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Motivation
[It's all about meeeeee this week, sorry. I'll manage to do a erudite, witty and intellectually-detached post sometime, I'm sure.]
I was having a chat with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saluqi today about my least-favourite personality aspect. I don't mind my irritableness, lack of patience, pig-headedness, vagueness, egocentricity (ha-hah!), and so on (I'm sure more negativities would come to mind if I pondered a bit more) nearly as much as I do my lack of motivation. I seem to surround myself with fairly go-getting types (and saluqi did point out that that personality quality is hardly typical), and in comparison to them, I'm an indolent lump of lard.
I know I have a short attention span for non-fun-related things. I also have the willpower of a starving person in a chocolate shop. However, I'm fine if something needs to be done. Like going to work, paying the bills, and occasionally, doing the housework. I like doing things for someone. I like doing things if I feel that my efforts will be appreciated (like most of us I imagine). But even if it's something I'd like to do - such as, say, brush up my French, or get properly fitter - getting the impetus to get started and then sustain doing whatever it is seems to be annoyingly difficult.
It gets to the point where I feel like bitchslapping myself and uttering trite homilies to myself like "just do it, already!" But do I? Not often. It's a layer of my personality that's always been with me, and it periodically drives me insane. Ok, it's not as if I haven't achieved anything in my life, or that I'm an utterly useless waste of space. Considering some of the crap I started off with, and some of the rumptions of my adult life, I'm doing ok. But I look at someone like my OGF, who had shit for her early life, due to which she ended up leaving home and school at age 14... going to running a multi-million dollar company while having a fantastic family. And I feel bloody inadequate. (Not that I want to do either of those things, but achieving more would be nice)
Of course, she (and plenty of my other similarly go-getting friends) don't grok what the hold-ups are. I know I don't like taking risks - although I have, plenty of times - but taking French lessons is hardly risky. I loathe loathe loathe looking incompetent, but one can't have a learning curve unless one starts to learn. I'm lazy, but I am fine with necessities, or when someone else says "would you mind?" But needing to be prodded into action seems juvenile. Bah.
Well, I want to track down a homeopath and see if taking a remedy might shift it. Embarrassment and annoyance at myself doesn't work. Being lectured/shamed definitely doesn't work. Pop-psychology books (at least, extrapolating from the couple I've read) will not break though my judging brain. Identifying a problem is all very dandy, but I've not evolved a mechanism to fix it. Anyone else have a consistent problem with motivation/impetus? What do you do about it? How does one develop willpower?
I was having a chat with
saluqi today about my least-favourite personality aspect. I don't mind my irritableness, lack of patience, pig-headedness, vagueness, egocentricity (ha-hah!), and so on (I'm sure more negativities would come to mind if I pondered a bit more) nearly as much as I do my lack of motivation. I seem to surround myself with fairly go-getting types (and saluqi did point out that that personality quality is hardly typical), and in comparison to them, I'm an indolent lump of lard.I know I have a short attention span for non-fun-related things. I also have the willpower of a starving person in a chocolate shop. However, I'm fine if something needs to be done. Like going to work, paying the bills, and occasionally, doing the housework. I like doing things for someone. I like doing things if I feel that my efforts will be appreciated (like most of us I imagine). But even if it's something I'd like to do - such as, say, brush up my French, or get properly fitter - getting the impetus to get started and then sustain doing whatever it is seems to be annoyingly difficult.
It gets to the point where I feel like bitchslapping myself and uttering trite homilies to myself like "just do it, already!" But do I? Not often. It's a layer of my personality that's always been with me, and it periodically drives me insane. Ok, it's not as if I haven't achieved anything in my life, or that I'm an utterly useless waste of space. Considering some of the crap I started off with, and some of the rumptions of my adult life, I'm doing ok. But I look at someone like my OGF, who had shit for her early life, due to which she ended up leaving home and school at age 14... going to running a multi-million dollar company while having a fantastic family. And I feel bloody inadequate. (Not that I want to do either of those things, but achieving more would be nice)
Of course, she (and plenty of my other similarly go-getting friends) don't grok what the hold-ups are. I know I don't like taking risks - although I have, plenty of times - but taking French lessons is hardly risky. I loathe loathe loathe looking incompetent, but one can't have a learning curve unless one starts to learn. I'm lazy, but I am fine with necessities, or when someone else says "would you mind?" But needing to be prodded into action seems juvenile. Bah.
Well, I want to track down a homeopath and see if taking a remedy might shift it. Embarrassment and annoyance at myself doesn't work. Being lectured/shamed definitely doesn't work. Pop-psychology books (at least, extrapolating from the couple I've read) will not break though my judging brain. Identifying a problem is all very dandy, but I've not evolved a mechanism to fix it. Anyone else have a consistent problem with motivation/impetus? What do you do about it? How does one develop willpower?
no subject
Yes, perhaps I was overly narrowing the field asking for suggestions from the overly-indolent. I don't actually expect the vastly competent to be able to launch into everything at the drop of a hat; I don't expect extroverts to necessarily be able to stroll onto a stage and be comfortable addressing hundreds of people. So learning some tricks of the trade from those already disposed to deal with X is dandy.
Looking at it as a project is a good perspective. Having an internal dialogue with myself is something I've been trying, but the results tend to end up as "You're a lazy fuck". "Yeah, whatevah." But I think if I strengthen the process and try and make it more of a routine (rather than avoiding thinking about what a lazy fuck I am), some slight progress might result that way.
Looking clueless in front of others is a biggie, most definitely. I think getting past the "looking like a dork" syndrome is going to be a biiig hurdle. I can be chugging along quite happily thinking "yeah, I'm too cool for school" when a sudden memory of some past gaucheness or fuckup will make me cringe and quite literally blush from embarrassment. Stuff that happened over 30 years ago, even. It's almost pathological (perhaps it is).
I think your technique of launching yourself into the showing stuff is most definitely a take-no-prisoners method of clearing it out. I think my own ego is just a tad too touchy to consider doing something quite that vigorous - while I don't do that "you think I'm shit? fine, fuck you, buh-bye" nearly as much these days, it's still there to some degree. Pathetic. I'm going to have to think on that one. Or evolve some of my own mongrel qualities - I don't know if "yeah, I'll show you" will ever be a major part of my repertoire, but we'll see.
Thank you for the awesome (of course) comments. It also helps narrow things down for homeopathic ponderings too - I hadn't quite considered the potential-embarrassment issue as part of the syndrome (since it doesn't seem to have any impact on the non-public laziness thing), but it's something I need to consider. Critical video cameras in my head do definitely act as deterrents (even if world domination isn't quite my aim, heee!)