defuse these conversations that are hijacking your productivity and we’re going to put the power to act back in your hands.

The first tool is a process called the Doubt Finder, which will step you through three questions that make you completely aware of the limiting beliefs which affect you most frequently.  When you finish this section you should set aside 10 minutes to work on this.  You’ll be answering three questions:

• When I imagine totally diving in and working hard to manage my time, what thoughts tend to pop up to make me feel like I’m not going to succeed?

• Where (and why) have my past efforts to manage my time failed?

• What doubts do those experiences leave me with?

Now, when you go through this process, if you finish before your 10 minutes are up, go back to steps 1 and 2 and ask yourself, “What’s at least one more thing I’ve missed?” or “What else could I come up with?”  Asking yourself leading questions like these tells your brain that you making the assumption that there really is another answer, so it’s more likely to find one.

So go ahead and take a break, just for 10 minutes and make your own Doubt Finder worksheet right now (or download the PDF worksheets for the 30 Hours A Day Project here).  It doesn’t take long at all and will give you instant insight into what’s going on in your head – and more importantly, it will give you targets to attack.  Go ahead and do it now – I’ll wait. 

Fade To Black, and … We’re Back.

All right, do I hope you’ve gone through the Doubt Finder exercise, and learned a little bit more about the conversations that are going on in your head.  If you haven’t done it, please go back now and do it. Really, the rest of this blog series can wait.  Remember, increasing your productivity is all about increasing your follow through, so if you haven’t done the Doubt Finder exercise, stop where you are and do it now.  Again, I’ll wait, just do it now.

Fade To Black, Once More (This Time, With Feeling)

All right, so you really have gone through that Doubt Finder exercise.  You’re walking the walk, and that’s great.

If you followed through on this quick exercise, you’ll be surprised at how many fears, uncertainties and doubts you are allowing to thrive in your brain.  The FUD may seem reasonable at first (such as “There isn’t enough time with all the things I have to do …”) but it’s really your brain being a little unreasonable, a little unrealistic.

It’s making the situation bigger than it really is, it’s ignoring a lot of your possible options, and it’s not taking a hard look at really solving the problem.  And that’s why you’re spinning your wheels when it comes to these situations.

Fortunately, in the next post, we’re going to go over the Doubt Killer exercise, where we’re going to take each and every one of those fears, and we’re going to come up with realistic counterarguments to show each of these issues is based in unreasonable thinking.  We’re going to defuse each of these trouble spots one by one, so get ready to start cutting the red wire (blue wire?  No, red.  No, blue!  No, red!).

But before we move on to the Doubt Killer exercise, for now I want to talk to you about the second important tool that you have at your disposal – the Doubt Capture process.  You’re going to use this process to capture issues as they come up in real-time.

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