Staying Motivated: Introduction

When You Finish This Module, You Will …

Understand exactly what fears, uncertainties and doubts keep you from taking action

Understand how to eliminate them, one by one

Have a “doubt killer” tool you can use to kick-start your motivation whenever you need it

Introduction

Staying motivated to develop your time management muscles is crucial to increasing your productivity. It is the fundamental starting point for follow-through, and it has an instant impact on how much stuff you get done every day. But most people struggle with staying motivated to regularly invest time in developing the key skills that have an insanely high return on investment. Desire decreases. Self-doubt creeps in. Life just tends to “get in the way.”

But if you’re serious about moving towards a 30 hour day, you’ve got to stay motivated to increase your time management skills and sincerely believe that your efforts will pay off. It’s the only way you’ll make yourself take the steady, consistent action that puts you in command of your schedule. And if you don’t learn how to hold onto that motivation, you’ll just be spinning your wheels for another year, wondering where all the time went.

Now, we could spend some time talking about how to get motivated in the first place – but we’re not going to do that, because it’s not the highest and best use of our focus here. Instead, we’re going to discover the things that are currently destroying your motivation, and we’re going to work on those first.

Fixing The Holes In Your Boat

Now, focusing on the problems first may be a different approach than you’re used to (don’t people tell you to “think positive”?), but let me frame it for you this way. Imagine you’re cruising across the ocean on a sailboat that has two serious problems – first, there are holes in the sails, and second there are holes in the boat itself, all along the bottom.

Which holes do you take care of first? Well, if you patch up the sail, you’ll increase the power of the wind pushing you forward. But if you don’t take care of the holes in the boat, you’ll not only slow down on account of the water, you’ll start going in an entirely different direction as well – straight down.

Down means the journey is over. So it’s a no-brainer that you take care of the holes in the boat first. Sure, you can bail water while you fix the sail, alternatively, but that slows you down over the long run and it’s a huge waste of energy. You’ve done that enough already, trying to ‘keep up’ with everything n your life. To get to where you’re going, you want to seal the holes in the boat first to get the best speed over the long haul.

The Paradox Of The Obvious

Now, if you’re in a boat, that’s fairly obvious. But when you’re dealing with what’s going on inside your own head, it’s not so straightforward. You want to go faster, and you want that now. I mean, that’s why you’re reading these posts in the first place – you want “more, more, more” out of your schedule.

You want to get things done faster, and I’ll tell you, I’m all for that. I’m going to help you find out how to do that, when the time is right. But we’re in this for the long term, so right up front I want to make sure that you take care of the holes that are bogging down and sinking that ship that we call your personal productivity.

So let’s talk about where most of the holes in your boat – most of the things that sap your motivation – where they come from. They tend to all be rooted in something we call FUD (that’s short for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, if you haven’t heard this acronym before). For example,

You may fear things like having to face uncomfortable personal issues or how difficult the work of changing habits might be.

You’re may be uncertain about things like whether your strategies are going to work, or about how people around you will react when you start raising your standards, even when they don’t.

You may doubt your abilities, or your resources, or how much time you have available to work on this kind of thing …

… and everybody has different fears, different uncertainties, and different doubts. So we’re going to start out by getting to the root of yours and work on changing them, one at a time, at the pace that works for you. Because you can do this. Because there is enough time. Sound good? Let’s look at the four steps you’ll need to take to consistently stay motivated to improve your time management skills.

The four steps are: