3080: How to Get Back on Track with Motivation & Habits by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits on Resilience & Overcoming Setbacks

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 3080, How to Get Back on Track with Motivation and Habits by Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net And I'm Justin Malik, your personal narrator, reading to you every single day of the year with permission from the authors.

[00:00:16] Now let's get right to it as we optimize your life. How to Get Back on Track with Motivation and Habits by Leo Babauta of Zenhabits.net It happens to all of us.

[00:00:33] You're going strong with a project, with learning something new, with a new habit or two, and things go sideways. You get derailed. This is a critical junction. If you let yourself quit, all your time and effort up until now has been for naught.

[00:00:49] If you can get back on track, things can be great again. Most people don't know how to get back on track and fail repeatedly. Today, I'm going to share a simple method that works for me. Recently, I've had to use the method because of a few difficulties.

[00:01:06] First, a learning project got sidetracked. For a couple of months, I've been focusing on learning something new, but I got discouraged because, A, my learning efforts got interrupted by travel, which was a bummer. And B, I had a couple of failures that made me feel like quitting.

[00:01:25] As of a couple of days ago, I was on the brink of quitting altogether. Second, my eating habits have been cr-laly. Well, not complete cr-laly, but cr-laly enough that I felt a bit unhealthy, and haven't been able to get it back on track.

[00:01:43] And third, my focus hasn't been what it could be lately. In recent months, I was super focused on my mission, on mindfulness and meditation and helping others. In the last month, that focus hasn't been there for a variety of reasons.

[00:01:59] I haven't given up, but have definitely been sidetracked. Sounds discouraging, right? But not to fear, getting back on track is actually fairly simple. The key principle. Here's the key idea to understand. Getting off track and getting back on track is all about mood.

[00:02:21] When we get off track, it's because of things that affect our mood as it relates to the project or habit. For example, we get interrupted because of travel, illness, visitors, crises, etc. This interruption makes us feel discouraged.

[00:02:38] It's not the interruption that is the obstacle, it's the feeling of discouragement that gets in the way. Or we get tired because of travel, illness, a lack of sleep, etc. And a tiredness makes us feel unmotivated towards our project or habit.

[00:02:54] Tiredness is a huge obstacle because when you're tired, you don't feel motivated, your mood isn't as good, and you just want to comfort yourself with distractions and food, among other things. Or when things aren't going well, we can get very discouraged.

[00:03:11] We're not losing weight on our diet, exercise is harder than we fantasized about, language learning is very difficult, etc. Or when things get busy in our lives we often have to skip the habit which can make us feel bad about ourselves.

[00:03:26] When our mood as it relates to the project or habit is bad, we often feel like quitting and don't even want to think about the problem. We avoid thinking about it, turn away from it, and seek other comforts. The method

[00:03:42] How do you get back on track? Here's the method I use. Number one, admit there's a problem and ask a key question. We often want to ignore the problem and not even think about it, but this only encourages quitting.

[00:03:57] It doesn't help the problem. All we have to do is simply say, I'm feeling bad about this, I'm discouraged in thinking about quitting. Then we can ask ourselves, do I really want to quit? Or is there good reason to get back on track?

[00:04:12] Number two, take one small easy step. If you have good reason to get back on track, don't think about the entire project of getting back on track. That's too much and can be overwhelming which means we'll never start. Instead, just think of one thing you can do.

[00:04:31] For example, if you've fallen off the meditation habit, can you meditate for 30 seconds right now? 10 seconds? If you stopped listening to your language tapes, can you just do two minutes of the tapes today?

[00:04:43] If you stopped doing yoga or body weight exercises, can you just do a few minutes right now? It might seem ridiculously easy, but that's exactly what you need to do. Something tiny, anything. This is the key step so don't take it lightly.

[00:05:01] Number three, focus on getting any kind of victories. If you do 30 seconds, two minutes, whatever, you've had success. This is a victory and a victory changes your mood. If you've been trying to play chess and you've been losing and become very discouraged,

[00:05:19] then focus on doing some tactics training for one minute. That's a victory. What other kinds of victories can you get? Look for anything. Just doing another minute later today or tomorrow morning,

[00:05:32] doing a little practice on your commute, reading a little about the topic online, anything you can do. Nurture your mood. Victories change your mood. Defeats and tiredness can bring it down. So see what you can do to lift your mood up, including talking to someone else about it

[00:05:51] or making it more social, playing some good upbeat music to make it fun, making some tea or lighting some candles to make it more enjoyable, etc. And number four, build long-term strength with small steps.

[00:06:07] If you build little victories, take small steps and nurture your mood as in the previous steps, you'll start to have a more solid habit or motivation for your project. After a while, you become more robust so that a little defeat won't really matter too much.

[00:06:25] You have room for some tiredness now and then. You'll be strong and won't need to worry about all of the little mood changes. But it takes a bunch of small steps and victories to get there. So focus on one small step, one victory at a time.

[00:06:41] Don't worry about the long term, just focus on the short term and the long term strength will come. This isn't a difficult method, anyone can do it. All it takes is a small admission of struggle, a willingness to ask whether you want to get back on track

[00:06:58] and to focus on small steps and victories. That's doable and awesome. You just listened to the post titled, How to Get Back on Track with Motivation and Habits by Leo Babouda of Zenhabits.net and I'll be right back with my commentary. Thank you to Leo.

[00:07:20] He has a great story of being an overweight smoker who completely turned his life around and of course it wasn't a straight line and easy. Sometimes articles like these can make it sound that way.

[00:07:33] But this is a great one because he admits it when things don't go as planned, which is inevitable. Motivation is one thing but sticking with good habits, continually making good decisions, that's the hard part. If you're listening every day to this podcast, hopefully that's helping

[00:07:51] but I think Leo gave some simple although maybe not easy tips for us to work with. It really is all about baby steps. It's something we hear frequently on this show but they really do add up.

[00:08:03] One tiny thing a day and then a year goes by just like that and you can look back and see how far you've come. Again, certainly not easy. Just one step at a time. And with that, thank you for taking this step with me here today.

[00:08:18] I've only been able to keep doing this with you coming back to listen every day. Have a great rest of your day and I'll be back tomorrow where your optimal life awaits.