Motivation, inspiration, and creativity are resistance in disguise.
If you wait to be motivated to start going, you won’t get far.
If you wait for inspiration to struck before doing meaningful work, you’ll soon be out of a job.
If creativity is what you seek when sitting down to write, the page will stay empty most of the time.
There is nothing sudden in people’s achievements, no overnight success will surprise you.
Go do what you are supposed to. Every day.
Once you’ve identified your triggers, the point is not to stay away from them or drown in the anticipation of the pain they will expose you to. The point is to find ways to manage them and gradually master them.
If you are comfortable around somebody you can’t avoid, take control of your encounters and suggest whatever makes you feel at ease.
If presenting in front of a vast audience is too much for you, volunteer every time there is a small presentation to give.
If you are afraid your boss might ask questions about a delicate issue, make sure you will be the first to raise the topic, at a time convenient for you, with the words you have chosen and rehearsed.
You can prepare for almost everything, as long as you choose to train the right muscles.
Remember to balance your ability to get things your way with the fact that, on the other side, there is somebody who has just lost the trust in the relationship and their capacity.
You can push, you can order, you can yell, you can bypass, you can threaten, you can boss around. And you’ll eventually make it happen exactly how you wanted it to be.
There’s little future after that though.
We are all subject to similar stimuli. Stress, frustration, love, anger, disappointment, desire, need, anticipation, exhaustion, fear, failure, envy.
Two things matter.
Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.
Viktor E. Frankl
To stop you from checking emails when you are not supposed to, think about the following.
Are you checking because you can take a meaningful action or out of curiosity?
If knowing the content of a mail now changes the way you act (compared to what you’d do if you would check at the appropriate time), that is a meaningful action.
In all honesty, there are very few cases where this is true.
Our opinion is not stronger if we share it now or tomorrow. Hearing some feedback is not going to make us change now, and probably it won’t tomorrow. Checking now if that email we have been waiting for has finally arrived is not going to give us a headstart on tomorrow’s work.
More often, it’s curiosity that drives us. It’s the dopamine hit we get from knowing something, even though it does not affect our possibility to do something about it. It’s like scrolling your social media timeline out of boredom.
We can train at keeping that impulse under control.
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