Motivation For Downshifters In 4 Easy Stages – Part One.

Are you committed to downshifting or de-stressing your life but can’t find the motivation you need to take the first step? Are there some external factors in your life, such as hefty mortgage repayments or an unsupportive partner that you feel are preventing you from realising your dream? Some conventional methods for moving ourselves forward in situations such as these often fall short on staying power and realism, so I’ve come up with an alternative, easier approach.

The Problem

Entrenched Habits. I believe the biggest single factor that keeps us in a high stress, high paced lifestyle when we know it is not doing us any good is our habits. For most of us who have been raised in the West, this is so deeply entrenched that we rarely stop to even question whether there is another way. Habits such as spending hours each day commuting, racing against the clock, writing “to do” lists that do not include time to rest or eating on the run have become a way of life that can seem like a serious challenge to break.

Comfort Zone. You may well have already heard of the term “comfort zone”. Our personal collection of habits, favourable or not, are what makes up our individual comfort zones. That’s the irony of this situation and we remain in our comfort zones, acting mostly out of our habits, because it feels comfortable and familiar, not because it’s necessarily the best thing for us, our friends and loved ones or the planet.

Waking up. The first sign that we are starting to wake up to our dilemma is when we start to become aware of our behaviour and it’s detrimental effects and question the reasoning behind it. For some people a moment of intense stress triggers this realisation, for others it is a more gradual and evolving sense of a new perspective.

Conventional Wisdom on Changing Habits

Will power. Will power is when we force ourselves to act despite what our values may be telling us. When we are engaging our will power, we are likely to force extra tasks into the time available expending even more energy on projects and activities that are not helpful to us. This just leads to more stress. First we need to free up some space and time in which to address how we want our life to change.

Metamorphosis – a new view.

Apparently, when a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, rather than the butterfly growing out of the caterpillar, the caterpillar disintegrates into a kind of chemical soup inside the chrysalis and it is out of this soup that the butterfly emerges. In a similar way, for us to change our lifestyle in a way that is sustainable (i.e. robust, self-contained and long-lived) we need to completely break down our old decision-making process and come up with some totally different approaches to motivating ourselves.

The Four Stages

There are other, much easier and more pleasant ways of motivating ourselves to change our lives for the better and I’ve devised a 4 stage process to help you.

1) Responsibility

Taking responsibility for changing our lives is all about deciding to respond rather than react to situations we find ourselves in. Ultimately, the individual choices we make at all the little crossroads we encounter through our days and weeks, determine which route our life will take. When we react to situations, we act out of habit without questioning why we make the choices we make. On the other hand, when we respond to situations, we question our habits and engage more consciously with making new choices. We can then make choices that are more appropriate for the person we are now.

So, this is about deciding to take control of our life as it is now rather than reacting in accordance with our conditioning from the past.

Since it is our thoughts that determine our actions, we can choose to stop being the victims of our unconscious actions and instead be the master of our conscious choices.

2) Re-view

Who are we now and who do we want to become?

What we do in the present will determine who we become in the future. If you don’t believe me then carry out a personal audit of just one major aspect of your life e.g. your physical health, and notice to what extent the state of your health now has been determined by the decisions you’ve made in the past about what to eat, how to exercise and when and how to relax. If your physical health is not great and you find the audit a bit depressing, you might like to focus on the opportunities you have now that you’ve decided to reclaim your responsibility.