Stop Giving Up Easily! 10 Powerful Tools to Boost Motivation

Hey there everybody, and welcome to this video that answers the question, why do I give up so easily? I'm your host, Dr. Donnelly Snipes. The first reason you may give up easily is a lack of motivation, or what behavioral analysts sometimes call behavior strain. When the effort to do something is more intense than the rewards that are coming in, you're probably not as motivated. For example, if you're going to a job and you're getting paid 725 an hour, you may be less motivated to get up and go to work than if you're getting paid $25 an hour. There are five different types of motivation, if you'll remember. Physical motivation is how does it improve the way I feel? My energy, my pain, my ability to sleep, my health. So if something has physical benefits to it, we want to recognize that affective motivation is how it makes you feel emotionally. Does it make you happy? Does it make you curious? Or does it stress you out? Cognitive motivation is number one, how it logically makes sense. Cognitively, I can look at it with my wise mind and say, yes, this is the right thing to do to help me move toward my rich and meaningful life. But also cognitively, if you are doing this behavior, whatever it is, is it helping you feel clear headed and smart, if you will, or is it just compounding your awareness of brain fog and difficulty concentrating? Environmentally, your motivation can be impacted by the people around you. Are they building you up? Do they make you look forward to doing this? Or are they pulling you down? And relationally, what are your motivations for doing this? Is engaging in whatever this behavior is, is it going to improve your relationships either with other people or with yourself, with your friends, with your family, with yourself? We want to look at all of those relationships and say, if I achieve this goal, if I accomplish this thing, how is it going to impact my relationships? Or is pursuing this goal actually hurting my relationships because it's sucking my time and energy away from them? So you need to look at your motivation and figure out why you want to do it and whether it's worth the effort. Poor goal setting is the next problem that causes people to give up too easily, if you will. When you don't set correct or effective smart goals, it's difficult to know where to begin or what steps to take, in what order and how long they should take. I know if I get furniture in the mail that I have to put together, I look at it and I kind of go cross eyed because it's just, it's overwhelming to me. So think About a thousand piece puzzle and you dump it out on the table. How do you figure out the best way to solve it? Do you flip all the pieces over first and then arrange them by color or shape or do you put the frame together first? How is it that you solve a puzzle? You're setting goals for what you need to do. First I need to do this, then I need to do this. So it's not overwhelming. And you don't just sit there and look at all those pieces going, I have no freaking clue where to start. Training for a marathon is very similar. You need to know how long is it going to take. If I want to train for a marathon, can I expect to be able to go from being a couch potato to running a marathon in six weeks? Well, that's not realistic. So that helps me identify how long it should take. How long should it take, you know, on average for me to be able to go from not working out at all to. To running a mile in 11 minutes and progressing from there? Relationships are the same way. And I know you're like, what? We want to have goals in our relationship. Where do you want to see this relationship going? Those are your goals and how are you going to get there? Relationships don't just happen. They need work. You need to pay attention to them. You need to work on things and nurture that relationship. And if you don't, then the relationship is likely going to dissolve. You may give up on a relationship really quickly because you haven't set those goals and haven't determined how you're going to handle different steps along the way. Discomfort is another reason you may give up easily. There's an old saying that change causes crisis and crisis caus. When you're doing something, you're probably changing in some way. You may be learning something, a new skill, or you may be trying something new. But you may give up if it's uncomfortable. And this can be physical or emotional discomfort. So for example, when you're learning a new sport like golf or football or hockey or tennis or whatever, initially you may go out there and you're using muscles you ain't used before. And it can be really uncomfortable. And you may wake up the next morning and go, oh no, not gonna do it. And you give up because the pain's too much. You went in and did too much too fast because you didn't set good goals. And now you're in too much pain and you're experiencing that behavior strain your brain saying, this ain't worth it. Emotional is also another type of discomfort. If you're trying to learn this sport and you're out there and you're practicing and you're not getting any better or you're not getting better as quickly as you think you quote should, you may start to feel stressed or inadequate and give up. It's like, I'll never get this right and and give up. So it's important again to recognize how long should it take you to learn how to throw a tight sp spiral or how to serve the perfect serve in tennis or whatever you're talking about. Hobbies are the same way. If you're learning how to put together model airplanes or whatever the hobby is, if you do it too quickly, it may cause you physical discomfort. Two of my hobbies, gardening and crochet, you would think those are pretty benign hobbies, but you use a lot of muscles doing both of those and that you don't normally use with crochet. There are a lot of fine hand movements that can make aggravate tennis elbow and make your forearms really sore. And with gardening, oh, there's lots of muscles you use. And if you do it too fast and you don't and you're not careful about your. Your form, for example, it can cause physical pain. And then when you've got physical pain and you're not making progress on it, you can get frustrated and that can cause you emotional discomfort. And then you may give up. And then relationships again are the same way. Hopefully, relationships are not going to cause you physical pain in any sort of way, but they can cause you emotional discomfort. As you start getting to know somebody and start to trust them a little bit more and feel vulnerable, you may start feeling terrified. And then you just say, nope, done, I'm out of here because it's too scary. Or the first time you get into an argument, it may be too scary because you are fearful that they're going to reject you or abandon you. So you just cut bait. You would rather be the one, you would rather be the dumper than the dump e so to speak, so you're maintaining some sense of power and control. Lack of knowledge is another reason people give up. If you're doing something you've never done before and you reach a sticking point and then you don't know how to keep going or you're not willing to ask for help, then you're probably just going to sit there stuck until you give up. Sports, hobbies and relationships. It applies pretty much everywhere, but we're going to continue to use these three different examples. If you are trying to learn how to serve a ball in tennis and you've watched YouTube and you've gone out there and tried and you're just not getting it, or you're still not able to get it the way you think it should be, then what do you do? If you don't have the knowledge, then you have to be willing to ask somebody who's an expert to help you out. In golf, in tennis, in a lot of sports, other people that are watching you or being videotaped and watching your tapes can give you more information to help you figure out what you're doing wrong. But then a lot of times it takes an expert to help you figure out how to fix it. So lack of knowledge can cause you to get stuck and then feel like it's hopeless relationships again the same way. Which is why a lot of people go to couples counseling. They get to a place where they're at an impass, they're stuck, and they don't know how to resolve the issue. So they seek out feedback from a counselor or a clergy member or a family member who can help them move through somebody who has been there before or who knows how to get through this type of problem. If you can't, then you just stay stuck and eventually give up. Attention deficit. Well, if you've got attention deficit, whether it's because of a trauma history or, or you have ADHD or whatever the reason, if you're having difficulty focusing, that's going to make it harder to stay motivated, and it's going to make it harder to stay focused, especially on things you don't want to do. When you want to do something, your brain releases dopamine that says, oh yeah, let's keep doing this. If you don't want to do something like your taxes or laundry or homework, then it's harder to make yourself stay focused. So it's important to recognize that some of this is neurochemical. Repeated distractions may cause you to feel like you're not making any progress. So if your attention deficit isn't necessarily because of adhd, or even if it is, but if you're regularly being distracted, then you're not going to make progress as quickly because your attention and energy is being pulled. And so you're splitting your time and energy between what you need to accomplish and everything else, you may look at your progress and get frustrated and say, I'm never going to get this done. I remember I felt that way about my dissertation many times and then give up. And a low frustration tolerance for Complex tasks due to a time intensive focus. And this is especially true of people who actually have adhd. Things that require them to focus and pay attention to detail for an extended period of time, especially if it's not something they're interested in, can be maddening. And when they start losing focus, they get frustrated and then that frustration turns into anger and irritability with themselves sets off the stress response system, makes it more difficult to focus, and it's just a downward spiral from there. So attention deficit is important. If you have difficulty focusing, figure out why and what things you can do in order to improve your focus. And even sort of cajole or trick yourself into doing things you don't like doing. For example, saying if I write this chapter or this paper that I've got to write for school, then I can go to the movies tonight, or if I do this, then I can do that. So you're setting rewards. As soon as I get this done, I can do something I enjoy and that can make it easier. Or if it's something like folding laundry that you really hate to do, pair it with something that you like doing. Talking to your friend on the phone or watching television or listening to a television show while you're folding laundry. There are ways to increase your dopamine levels, which increases your motivation and your attention for things that you don't like to do. Impatience is another reason you may give up quickly, which kind of goes along with low frustration tolerance. But impatience is thinking that you need to be an expert the minute you start. You need to be Joe Namath the minute you walk onto the football field when you're six years old, you need to be an expert painter like Bob Ross. The minute you open a canvas, you need to be an expert at relationships as soon as you get into one. And that's just not how life works. And even if you've been in relationships before, or played sports before, or done different hobbies, every situation is slightly unique. So you're not going to be an expert at how to handle things with this person in this relationship at this time. You're going to have to learn about that person a little bit and adjust along the way. Exhaustion is another reason you may give up easily. Poor time management, always saying yes to other people. Yes, I'll do this, yes, I'll help you with that. Yes, I'll do that project. Well, that may be nice, but that can make you get really exhausted. And when you're tired, you it's harder to focus and it's harder to stay motivated to do things and your frustration tolerance goes down significantly. Forgetting is another reason. With our busy lives, it's easy to forget things that are not essential to our daily lives. However, if you don't work on or nurture things that are important, they will fail. So maybe you decided you're going to learn how to play tennis and that's wonderful. And then. But you don't make a time three days a week to go out and play tennis. You just say, I'm gonna practice, I'm gonna go out and play tennis three days a week. And then life happens and you start doing what you need to do for life. But unfortunately you forget or you don't make time to go and practice the tennis. And then all of a sudden a year's passed and you've made zero progress. And then you get frustrated. Same thing with relationships and or hobbies too. But with relationships, if you forget to nurture those relationships, they can dissolve. You can give up on a relationship or you can say, you know, now the relationship has deteriorated so much, it's beyond help. So it's overwhelming and just, fine, peace out. So it's important to recognize that forgetting to use your energy to nurture the relationship and to work on the relationship with regularity can make it more difficult to keep it going and make you more likely to cut bait. If you have not put a lot of energy into it, it's a whole lot easier to say, you know, that this isn't working. See you. Powerlessness is another reason that people quit really easily. And if you have a can't do attitude or low self efficacy, and that's a belief that you can't do it, that is also going to contribute to quitting a lot more easily, giving up a lot more easily. Because in the back of your head you start something telling yourself, ah, you probably ain't going to be able to do this. And so you set yourself up for failure. It's important to acknowledge what you can do and what you don't know. Hey, I want to do this, I want to try to do this, but I'm going to have to learn. And in order to learn, I will take these steps. Fear of failure and rejection is another reason that people give up really easily. If you have been raised to be perfectionistic, that it's only good enough if it's perfect, or you are only good enough if you're perfect, then you may quit really quickly on something so you don't have a lot invested and you can back out and have an excuse for not completing it. So you don't fear failure or rejection. You don't present a finished product and have somebody go, yeah, that's not quite it. If you have expectations of failure, then you may give up easily like we just talked about. And if you self handicap, it is also a way of addressing fear of failure and fear of rejection. If you know that something has to be done, but you just keep putting off doing it, you keep procrastinating. That's a way of self handicapping. So if you do it and somebody doesn't like it, you can say, oh well, I ran out of time, so you actually self handicapped, so you had an excuse for not doing it well. And I know that's not giving up so easily. Another example would be procrastinating to the point that you can't get it done and then needing to ask for an extension. And you just keep asking for extensions because you don't want to turn in a finished product and reject and risk rejection. So the Activity Identify three to five things that you have given up on easily Review the reasons we just discussed and identify which ones contributed to your giving up. Identify ways you might have been able to prevent those things from causing you to give up. And then identify one thing you're working on right now and what strategies. Now that you know some of these different strategies or different issues, what strategies can you use to prevent giving up and to keep pushing forward to achieve whatever this goal is? Behaviors Communication People give up for very different reasons. To increase your belief that you can complete the things you start, it's important to address the reasons that you give up. Start with small tasks or goals to ensure success. So start with something you can accomplish in a day or a week and examine what may make you give up there and then progress from there to some of the harder things.