When that happens, you need to figure out how to keep them at the table.
We all quit on ourselves. We say we’re going to do something and we don’t do it.
Then we sort of punish ourselves for it, you know, think negative thoughts about ourselves, beat ourselves up a bit and just kinda give ourselves a hard time.
It’s almost like we think that by beating ourselves up, we’ve made up for it. Or, by making ourselves unhappy, we have an excuse to just do it again.
This cycle is just that… a circle that leads us back to the same place.
This week, try a new approach. We know that quitting is the thing that is easiest and least risky. Our brains feel better in the moment when we don’t do something new, don’t get outside our comfort zone, do the easiest thing, the comfortable thing.
The next day however, the easy thing feels terrible and the risky, taking chances, harder thing feels mind blowing good. To get to that, you have to override your mid-brain and actually do the thing.
Three ways to outsmart a quit.
I’m sure you can find more but here are three that I came up with:
- Plan on doing the quit. — You heard me, you plan on eating five jelly donuts at lunch. Then you sit there and make yourself do it. Now what does your mid brain say? If it’s like mine, it doesn’t want to do it. It quits on the quit. Whaaaa?
- Postpone the quit – you can skip inbox zero … tomorrow. Just clear your emails before you leave today.
- Pomodoro through it. – Look up pomodoro method, basically work like a wild person for 25 minutes, then take a 5 minute break. I do four pomodoros and then I give my self an unstructured hour. Then I hit it again. Good times.
Be Curious, Georgina.
Let’s face it, if you don’t bother with the self flagellation, you can stop giving yourself a pass on quitting and maybe, you can just be curious about it. What can you change next time? In the end, you have to give up quitting to win. Other people have figured out how, and you can too.