Sneak Up On Your Dreams

Most of us don’t like the idea of being forced to do anything by anybody. I despise the idea or the reality of being forced to do things by other people. I have found, though, that to take control of my own life I need to force myself to do many things. I force myself to brush and floss my teeth every single day even, though I rarely feel like it. I force myself to do many things to make up my and my children’s lunches at night so that the mornings go smoothly. I force myself to get all my work done for the online college long before it’s due.

I have found that forcing myself gets easier with practice. I don’t resent myself and I guess I’m used to forcing myself to do things. I’ve also found that with forcing myself to do some things regularly I’ve build an easier life for myself so that certainly makes it easier to force myself to do more things. It seems that with practice you can train yourself to get used to the feeling of forcing yourself to do things even when you don’t want to.

The trick is to start slowly and prepare yourself with a mindset that does not allow any excuses. Choose something that doesn’t involve anyone else and that you have full control over. Basically, it’s self-discipline. Some people have lots of it and some people have little. To get where you want to go you need to build up your self-discipline.

This is a different thing that will-power and trying to get yourself not to eat or not to drink or whatever. Getting yourself to do things you don’t want to do is different somehow from stopping yourself from doing things that you want to do. I have no answers for that kind of thing. (sorry)

Start practicing some small amount of forcing yourself to do something regularly. I started with exercise. I was completely out of shape and was embarrassed because my eighty-something year old grandmother exercised every day. I needed to do something. I started a running/walking routine. I did a little every day even though it felt pretty miserable. As I got better, I forced myself to get on the treadmill every day. I had no requirement about how long or how fast I had to move, just that I had to get on every day. I realized that I hated changing clothes so I just go in my street clothes. Once I was on, I rarely wanted to do less than twenty minutes. If, after twenty minutes I still felt like crap I just got off. Of course, in the meantime I got a perfectly fine workout for the day. Other days I’d feel like running for an hour.

One other trick that I use is to force myself to do undesirable things when I feel the worst. I figure since I already feel lousy why not do stuff that will have made a good day feel lousy.

With my energy ebbs and flows, I wondered how I could get things done and how I did, in fact, get what I wanted. I realized that it involved having very small, manageable tasks that I am able to force myself to do every day regardless of energy level that gets me where I’m going. I also have taught myself to ignore how I feel and do what needs to be done in spite of what I want to or don’t want to do. I’m convinced that this is what got me where I am today.

This process of working out the balance between self-force and respect for my energy level hasn’t been an easy one. Once I did an experiment. I had a paper due in a college class and I wanted to see if I could get it done by just doing it only when I wanted to. I tried to “follow my gut” as you might say and ended up having to get an extension. The college course I was taking was at a high level and the paper was difficult for me. I didn’t know where to turn for help. My experiment showed me that I would not actually get anything done if I just worked on it when I “felt like it.”

I learned two things from this experiment. One, is that I needed to push myself to do work even when I didn’t want and two, I needed to figure out where to get help when I felt frustrated (I’ll discuss this in later posts). This one failure taught me lessons that I’ve taken to heart and have helped me in later successes.

Just doing what needs to be done regardless of desire has taken me a long time to reconcile. I have so many up and down moods and up and down energy times that I used to just do what I felt like and I often felt like doing nothing. Unfortunately, that’s what I would do, nothing. Following my desires of what to do left me feeling like doing very little. I had to figure out how to get things done even when I didn’t want to.

This, basically, comes down to force.