Everyone’s heard the saying, “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Sometimes, however, we need to sweat the small stuff when it comes to our motivation. Things that seem small can often have a very powerful and negative impact on our motivation. These small seeming things are called distracters.
Back in January I wrote a post about a special kind of detractor, the distracter. As a little reminder, a detractor is anything that decreases your motivation, and a distracter is a special type of detractor, one that temporarily knocks you off course on your path to your vision. Many distracters are temptations or time wasters. So many of these distracters seem little things. For me, my main distracter is the television. How large a detractor can that be?
Distracters are deceiving, probably because they can be temporary. Tonight I can watch tv instead of doing my work, but that doesn't mean that tomorrow night I can't be ready to start working again on my life changing work.
But don’t be fooled by them. Yes, they are temporary, but that also means they are always there. Mostly distracters are the chronic detractors; you can never stop them permanently. TV will always be a temptation to me. As long as I pay the cable bill, I will have at my command hundreds of channels all waiting to entice me. It got so bad for me, that I put my main distracter on semi permanent hold. I no longer have a TV. No joke. But … to be honest, I am constantly considering getting a new one, a wide screen one, high def of course, once the book is published … as a reward. As if I will be better able to control my desire to watch too much TV after the book is published.
So even though they seem like small stuff, distracters for many of us are far more insidious than they would appear. Luckily there are strategies we can use to keep them in check, to minimize their negative impact on our motivation.
The first strategy is to get rid of the distracter, if you can. If you are a TV junkie like me this may be hard if you have a family that enjoys watching TV and you aren’t able to convince them that it takes away from family time, especially if they know that without TV you will be in your office working on your vision.
One strategy that can work for you if you aren’t able to get rid of the distracter is to keep your distracter in check by building the runway. This strategy works especially well with tasks that are less exciting than other tasks, even if they are no less important. The problem with less exciting tasks is that the inherent appeal of these less exciting tasks is less likely to overcome the temptation of your favorite distracter. The unexciting task just doesn’t motivate you to do the task!
Building the runway is built on the analogy of an airplane not being able to get off the ground unless there is a runway. Building a runway, even though it isn’t anywhere as exciting as flying an airplane, is necessary if we want to soar, and that’s what we want to do in manifesting our vision. By keeping in mind why we need to build the runway, the end result of our labor, we create the motivation to do this work. The key is make the task important to us; make the task a building block of our vision.
Distracters can stop you cold if you let them. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out what your distracters are. The next step is to figure out how to neutralize them.
Some might feel my strategy of getting rid of my television was a bit too drastic. But I have seen the results. Since I got rid of it I have accomplished so much more on my vision. And I reward myself by going to the movies.
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