Are you right now, this moment, moving yourself towards your goals? Or are you spending time in a side activity? Maybe you forgot to stay “on track” and you’re stuck being counter-productive.
It happens. You lose focus. You get tempted with another activity. And you may even ask yourself “Why can’t I switch to what I really want to do?”
Here’s something I call the Motivational Question Process – MQP – consisting of four questions. Ask yourself these questions, and you may be helped by taking you from doing a less-important activity to a more – or most – important one.
Use this technique when you are stuck in a pattern of doing things that are not making you feel fulfilled. It is designed to help balance your ultimate goal against your immediate desire, to re-energize the motivation to take action towards your vision in life.
Here are the four questions, identified by their keywords: Now, Needed, Nuance, and Next:
Now: What are you doing now? Think about the activity that you are doing at this moment… what your activity will be for the rest of this minute or this hour. Call this your activity-momentum… where your current energy was headed.
Needed: What result are you working towards, but currently not on track towards? You may already have this in your mind; this activity is what you need to do. What course of action will move you towards your future happiness – towards your goals and vision of the future? This is not about finding your vision, but thinking about one of the parts of your vision, and focusing on it.
Nuance: Shift from future pain to future gain. How will you feel later about successfully changing – nuancing – your activity back on track? Honestly think about how you will feel later about your current activity and momentum… what unimportant act you “were” going to do next? Become, for a moment, yourself in the future and be critical of what you did, versus what you could have done. But there is still time. Why punish yourself later after you’ve wasted time, when you can imagine it now before it’s too late? Imagine how upset you’ll be with taking the wrong action, and then use that emotion to change your direction while you have time. As you visualize the undesired future in your mind, replace it with how you will feel when you have moved – even in one small step – towards what you want for yourself in your life. Imagine yourself happy with yourself, for having switched focus back on track.
Next: Find the very next step… an activity that you can do right now… that is part of what will get you towards your vision. What small action can you take to shift your mind to focus and continue to take action towards your goals? It could be calling someone, updating your plan, doing part of an activity, or writing an email… even writing a single word and focusing on it… a basic action that is only second or minutes, and leads to other ones. It can even be an action that you can start to take the second that you think about it.
Then do it. Put your mind into the focused state that sees you as having already started, and follow through with action. I’ll stop here so you can do just that, right now!