Another of the 10 types of demotivation that’s really common is when you’re working on the wrong goals, so I wanted to share more about how you can avoid setting demotivating goals.

There are a lot of goal-setting, project management and productivity methodologies out there to help you to make the changes you want more quickly and effectively, but if you’re working on toxic goals – goals that don’t reflect what you really value, then all of those systems aren’t any good to you. They’ll just help you to get up the wrong ladder more quickly. There aren’t many systems that teach you the most important aspect of goal-setting – figuring out what you really want.

How we end up setting demotivating goals

We’re biologically wired to be concerned with what our social tribe thinks and expects from us, so we tend to pay a lot of attention to worrying about what other people will think and trying to impress other people. Since we have such busy, noisy lives, with so many demands being made of us, and add to that the fact that we’re not really ever taught to stop and quieten down and listen to our inner voices, it’s easy to get caught up in setting goals that we think we “should” set, rather than working on things that we truly want to work on.

And stress and fear exacerbates this. Most of us only get around to setting goals and trying to change our lives when we find ourselves in a state of pain. We’re much more motivated to change through desperation that inspiration. This is the root of toxic goals, because when we’re stressed, afraid and in pain, our thinking and creativity shuts down, we’re more focused on problems than solutions, we find it hard to notice opportunities outside of our problem sphere, and we have a distinct sense of urgency, so we’ll tend to reach for the first solution rather than the best solution.

A big problem with goals is that a lot of people decide their goals and the changes they want to make when they’re in a fearful, stressed state of mind, and then they choose to work on changes that are important to other people, rather than being truly important to their Essential Selves. And when you’re trying to do and be something that’s important to other people and not important to you, it’s very hard to stay motivated and even harder to enjoy the process of getting there.

There are two simple ways to check that you’re choosing goals or changes that are aligned with your Essential Self:

1.) Check your body compass

Your body carries your non-verbal wisdom and because it’s non-verbal, it doesn’t know how to string together stories and rationalizations. Your body just speaks the truth.

Rather than looking outside of yourself to what other people expect of you, quieten down and take a few deep breaths. Now, as you’re relaxing and beginning to tune into what your body feels like, think of the goals you’re considering setting, one at a time, and notice what your body feels like when you think of setting those goals. Don’t just think of the goal’s outcome. Picture yourself working towards that goal, doing the things you’d need to do to get there. What does your body feel like?

Your body will typically relax and feel light, open, expansive and peaceful when you hold in mind a particular goal that’s an expression of your Essential Self. And when you think of a a goal that’s not an expression of your Essential Self – a toxic goal, your body will feel tight, trapped, constricted, tense or even painful.

As Martha Beck says, goals that are right for you will feel like freedom and that feeling of freedom is incredibly energizing and motivating, but the goals that you’re setting just to impress other people or because you think it’s the “right” thing to do – those goals always make you feel trapped, and it’s this sense of feeling trapped that’s so demotivating.

2.) Chunk up to eagle vision

Often, when we set a goal, we don’t really want that goal we’ve set – we’re only setting that goal because we think we need to have that goal before we can have the thing that we really want. You don’t have to be thin before you can find a great life partner, you don’t have to get your teeth whitened before you can start your speaking business and you probably don’t have to get a bigger house or car before you can consider having a baby. When you lose touch with what you really want, it;s easy to end up on demotivating wild goose chases, going after stuff that you think you need to have in order to get what you really want.

You can get back in touch with what you really want by asking yourself, “What will making this change/ having this goal get me?” a few times and discovering what the thing you really want it. Then question whether you need to have that goal in order to have the thing you really want – you might not need to. Perhaps you can skip the middle-man and go straight after the thing you really want.

The other reason why chunking up to eagle vision is so useful is that you can then check in whether the thing you really want is aligned with your values. If you struggle to come up with answers that feel compelling or if the answers you come up with aren’t aligned with your personal values, then those particular changes aren’t for you.

So take a moment now to check in with your body and your eagle vision – are you setting the right goals?

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What are personal values?

Personal values are the stuff and experiences that you consider important in life. They’re your “why” behind all the choices you make. When we’re in relationships and environments and doing things that match our criteria of what’s important in life – in other words, our personal values are satisfied – then we’re highly motivated. And when we’re in relationships and environments and doing things that don’t match our criteria of what’s important in life, then we feel highly de-motivated. A key to feeling that your work is purposeful and getting motivated is in discovering your life values and aligning your work with your life values.

Your personal values can be conscious or unconscious – either way they direct your behavior, and unconscious values almost always have a more powerful influence on our behavior.

Here’s how to discover your conscious and unconscious personal values and elicit your intrinsic motivation at work. It’s a very practical exercise and so you’ll only “get it” if you take some time to work through the questions. Give yourself 30 to 45mins to do this and I assure you, you’ll be amazed at the clarity you have afterwards.

1.) Start by asking yourself, “What’s important in work?”

Grab a piece of paper and brainstorm, listing anything that comes to mind to answer the question, “What’s important in work?” Switch off your inner critic for this – it can help to play some music or work with fat colored crayons to get into an honest, childish space. Don’t prioritize or rank your answers, and stay away from using full sentences and long stories. Just brainstorm brief answers that come to mind when you ask yourself, “What’s important in work?”

2.) Now think of a time in your career when you felt really motivated.

Imagine your life as a movie reel, and go to a moment in your career when you know that you felt really motivated about your work, really alive and excited and fulfilled. Step into that moment mentally, seeing events through your own eyes as if you’re there right now, and notice what was happening for you at that time that triggered your feelings of motivation. Jot down those themes, adding them to your list.

3.) Now think of a time in your career when you felt really de-motivated.

Imagine your life as a movie reel, and go to a moment in your career when you know that you felt really de-motivated about your work, as if you just couldn’t be bothered about stuff really, and you felt tired and fed-up.
Step into that moment mentally and see things through your own eyes as if you’re there right now, and notice what was happening for you at that time that triggered your feelings of de-motivation. Jot down those themes, adding them to your list.

Your answers to questions 2 and 3 represent your unconscious values. While your answers to question 1 are your desired conscious values that you try to live by, your unconscious values have a powerful impact on your life and are often the values that you actually invest more of your time, energy, attention and money in.

4.) Now rank your values.

Have a look at your list of values. These are all things that are important to you – they made it onto your list out of an infinite number of different values out there. But they also have varying levels of importance to you. Take a moment now to rank them in order of importance according to how much energy, attention, time and/or money you’re willing to invest in them. Which of these values is your top priority – your number 1 value? And which comes next? And then rank the rest.

5.) Now circle your top 5 values.

These are the values that are most important to you in your work – the values that most drive your motivation levels at work. To what degree do you feel like each of these values is satisfied in your work, the way your work currently stands? Rate each value as a percentage, out of 100%, representing the degree to which you feel that value is satisfied in your work as it currently stands.

6.) Have a look at your values ratings

Do your values ratings explain your motivation levels at work? Remember that the higher you go up your list of values, the more important that value is to you, and the stronger it’s motivational – or de-motivational effect will be. So that means that, even if your number 4 and 5 values are satisfied more than 75%, if your numbers 1, 2 and 3 values aren’t being satisfied, you’ll feel quite de-motivated in your work.

7.) Would you like to increase your motivation?

You can do that by increasing your ratings on each of your values. So start with your top 5 values: what changes could you make to your work scenario, to be able to increase your ratings on each of those values? And what different would that make if you could make those changes to satisfy more of your top 5 values?

Let your values guide major career decisions

When you do this exercise, you’ll probably move from feeling a bit fuzzy about what’s de-motivating you at work to realizing one of two things:

• Either your work scenario is so far from your personal value system that you’ll never be able to align it, and you need to think about a change of work if you want to feel more motivated at work, or…
• You’ll realize what the specific reasons for your lack of motivation or inconsistent motivation are, and you’ll realize that you can take responsibility for making changes in your work so that you can increase your motivation levels and enjoy your work more.

Discovering your personal values puts you in the position where you know yourself better and so you’re more empowered to shape your work around the experiences that’ll elicit your intrinsic motivation, allowing you to do more of the work you love and love more of the work you do.

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Would you like inspiration, step-by-step guidance, support and accountability to help you create your first digital program, ready to share in 6 weeks?

By turning your best knowledge and experience into quality digital programs, you can:

• Leverage your time and increase your income without working longer hours.
• Build your brand and get known more quickly by having an easy-to-share, tangible example showing people how you work.
• Secure yourself more freedom to work where and when (and if!) you please.
• Make your expertise more accessible to more people, and ultimately help more people all over the world (while of course developing an international brand).

Join the Dreaming to Delivering Mastermind.

Starts Monday 26 July. I’m limiting the group to 12 people and 8 places have gone already.

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Is your curiosity about abstract or global issues a sign of healthy curiosity and the ability to see beyond your little world or a sign that you’re dissociating and running away from your own reality? Have a read of Eduard’s perspective and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this!

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There are a group of acquaintances I hang out with who mostly talk about stuff like the politics in China, or the evolution of space exploration. Stuff which, in my perspective, is pretty distant from their own lives and doesn’t visibly influence them. They also have jobs they hate and bad relationships, but they never really talk about this stuff. If I meet them and ask one of them: “So, how’s your job going?” he’ll just reply with an irritated voice: “Shitty as usual!” and then immediately change the subject.

I call this running from your reality. It’s the process of distancing yourself from what’s going on in your own life, especially the stuff that’s not going well, by not thinking and not talking about it, while focusing on things which are far away from your own life – things that only affect your life in a minuscule way.

Whenever I meet people who talk a lot about subjects which tend to be very abstract or lack practical relevancy to them, I get this intuition that they’re running away from their reality. I often like to test this by bringing the subject to their and my real life, and if my hypothesis is true, they avoid talking about their life like the plague.

Running from your reality is a coping mechanism

What’s going on? I believe that running from your reality is a coping mechanism. And like all coping mechanism, there is a positive intention behind it. It’s usually something a person does when three things happen:

• Her reality does not look they way she wants.
• This is very frustrating for her.
• She doesn’t believe she can change this or she is afraid to do anything about it.

So the only available option seems to be forgetting about it, distracting herself from it. This process can happen in many ways, from talking about distant subjects like in the example above, to excessive daydreaming, to heavy drinking, to drug use, to becoming obsessed with one part of her reality which works, in order to escape all the other parts of her life.

The bad news.

Unfortunately, running from you reality can only work so far. You can’t avoid it forever and never think about it. You may choose not to think about the job you hate in any of your free time, but you will be doing that job 40 hours each week, and you will still hate it.

We all have problems in our lives, big or small, and we can all be tempted to run away from them. But it most cases, this only makes the problem get worse. Eventually, it’s like the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.

Facing your reality.

I believe that the most effective solution is looking your reality in the eye, seeing it the way it is and doing something about it. This doesn’t imply you have to think about your problems all the time, but it does imply that you’re not ignoring them either.

How do you do this? First of all, you need to learn to accept your current reality, no matter how bad it is. This doesn’t mean that you start thinking your reality is the way you want it when it’s not. It means that you accept that this it’s the way it is and it’s not the end of the world. This is what will make you able to actually face your reality.

Secondly, you need to learn to believe that you are in charge of your life and you can change your reality. You can have a job you’re passionate about, a loving relationship, a life lived by your standards. People make this kind of stuff happen in their lives all the time.

Ultimately, for me, facing your reality and making the best out of it is a thing of acceptance, courage and responsibility. When you have these three tools in your toolbox, you are able to do amazing things.

Eduard Ezeanu is a communication coach with an attitude-based approach. He teaches people how to put their best foot forward in communication and get top notch results. He also writes on his blog, People Skills Decoded.

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Would you like inspiration, step-by-step guidance, support and accountability to help you create your first digital program, ready to share in 6 weeks?

By turning your best knowledge and experience into quality digital programs, you can:

• Leverage your time and increase your income without working longer hours.
• Build your brand and get known more quickly by having an easy-to-share, tangible example showing people how you work.
• Secure yourself more freedom to work where and when (and if!) you please.
• Make your expertise more accessible to more people, and ultimately help more people all over the world (while of course developing an international brand).

Join the Dreaming to Delivering Mastermind.

Starts 26 July. Sign-up closes 16 July. I’m limiting the group to 12 people and 6 places have gone already.

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So, because of all these requests, I’ve consolidated my biggest mistakes and lessons learned and the best secrets I picked up along the way as I developed my Bottom-line Bookclub and I’ve put it all together in a report, so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. And, starting 26 July, I’m running a mastermind group where I’ll guide you to create your first digital program and set it up so it’s ready to share in just 6 weeks.

Here’s what’s in this report for you

Get started by grabbing your free report about how I created the Bottom-line Bookclub.

Digital programs place tools for transformation in the hands of the people you serve and make it possible for you to help people even as you sleep, so they’re an incredibly empowering and sustainable way for you to do your work – both for you and the people you serve!

If you’d like further in-depth information that I couldn’t squeeze into this report, help with refining your message and deciding the best way to share your message and expertise, and lots of hand-holding, inspiration and accountability to make it happen, then I’d love you to join my Dreaming To Delivering Mastermind Group, starting 26 July.

Here’s what the Dreaming To Delivering Mastermind is all about

Click through for more details…

I create a completely new digital program for my Bottom-line Bookclub every month. I’ve learned the lessons and ironed out the kinks. With some clear direction and lots of encouragement, inspiration and accountability, I know you can create your first digital program in just 6 weeks and set it up, ready to share. So pick up your free report and consider joining my 6 week Dreaming To Delivering Mastermind Group, starting 26 July.

Latest update: There are only 12 spots and 6 are taken already. Sign-up closes 16 July.

So if you’re curious about this mastermind and have any questions you’d like to ask, or would just like a general one-one-one chat about whether you’d be a good fit, before you make your decision, then get in touch – I’ll be happy to chat. You can email me on cath [at] mineyourresources [dot] com to set up a time to chat.

As usual, Gold Members of the Bottom-line Bookclub get 30% off

If you have valuable expertise, an important message and a heart for reaching more people in more empowering and sustainable ways, then I’d love you to join us.

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