Building Hope Counseling Services

Your brain loves to see progress towards your goals. Even a small step in the right direction can change your own day.

A little bit of progress = a little bit of motivation.

The more progress, the more motivation. The more motivation, then the more progress, and then even more motivation.

When you feel like you’re on a roll, you’re on fire, you’re unstoppable, what you’re really noticing is that motivation comes from repeated, consistent wins.

Motivation is a reward for action, not a catalyst for action.

Motivation is the urge to keep moving forward. Unfortunately, motivation without a stubborn refusal to give up on yourself isn’t going to be enough to keep you going through those moments when you’re struggling to remember why you started this seemingly neverending task to begin with.

I suppose there are some people who find a way to just keep pushing forward, no matter what the unexpected obstacle. Those people are loud – they post a lot and dominate the conversation at a party – so we think there’s a lot of them.

Maybe there are. Maybe there aren’t.

Pretending everything is *just so easy and perfect* when you are struggling to get out of bed in the morning wasn’t working for me, so I started figuring out ways to motivate myself to live the life I actually wanted for myself.

Let’s take cleaning the kitchen for example.

How do you clean your kitchen when you have no motivation? How do you clean your kitchen when the idea of even stepping into the kitchen is triggering a panic attack?

We can keep pretending that we all have it all together all of the time, or we can admit, quietly in this little corner of the internet, that thinking about cleaning the entire kitchen is daunting.

The dishes are piled high after a long weekend, the trash needs to go out, and what on earth is that spill…?! If you look at everything all at once, you’re likely to feel overwhelmed and return to doom scrolling at your earliest convenience.

If you’re struggling with the motivation to clean the kitchen, take that task and make it smaller. Start by taking the garbage cans to the road for pickup.

And then make it a little smaller than that. Just take the trash outside. (I’m not even gonna lie, I have been known to throw the trash bag out the window to achieve this.)

Annnnnd if you’re still overwhelmed? Let’s go even a little smaller than that. All you have to do is tie the trash bag up.

If the goal is not to clean the whole kitchen but instead the goal is only to tie the trash up and you accomplish that one task, your brain rewards you with a nice little boost of dopamine that translates to feelings of confidence, mastery, pleasure, and that’s right – motivation.

The more immediate progress that you see, the closer you’ll be to your long-term goals.

The trick is that you can’t punish yourself if you don’t do more than that tiny task.

Adopting the mindset that “5 minutes of cleaning is 5 minutes cleaner than the house was before” gave me the freedom and flexibility to go as slowly as I needed.

By breaking down what previously felt like a monumental task into 5 minute increments, I was able to slowly build my way up to “10 minutes cleaner”, then “30 minutes cleaner”.

I saw the progress I was able to make in 5 minutes, and it made me want to keep going.

If I had started at “Sundays are for cleaning”, which is my current method of living, I would have been overwhelmed, discouraged, distressed, and really, really mean to myself while it inevitably did not work because I did not set myself up for success.

Start small. Go slow. Stay consistent.

What’s something small that you can get done today?

It doesn’t have to be perfect. I personally don’t even think it has to be completely finished. It just has to happen.

Put one foot in front of the other and get that one thing done.

One thing… Anything… Just don’t give up.

Don’t give up on your dreams or on yourself.

Rooting for you.

– Mikaela