positive attitude

9 Ways to Maintain Motivation When the Going Gets Tough

Sarah Winfrey — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 11:36:32 +0000

Life is full of difficult situations. Whether you’re cutting back financially, trying to save a failing business, enduring a difficult job, or walking through a hard place of a more personal and private sort, it’s easy to lose your motivation to keep to moving forward. We’ve all been in those muddled, trapped places where it’s hard to keep going, let alone to feel like we know how to do so.

But you really can stay motivated. After all, it’s the motivated people who manage to see difficult times through to the other side. These are skills worth developing, even if you’re not facing hardship right now. (See also: 25 Ways to Get Motivated Today)

Remember What You Love

We choose to do the things that we do for a reason. Even when we choose to do things that aren’t pleasant in the moment, like cutting back our spending, we do it for a reason. Nearly always, that reason has to do with something we love. We stop spending so we can save to take a vacation, send our children to private school, or know we can buy groceries next week. We work jobs we dislike so that we can have health insurance, or so our children can have a comfortable home.

When things get hard, we tend to forget why we’ve chosen a particular action. We forget what we love. And when we remember this, when we intentionally focus our minds on whatever it is that we love, we find that we have the strength and motivation to get through the hard times.

Celebrate Small Steps

It’s easy to get frustrated when all we’re looking at is the light at the end of the tunnel, and even moreso when we feel like we can’t even see that anymore. But when we realize that every single step we take is a small step in the right direction, even when it’s dark and we can’t see our goal anymore, we’ll find the motivation to push through.

When we celebrate these small steps, we’ll have even more motivation. Making an extra payment on the credit card this month, even when it’s not as much as you’d like, is worthy of noticing. So is cold-calling 10 more people, even when they aren’t interested in your services, or getting through another day at a job you hate. Note these and celebrate them, and you’ll find you’re able to keep going.

Maintain Perspective

When one part of life is going miserably, it’s often hard to see that any other parts are going well. Take the time to look at your life as a whole, to examine all the different aspects, and put the negative parts in perspective.

While a miserable job can make you unhappy while you’re at home, too, it doesn’t have to ruin your relationship with your kids. Not being able to buy as many gifts for Christmas is hard, but you still have family and friends around you. When you see the difficult parts of life along with the good, you’ll be able to keep plugging away even when it’s hard.

Know Your Limits

No one can work at something difficult all the time. When your business is failing, there’s not enough money, or your children are struggling, it’s easy to focus only on that thing that is so hard. When we don’t give ourselves a break, though, we tend to lose our ability to come up with new ideas and solutions, and eventually we burn out.

Learn how long you can spend focusing on a problem before you have to focus on something else. Take a break to be with people, read a book, or do something else that is completely different from the part of your life that is hard. You’ll return to it later better able to think through your problems objectively, and more motivated to try and tackle the difficulty again.

Take a Deep Breath

When our minds worry and struggle, we tend to bring our bodies along for the ride. We get ready to fight or flight, and so we’re tense and amped up on adrenaline. While this is great for situations that are actually dangerous, it’s not a good way to live long-term.

Taking the time for some deep breaths, even one or two, helps us let go of this tension. Being relaxed means that our bodies are happier and healthier, and so we’ll feel better even while dealing with a difficult situation. Feeling crummy is almost always dispiriting, while feeling well gives us energy to put into the task at hand.

Find the Good

Almost every situation, even the most dire and difficult, has something good about it. Taking the time to identify the positive things and focusing our minds on them will help lighten the load even in a hard place.

It’s easy to feel like identifying the good is fake or false or weak, especially when the bad feels so overwhelming in return. However, bringing our minds back to something good in the situation, no matter how small, will eventually help us to feel more positive about what is going on. When we feel positively, we’ll be motivated to make things even more positive by attacking the situation from different angles.

Discover Companions

Walking through a hard place is much easier when you have other people walking with you. These can be people facing the difficulty along with you, people facing a similar difficulty, people who have faced a similar difficulty in the past and overcome, or simply people who love you and are willing to walk a hard road with you.

Asking people to walk with you can be difficult. Working through a hard situation takes a lot of energy, and it’s easy to feel too tired to share your difficulty with others. Taking the time and energy to find companions will pay off when you have people to share your burdens. When the load feels lighter, you’ll be in a better place to go back into your problem with renewed energy.

Tell the Truth

It can be hard to believe, but telling the truth about a hard situation can actually provide needed motivation to look at it squarely and figure out a way through. When we say that everything is fine even when it’s not, we limit our own ability to let a hard situation be hard. We end up hiding, which means we can’t acknowledge the situation for what it is.

While it can feel awful to talk about how hard a situation is, afterwards we’ll feel more freedom. We’ll be able to rest in the fact that we know what’s true about our difficult situation. When we’re not fighting ourselves, we’ll be able to put that energy into sticking with the hard situation.

See the End

When things get hard, we often forget that, somehow or some way, our difficult situation will come to an end. We feel like we’ll be paying off debt forever, or like another door will never open, or like the world might end before we find a workable solution (though that is an end in and of itself).

Keeping in mind the possibility of an end will help us walk into each day with hope. Even if that hope is disappointed time and time again, we’ll know that a solution may be just around the corner. Hope is always motivating, because it give us a reason to keep pressing forward.

When you’ve walked through a difficult, dark time, how have you kept your motivation? What keeps you going when everything feels hard?

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This article is from Sarah Winfrey of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

7 Ways to Have a Better Day at Work

Tisha Tolar — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 10:36:47 +0000

There is nothing like a bad day at work to set the tone for the days ahead, from lost productivity to lost tempers. Enough bad days and you may even see a pink slip in your future.

It is important for your own mental and physical health to make it a point to resist falling into a sour mood. Your ability to create a positive out of several negatives can not only keep you healthier and happier, but may also help you bring home more bacon.

When things start going south on the job, these seven tips can help you turn it around. (See also: What to Do When You Want to Quit Your Job)

1. Plan Ahead

One reason many people start the day on the wrong foot is because they are scrambling to avoid being late. Being in a hurry makes you susceptible to forgetfulness and anxiety. This can set the tone for the rest of the workday or the work week. Carve out time the night before each work day to get organized:

Pack your lunch so you can grab it on the go. Stock your briefcase or purse with the items you need for the next day.
Place your car keys on top of your stuff so there is no massive hunt in the morning.
Lay out your clothing so you won’t waste time staring into your closet.
Fill your vehicle up with gas on the way home from work to avoid waiting in morning lines.
Get the kids organized in the same way so it is easier to get them out the door in the morning to prevent them (and you) from being late.

2. Wake Up 30 Minutes Earlier

Thirty extra minutes in the morning can give you a chance to wake up and begin the day in a better mood. If you are a parent, you get some extra time to yourself to relax, start a load of laundry, or take meal ingredients out of the freezer. These activities will also help you avoid stress after work since you’ll have less to do and feel good about having accomplished more in a morning than usual.

3. Eat a Healthy Meal

Skipping breakfast is a fundamental mistake. Not only are you going to lack serious energy throughout the day, you’ll be more likely to have a poor attitude due to low blood sugar and hunger pains. Eat a healthy breakfast every morning at the table. Give yourself enough time to eat calmly. Make sure your lunch is just as healthy, and avoid buying lunch every day from fast food places to save money and stay on a nutritious meal plan.

4. Give Out Greetings

It makes people feel good to be personally acknowledged by their name. When you arrive at work, be sure to offer a greeting to your co-workers. Give them a smile as you head to your desk. By creating a positive atmosphere you may be able to head off other people’s bad moods. Even if you are not feeling 100%, do your best to project a friendly, positive energy in the workplace.

5. Get Stuff Done

Another factor in frustration is feeling unaccomplished. You can help avoid this feeling by better organizing your day. Set a flexible schedule for your daily tasks and stick with it.

Be determined to stay focused and avoid distraction.
Commit to a certain time to answer emails, make phone calls, or do your other tasks.
Socialize with coworkers when on break rather than allowing people to interrupt you all day long.

You’ll be more focused and more likely to keep productivity levels on the high side. You can help keep the day running smoothly by creating a to-do list at the end of each day so you’ll know what to expect come tomorrow. Reenergize on the job by taking a walk during lunch outside in the fresh air if possible.

6. Think Before You Open Your Mouth

Working with other people can be exasperating, and if you tend to have a short fuse, you should consider working on your patience and your own reactions. You can ruin a good day by spouting off when angry or aggravated. Commit to taking a quick break or practice calming breaths when work stuff starts stressing you out. Take a step back and consider what you should say rather than what you want to say.

7. Track Your Accomplishments

When you get better at adopting a more positive attitude on the job, you will likely notice your productivity and accomplishments rising along with your spirits. Make sure you keep tabs on these achievements. Your ability to communicate your own improvements and renewed work ethic may afford you a raise in pay or a bonus.

On the other hand, if you try and try to make things better at your workplace and still find you are genuinely not happy, it may be a good time to consider your other options by conducting discreet job searches when away from the office. You may also want to consider a new career path in general if the work you do is no longer satisfying. It may be that the environment where you are employed is having a negative effect on you personally, and you may not be able to fix that without making a larger change.

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This article is from Tisha Tolar of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread:

How to Be a More Positive Person

Tara Struyk — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:00:11 +0000

I come from a family of borne curmudgeons. When the wind kicked up, my dad would proclaim it had been brought in to ruin his carefully coifed side part. My mom often tempers good news with something like, “Well, it’s better than a kick in the head.”

How’s that for positive?

As you might imagine, I am, by my very nature, prone to pessimism. The old glass isn’t just half empty, it’s probably too cold, or not cold enough...or maybe I never asked for water in the first place, and it just figures that I ended up getting served it in a joint like this. So, anyway...I always sort of imagined that being a positive person was for people who wear flowers in their hair and eat organic food and think the world is a beautiful, nurturing place just bursting with possibility. Meanwhile, I can’t help getting stuck on depressing stuff like politics and tsunamis and the birds that poop on my car the minute I’ve washed it. (See also: Big List of Things to Be Happy About)

Then I started going to yoga a lot, mostly because I was feeling very uptight about the fact that I couldn’t bend more than a couple of degrees in any direction. Yoga people are tremendously positive (suspiciously so). They’re always smiling, and gushing and talking about how good it feels to “just breathe.” But while I was trying to get my breaths to conform to something along the lines of “ocean sounds,” I heard something else — a constant barrage of internal bellyaching running the gamut from cursing the downward dog to worrying about the weather to wondering whether my yoga pants were feeling tighter today than they were yesterday.

I didn’t like it. It was annoying. Worst of all, I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t seem to have much control over the thoughts. But after many months of working my body into ever-tighter contortions, it finally occurred to me — it was my brain, and it could bloody well do what I told it to. Nowadays I’d say I’m more of a recovering killjoy. Here are some things I learned along the way.

Fake It ‘Til You Make It

I once watched a dog trainer on TV lift a timid dog’s tail from between its legs as it walked down a crowded street. Minutes later, that scuttling, quivering little dog was walking tall, head — and tail — held high. By assuming a positive posture, his mind got the hang of it, too.

I hate to say it, but our inner workings (or at least mine) aren’t that much more complex. If I’m stuck in traffic and just feeling furious about the fact that the guy in front of me has been driving with his signal light on for about 10 minutes, there are two options: melt down, or assume the teeniest, tiniest smile. Just the very corners of your mouth will do. No one even has to know you’re doing it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it works like a charm.

Understand That What You Nurture Is What Grows

There’s an old Cherokee legend about an internal struggle that is characterized as two wolves. One represents negative thoughts such as anger, self-pity, resentment, and greed; the other represents positive qualities, such as hope, serenity, empathy, and faith. According to the legend, you get to decide which wolf wins — it’s the one you feed. Let’s just say I put one very over-fed wolf on a strict diet.

Realize That Anything’s Possible

Think way back to what you thought your life would be like when you were, say, 10 years old. Chances are it’s nothing like that image, right? Now before you start slipping into a depression about lost dreams and missed opportunities, think of it this way — life is full of curveballs. That doesn’t mean every unexpected twist will put you one step closer to your dream life, but simple logic dictates that some of life’s surprises will be good.

Become Proactive

You can think of life in two ways: something that happens to you or something that you have the power to shape. OK, so things do happen regardless, but thinking they are happening to you is a one-way street to being a total wet blanket. Instead, recognize that a lot of what happens is out of your control; what you can control is how you react.

Be Grateful

Everyone has some things and not others. So we all tend to overlook what we have and wish we had the awesome life that other guy has. The irony is, the other guy is probably thinking the same thing about you. Rather than sniffing around for that greener grass, just relax and enjoy life on your own lawn. It’s a lot easier that way.

Don’t Go Off the Deep End

Here’s where (I think) things get a little complicated; veer too far toward optimism, and you land smack dab in the middle of totally unrealistic. And frankly, that’s not a good place to be. Because while cultivating some good vibes will probably help you live a better, happier life, too much contentment can breed complacency. A healthy desire to make things better is what drives us to do bigger and better things. I’m not wearing flowers in my hair yet, but I’d say there’s nothing negative about that.

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This article is from Tara Struyk of Wise Bread, an award-winning personal finance and credit card comparison website. Read more great articles from Wise Bread: