The Art Of Making Moves: 3 Ways To Finally Do Something About Your Life
Hrecheniuk Oleksii | Canva Need some life tips for getting started with self-improvement? Understanding how to stay motivated, despite your limiting beliefs, is a great place to start. We all have limiting beliefs that stop us from reaching our full potential. But if you learn how to get motivated and work hard despite your limitations, you can achieve anything.
Do you ever feel that if you just pushed a little harder, you could live a better life? That if you learned how to motivate yourself (and stay motivated), you'd have accomplished so much more? Perhaps we think about living to our fullest in unhelpful ways — for ourselves and for our kids. What is the right amount of incentive or even pressure to grow, and where does it come from?
Here are 3 ways to make moves and finally do something about your life:
1. Find someone who believes in you and holds you accountable
Another person, like a coach, may inspire motivation. However, this only works when the person receiving the coaching desires change. It also helps to feel truly accepted or respected by the person coaching.
Research shows that a strong working alliance between mentor and mentee, built on warmth, trust, and respect, is one of the best predictors of positive outcomes. The quality of the mentorship matters more than specific techniques or interventions, with people feeling more motivated to change when they believe their mentor genuinely cares about their welfare and they feel accepted rather than judged.
2. Get fed up enough to act
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Reaching for our "best" sometimes arises from a sense of frustrated disgust after years of not doing or being what we suspect we could do or be. This thought process works when we are in enough pain to move out of comfortable complacency.
People move through different stages of readiness to change and often need to be motivated by enough pain or dissatisfaction before they're ready to take action, research has concluded. When the discomfort of staying stuck becomes greater than the fear of making a change, people naturally shift from just thinking about doing something to actually doing it.
3. Let yourself want more
The inner peace of feeling deeply loved and yet not completely discovered places a longing in our hearts that pulls us into the next discovery of ourselves and our lives. Although we may be quaking and shaking, we feel deeply encouraged to move ahead. I am reminded of the words of author Marianne Williamson, "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."
Research suggests that when people's needs for love and belonging are satisfied, they naturally develop tendencies toward growth and self-actualization by pursuing their full potential. People who feel valued and connected with others are more likely to move toward discovering what they're truly capable of becoming, driven by an inherent desire to be all they can be in life.
My heart desires to compassionately examine spaces in my life where I believe I should "take it easy" because other options are too worrisome, too scary, or too risky. Parts of me prefer to worry over making changes that scare me rather than just making these changes.
As I look at these parts of myself, I realize that they are not trying to handicap me. They only want to keep me from pain and danger. I can respect them and feel gratitude. For almost two decades now, I’ve had the honor of helping people meet and embrace previously unknown or misunderstood parts of their personalities, especially the ones that worry.
I recognize the sequence of worry that leads to feeling stuck, which eventually capsizes confidence. I’ve known it myself. Life is not a choice of being comfortable with your true nature or moving forward toward growth and change. It’s about doing both simultaneously.
From this perspective, you can consider both "What is best for me based upon my nature, preferences, disabilities, wounds, or skills?" and "What is the right amount of challenge to help me grow?" You can learn to love yourself more fully, embrace yourself more completely, and move into your fullest being. It’s a practice you can begin today.
Ingrid Helander is a marriage and family therapist helping people who suffer from insecurity, doubt, impossible communication patterns, and overwhelming stress.
