The 1 Thing You Need to Know To Set Yourself Up for Success

It’s Monday morning. The alarm goes off at 6 a.m. You know what that means – pulling back the covers and venturing into the cold reality of work, school, or other obligations looming over your head.

That snooze button is looking more and more enticing by the minute.

The key to finding your motivation, and to keeping yourself from throwing your alarm clock out the window, is simple:

Realize you are never going to “feel like it”.

According to Mel Robbins’ 5 Second Rule, each of us has 5 seconds to decide whether we are going to do something. If we don’t, we hesitate. And when we hesitate, we make excuses.

We hit the snooze button.

Life is about decisions. No, not necessarily who you are going to marry or what job you are going to take decisions. Decisions like choosing what we eat for lunch or what we watch on TV or whether or not we are going to wear a one-piece or a two-piece suit to the pool – these are decisions that affect our lives, too.

We live in the greatest time period in history so far. Why? Because we have the power of the Internet. We are literally a click away from anything in the world we want to know. Google is the modern-day Edison, and it’s calling you to invent the next lightbulb. So what’s stopping you?

Fear is the overriding factor in our decision-making process. If we don’t react within the first five seconds, we are left doubting ourselves. Every day we have ideas come to us, yet we deny ourselves the ability to share them.

Fear of what others think. Fear of being wrong. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of failure.
And yet the most successful people in this world dealt with failure, too. When Edison was asked how he felt to have failed so many times, he replied, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Maybe you’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.

So let’s change that.

Understanding Change

We must acknowledge the Spotlight Effect, first and foremost. According to Robbins, our brains make risks appear much larger than they really are to keep us from encountering problems; to keep us safe.

Once we acknowledge that fear is keeping us from realizing our potential and fulfilling our need of exploration, we can allow change into our lives. We don’t have to settle and fall into the fallacy of sunk costs.

This theory promotes the idea that, whether money or time was lost, it is gone now, and there is no point in dwelling on it and making yourself more miserable. If you want to make a change, make a change.

Find the activation energy inside of you and utilize it. This energy is what it takes to get you going – it is significantly less than what it takes you to continue.

Motivation, all in all, is trash. Why? Because there will never be a “perfect time” to do something. You must find it within yourself to avoid the snooze button, get your butt out of bed and create a new. My husband would say, “Be more. Live more. Give more.”

What? You don’t feel like it? (Ha!) Well, you have 5 seconds…

Just decide.

The results will follow.

What is the one decision that could transform your current lifestyle into a healthy lifestyle?  Join the conversation by leaving your comment below.