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August 23, 2004
Excerpts From Books - Continued
7.) Perfectionism: You defeat yourself with inappropriate goals and standards.
8.) Fear of Failure: You imagine that putting in the effort and not succeeding would be an overwhelming personal defeat, you refuse to try at all. Thinking errors are overgeneralization - also you evaluate your performance exclusively on the outcome regardless of your individual effort.
9.) Fear of Success: Because of your lack of confidence, success may seem even more risky than failure because you are certain it is based on chance.
10.) Fear of Disapproval or Criticism: You imagine that you try something new, any mistake or flub will be met with strong disapproval and criticism because the people you care about won't accept you if you are human and imperfect. The risk of rejection seems so dangerous that to protect yourself you adopt as low a profile as possible. If you don't make any effort, you can't goof up.
11.) Coercion and Resentment: A deadly enemy of motivation is a sense of coercion. You feel under intense pressure to perform - generated from within and without. This happens when you try to motivate yourself with moralistic "shoulds" and "oughts". You feel obligated, burdened, tense, resentful and guilty.
12.) Low Frustration Tolerance: You assume that you shuld be able to solve your problems and reach your goals rapidly and easily, so you go into a frenzied state of panic and rage when life presents you with obstacles. This is also called the Entitlement syndrome because you feel and act as if you were entitled to success, love, approval, perfect health, happiness etc. Your frustration results from your habit of comparing reality with an ideal in your head. When the two don't match, you condemn reality. It doesn't occur to you that it might be infinitely easier simply to change your expectations than to bend and twist reality.
13.) Guilt and Self-Blame: If you are frozen in the conviction you are bad or have let others down, you will naturally fell unmotivated to pursue your daily life.
Now - So what - What can I do about all this do-nothingism?
Do you know why virtually any meaningful activity has a decent chance of brightening your mood? If you do nothing, you will become preoccupied with the flood of negative, destructive thoughts. If you do something, wou will be temporarily distracted from that internal dialogue of self-denigration. What is even more important, the sense of mastery you will experience will disprove many of the distorted thoughts that slowed you down in the first place.
What comes first - motivation or action? Motivation does not come first, action does. You have to prime the pump. Then you will begin to get motivated, and the fluids will flow spontaneously. Individuals who procrastinate frequently confuse motivation and action. You foolishly wait until you feel in the mood to do something. Since you don't feel like doing it, you automatically put it off. Your error in your belief that motivation comes first, and then leads to action and success. But it is usually the other way around; action must come first, and the motivation comes later on.
Posted by Nealus at August 23, 2004 08:11 PM
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