What is it that motivates us to do a task or start a project that we’re not all that enthusiastic about? We may be wholeheartedly in favor of the goal that is to be achieved, like organizing my new place, but it’s still a terrific struggle to get moving toward this goal. Those first little steps can be so difficult for some that they are literally never taken.

I’ve found this to be a factor in many areas of my life. While I can find the energy to get up and go to work every day, take care of my family, and take out the garbage, etc, getting beyond the basics almost takes an act of God. Why is it so hard to find time to put away boxes from the move, go to the gym, practice guitar, or write a few pages of a novel?

Thinking back on the last couple of months, the most progress we made in clearing out the boxes and organizing our home was when we had guests coming over to celebrate my daughter’s birthday. We worked our butts off for hours because we wanted to make a good impression on my wife’s parents. This is despite the fact that they are easy-going people who are not at all judgmental.

Regardless, we were able to make some great improvements in the time before our guests arrived. This underscores the importance of having some sort of outside influence as a motivator towards those projects that we’re having trouble starting. With this in mind, I have a few thoughts that may be helpful in kick-starting stalled progress towards our worthy, but rusty goals:

1. Find a motivator outside yourself. Whether it’s inviting guests over to impose a hard deadline on cleaning your apartment, or taking a creative writing class with weekly homework, sometimes it’s necessary to have someone hold you responsible for meeting your goals. Invite friends over to your place, then, or take a class in writing or guitar playing or pilates where there will be someone expecting you to deliver something tangible on a regular basis.

2. Multitask the simple stuff. If you have a box of papers sitting in the corner of your living room that needs to be sorted or shredded, grab a beer, pull up the box, and turn on that Breaking Bad or Californication that you’ve been waiting to watch on the DVR. OK, ladies, you’re allowed to watch Dancing with the Stars. While you’re watching, sort a few papers, you can shred during the commercials instead of fast-forwarding.

3. Focus on the built-in rewards. Having a clean, well-organized place makes you feel good. I don’t think anyone really likes living in a cluttered space. Similarly, it also feels good to work out, to burn away all the stresses that have been building up like clutter in your soul. This isn’t always the best motivator, obviously, because even though we know these things, we don’t always get started. This leads us to another step:

4. Make it fun. If you’re having trouble going to the gym, then it’s probably not fun enough for you to even want to begin. The answer to this is to mix it up. Do something different that will stimulate your motivation and build some excitement and interest. The treadmill is boring? Then join a hiking group or Krav Maga (brutal, but effective Israeli martial art) class. If the story you’ve been working on no longer gets your juices flowing, try writing about something completely different, a topic that you’ve never explored before.

5. Get a partner. I’m not saying that you should go sign up for e-harmony, but aligning yourself with a friend or family member who also needs a little encouragement toward a common goal can be an enormous benefit. Even if it’s someone from work whom you can trade updates with during lunch once a week, this can be the one thing that motivates you to do something before that next lunch date. Maybe you can talk your spouse or neighbor into trying out rock-climbing and then if you both like it, turn it into a regular exercise thing.

I hope that these ideas will prove useful for you. It’s the result of my reflecting on the issues affecting my own life and my own lack of progress toward certain goals. Living a successful and productive life means filling your days with positive activities that benefit you and the people around you. Feel free to leave a comment and tell me about your own experiences.

What’s that sound? That’s me trying to get out of bed this morning to work out. It’s been a while since I’ve been exercising each day. Once upon a time, I used to get up early and run several miles each morning. After some knee problems, I started lifting weights and doing other exercises to keep in shape. Over time, though, life got in the way, and I stopped working out entirely.

Does this sound familiar to you? I’ll bet this happens to a lot of people reading this. Why is it so much easier to drop out of good habits than bad habits? First you skip a day, then another, then another, and soon the habit is only a memory.

The topic of maintaining those good habits indefinitely is one for another post. For now, I’d like to talk about getting back into good habits or starting new ones. I’ve found that the key that works for me is to start small.

Many times I’ve heard of people starting a new diet or exercise regimen and quitting after the first day because it was too hard. Sometimes, it’s necessary and effective to affect a total lifestyle change overnight, but most of the time it’s just too much of a shock. That’s why starting small is such a great technique to begin a new habit.

Here’s an example from my own life. I’ve been through many cycles of regular exercise programs that have been interrupted and then gone by the wayside as my priorities shifted. After a long time of beating my head against a wall while trying to pick up where I left off, I discovered that it was much easier to start with a very small step.

When I first started running regularly, I hadn’t been running for years. In fact, I hated running with a passion. It was my least favorite exercise activity. Running was something that I continued for a short while after getting out of military training and then gave up because it was difficult to fit in between work, school, and social life. Also, I was just plain lazy!

I tried to get back into it years later because I could feel how out of shape I was getting. I was alarmed by how winded I would get by climbing the stairs at work. I was a young guy, slim and in decent shape even though I wasn’t working out, right? Actually, being still young and slim doesn’t mean you’re in good shape! So, I tried to jump right in and do the things that I had been doing a few years before. Bad idea!

Going from huffing and puffing up a few flights of stairs to running a couple miles each morning was too much for me. After a couple of abortive attempts, I gave up. It was just too hard.

Fast forward a few more years. This time, I was fully cognizant of how I would react to biting off more than I could chew. I knew I wouldn’t be able to maintain the motivation if I got my butt kicked right off the bat. I had to start small. Baby steps.

To begin with, I started stretching every day for a week. This was something that provided some immediate positive benefits. I didn’t feel as stiff each morning and it helped to get my muscles and tendons warmed up and flexible again. After a week of this I started something a little more aggressive. I began to run again.

The running could hardly be called that. I was going from no exercise at all into a pretty strenuous activity, so I started with just a short jog at a pathetically slow pace. I think I ran much less than a mile for the first week or two. I was able to increase this incrementally every couple of weeks, though, until it was four or five miles each day.

The difference in how I felt before beginning the exercise program and after doing it for a while was night and day. It’s impossible for me to overstate the benefits of a regular exercise routine on your physical, mental, and spiritual health. If you’ve been through this before, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Getting started is the worst part, though.

The important thing is to pace yourself. I found that in this particular activity, I needed to give myself two weeks at each level before pushing myself harder. This meant that I didn’t have to worry about doing any better at all each day. I could just get used to a slightly more intense or longer workout for two whole weaks before having to think about upping my running pace or lengthening the time spent running.

This provides an important mental advantage. By doing something easy at first, it helps to convince your subconscious that it’s no big deal. You know right away that you can do it without too much trouble.

It’s crucial to remember not to judge your own progress by anyone else’s standard, though. Each person is different. It may only take three days at a particular level before you feel you can move on to the next or it may take three months. Set a schedule that you’re comfortable with and then forget it. Don’t worry about things. Making your new habit something stressful can kill it before it even gets started.

The idea of starting small can be applied to any number of activities in your life. If you’re looking at making a change, consider beginning with baby steps. Oftentimes even the smallest of changes can provide great benefits. Relax. It’s OK to start tomorrow. But, DO start!

His answer is that in that counting up each penny or calorie and restricting yourself to an outside definition of what your spending or eating should be, you’re trying to fit your own personal style into someone else’s. This does make some sense, but to me it’s even more simple than that. It’s just plain hard to record every penny and calorie. It’s tedious.

Most of us have a difficult time making ourselves do hard things. Take for example, that New Year’s Resolution you’ve made to run every day. If you start out the first day with the intention of running 5 miles, you’re likely to fail. Not only are you likely to fail, you’re probably going to quit running far short of your 5 miles and still be so sore for the next few days that you won’t even attempt to run again for a while. By then it will be well past New Year’s and you’ll wonder if it won’t just be better to try again next year.

This is the equivalent of putting yourself on a crash diet or budget. I won’t argue that sometimes this works for people and is just the thing that they need. For most people, however, it would be much better to start out by running half a mile (or even less) at not much more than a fast walk. Do that for a couple of weeks and then think about kicking it up a notch. Budgets and diets work the same way.

Trent’s idea of breaking yourself of bad spending habits by slowly creating good, alternate ones is brilliant in it’s simplicity. I also really love the idea of finding the biggest waste of money in your budget and eliminating it. I might not start with the biggest one, though. I would probably try to find a small expenditure or two that could be lowered and then make sure that I put that savings where it could do the most good, namely, paying off debt.

If we carry this idea back over to our other analogies, it would be like eliminating a couple hundred useless calories from your diet every day. Have a cup of water at lunch instead of that super-sized soda pop. Or maybe get the chicken sandwich instead of the Big Mac. We can even adapt this idea to our exercise goals. Can you walk up the steps from the parking garage each day, just once in the morning, instead of taking the elevator? Yes, it’s only a few calories burned, but it’s a small price to pay for one, small good habit.

Once that habit has been ingrained, add another one. The same goes for any one of these ideas we’ve talked about. Start your good habits one little bit at a time. It’s okay if it’s relatively painless. Worry about that no pain, no gain thing later on. That’s if you’re training for the triathlon, not when you’re just trying to make it every day. We can regain control of our finances, our bodies, and our lives one little habit at a time. Think about it, but don’t just think. Do it now.

I’ve also been taking a break from my story writing. I’m not giving up, but re-evaluating where I want to go with it. Actually, I’m taking a fresh look at everything I’m doing to get a sense of where I am in my life and where I want to go. It seems like it’s been a very long time since I’ve been able to step back for a moment and really consider what I want to do.

I’ve been entirely caught up in achieving goals that I set long ago as well as just making ends meet on a daily basis. It struck me that I’ve been spending much of my life in crisis mode. I’ve been focusing mostly on survival rather than actually getting somewhere. It’s time to get out of crisis mode and rethink my purpose and the goals that flow from that.

Tags: blog blogging writing life survival

I found out recently that I’ll be teaching a developmental writing course this fall at the college where I work. I’ll be putting that English degree to some use right away, it seems. I’m excited about the opportunity and I think it could lead to more and better things.

I’m continuing to run three days a week and it’s gotten much easier than the first couple of weeks. There’s no more soreness in my legs and only a little minor burning sensation above my knee. I’m hoping that goes away eventually, but I’m taking it pretty easy before I increase my mileage much.