PPI #170: 6 Ways To Get Back On Track When You’ve Lost Your Way

Hey everybody, today I'm going to share with you six strategies that you can use when you feel stuck so that you can get your life back on track. Because let's face it, we can't always be happy feeling successful, productive and energetic at all times. Sometimes we feel a little bit down, a little bit depressed, and we don't feel like doing anything. But today you're going to learn how to get yourself out of that rut.

Hi, I'm Eric Partaker and I've been recognized as the CEO of the year. And I'm also the author of two best selling books including the Three Alarms. So number one, move and get active. Move and be active. Our bodies are meant to move. You know, human beings are not meant to be sitting down all the time. And one of the things that I've always recognized with myself is that when I'm feeling down or a little bit depressed or not on top of my game, I immediately have trained myself through experience to realize that I need to go to the gym or I need to do a workout. Because when you do a moderate amount of exercise, moderate meaning, you know, moderate exertion level, it releases a whole cocktail of positive hormones in your body that not only make you feel good, but right there in that moment, but also make you feel a lot more positive and energetic just, you know, going forward, also just improve your mental health in the long term. And so, you know, again, a lot of times when I'm not feeling at the top of my game, I realize that all I need is a good workout or, you know, a good bout of exercise. And that's because I believe that 90% of my psychology is driven by my physiology. By going and working out, I'm getting that positive relief of endorphins. I feel the serotonin after feeling proud about myself or completing the workout. And I get that dopamine rush of knowing that I've done the right thing as well. And all that gratification feels good, changes my frame of mind and helps me go after the things that I know I should be going after that before I did the exercise, I, I had no will or desire to do. And I'll give you a really interesting fact that when you do just 20 minutes of moderate exertion exercise and ideally in the morning, so you can benefit from what I'm about to say. So when you do that exercise, you actually get a 12 hour mood boost that's equivalent in strength to taking an antidepressant tablet. So all of that benefit with zero side effects. So Move and be active. Number two, write down your reason why. Why are you doing the things that you're doing? Why are you pursuing the career that you're pursuing? What is your why? What is your why in life? I'll give you an example with me. So I know a lot of other, you know, coaches and mentors and authors in my space, and a lot of them think of themselves as coaches, as a mentor, as an author. I think of myself a little bit differently. I think of myself as the world's biggest problem solver or that I'm. In other words, I'm trying to solve the world's biggest problem. What is that problem? Well, Abraham Maslow, preeminent psychologist from the United States, came up with his hierarchy of needs. And at the top of his pyramid, he said that our path to deepest fulfillment lies in reaching our fullest potential and utilizing our fullest capabilities. And he estimated only 2% of people do that. So my big why is to help more people gain entry to that 2% club, to help more people break free from that 98% and join the 2% of people estimated to be operating to their fullest capabilities. And this for me, is a lot more fulfilling than just thinking of myself as either a coach or a mentor, an advisor or author. No, I'm tackling what I believe is the world's best biggest problem, that the vast majority of people aren't playing the game that they're capable of playing. Number three, consume powerful and inspiring content for the mind. Self development. Working on yourself, working on your personal growth and development is absolutely exhilarating. And it's so perfectly suited to also helping you get out of those low points, those ruts that you're in. Put on your favorite podcast or listen to some inspirational, you know, talks, or watch an inspirational video, or if you prefer reading, read something that inspires you to greater heights. But make sure that you're constantly filling your mind with things that make you feel strong and confident and good about yourself and make you feel that you're able to not just survive and thrive when things are going well, but that you build up that foundation, you know, almost like that insulation that helps you when things get dark and cold and when you reach the bottom so that you can better navigate and your way back to the top. Number four, if you feel like you've lost your way, it could be because you don't know where you're going. I mean, the surest way to kind of wander around aimlessly in any situation is to not know where you're going. Imagine for example, if you just got into your car and just started driving with no rhyme or reason to where you were going, eventually you would be lost. Eventually you would lose your way. And it's the same with our lives. If we don't know where we're going, if we, if we don't have a vision for our life, if we don't have goals that we're working towards, it can feel aimless. And when things start to feel aimless, given that we are very goal oriented beings, when things feel aimless in that we have nothing to aim for, we start to drift, we start to lose our way, we start to feel not so great about things. So if you haven't sat down to think about what are your most important goals? What would you like to be doing health wise, what would you like to be doing wealth and work wise, what would you like to be doing on the home front with your relationships? Take time to actually write those things down. Even if you just took 10 minutes, taking some time versus no time will at least give you that fuel, that target, that something that you can aim for so that things don't feel lost or aimless. Number five, if you feel like you've lost your weight, time to check in with your just general motivation. So take some of the things that you know you should be working towards and put them through what's called the motivation equation. So this is based on the largest ever peer review research of all the articles and scientific studies that relate to motivation. And the result of that was this equation that motivation equals value times expectancy. These are in the numerator over impulsivity by times delay. And what we want to do is we want to maximize the things that are in the numerator. We want to maximize the value of whatever it is that we're working towards and our expectancy that we can do it. And we want to minimize the things in the denominator, want to minimize our impulsivity, which is simply our likelihood of becoming distracted when we're working towards that thing. And we want to minimize delay how long it's going to take to first experience success on our path to achieving whatever it is we're trying to have the motivation for. So value times expectancy or value and expectancy, you want to maximize both of these. How do you do that? Check in with value. Check in with, well, why are you doing this? What are the benefits that you would receive? Take some time to spell that out to yourself. Why would this be valuable for me? That's very Important to check in with that from a motivation point of view. And then expectancy, that's something that we want to increase as well, which will positively influence our motivation. And how do we increase expectancy? Well, expectancy is simply our expectation that we can achieve whatever it is that we're working on. So, so how can we increase that? Multiple ways? We can remember back to similar things that we've done in the past that required the same amount of effort or had the same amount of challenge. We can look at other people who have done it. We can just simply have the realization that everything always seems challenging and difficult until we get started. That's just life impulsivity in the denominator. How do we minimize that? How do we minimize our likelihood of becoming distracted whenever we're working on what's very important to us that we want to stay motivated for or towards? Well, we can do that by one way is to optimize our environment. So if we want to be doing or working productively towards something, make sure that there's nothing in our environment during the time that we want to be doing this work that is likely to distract us from getting the work done. This could be your telephone. This could be social media. This could be simply working in the wrong environment. Like, for example, needing to have a very, very quiet environment for. If you're writing up a report as an example, but yet you find yourself in a very busy and loud coffee shop, well, probably not going to be great for your motivation because it's going to be very hard to minimize the distraction. And then the last component is delay. And so how do we minimize delay? How do we minimize the length of time that it's going to take before we get that first taste of success? And we do that by chunking down our goals. So how can we break down our goals into smaller steps, little milestones on the way to whatever it is that we're trying to achieve?

Okay.

And last but not least, if you feel you've lost your way, make sure that you're making the right payment. Nothing in life comes for free. It requires some form of payment. And you can either pay through the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. And I'll give you some examples. So when it comes to the health front, for me, so the number of days that I absolutely want to go to the gym, if I'm being dead honest, it's probably only, you know, half the time, sometimes even less than that. But I know that if I don't go to the gym and do my workout that I'll regret it later. It might not be immediately, it might be not even the next week, but it will happen within a month or two months as I get more and more out of shape. And I know through experience that that pain of that regret is much, much greater than the smaller pain on a daily basis of discipline, of doing the things that need to be done whether I feel like doing them or not. Another quick example of making the right payment Pain of discipline versus the pain of regret Choosing my pain wisely would be with content production, with my blog, with my email newsletter, with all the social media posting, with the video creation and production. It all requires effort and it's very, very easy to stop. It's very, very easy to say I just want to take a break off a month to two, three months. But then I know I'll regret that later. And so while it still is difficult and requires discipline to continue working consistently in all those areas, I do that because I know that the pain of discipline right now, the pain of discipline to do that work is still less than the pain of regret that I'll feel for not doing the work later.

And I'd love to hear from you. So don't forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And and if you'd like to get a copy of my new book the Three Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com that's E R I C eric partaker.com where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best selling book the Three Alarms.