Saturday, October 20, 2018
Sunday, August 5, 2018
Thursday, August 2, 2018
How To Create A Productive Mindset
When it comes to create a productive mindset, a lot of us seem to have the hardest time. Most people get into procrastination mode which is usually an easier choice but is the habit of putting off what you want to start. Therefore, how you can win the battle to build a fruitful frame of mind?
As you know, each of us is different, so it is quite important that you structure your day in a way that works for you. First of all, you should observe your daily routine and be honest with yourself by looking if you do have a productive mindset or if you are just being busy, and correct that.
How productive your mindset often begins with your thoughts and habits. You always must start your day by being grateful for what is about to start. Always be ready for possibilities. Plans often change or get rescheduled leaving you with some free time.
You have to picture what you want and visualize it. It helps you focus and gives you an ideal image of what the outcome could look like. Without a picture in your mind, it is quite challenging to have the productive mindset to achieve a goal. People with a vision can accomplish what seems impossible.
You have to cultivate and motivate your mindset for it to be productive. Without motivation or inspiration, there is nothing to drive you to set goals, apply, improve and make progress. Inaction and procrastination destroy any improvement you wish to make or dream you want to realize.
You have to believe that you are capable of doing what you set your mind to do. Self-confidence can help you reach your full potential and a more productive mindset. Stress is a natural reaction, so you have to relax by taking a deep breath and a small reflective pause. Then refocus on the day ahead. It will give you greater confidence.
In today's world, our mind runs through a list of dozens of things simultaneously. Some of those things keep us living in the future, while memories, good or bad, retain us in the past. Yet, to create a productive mindset is to live in the beauty of the present.
In creating a productive mindset, your attitude has to be positive rather than negative, because it can make you or break you. When you have a positive outlook, it allows room for opportunity and option, while having a negative attitude defeat your frame of mind before you even begin.
Most of us know that the path to success does not come easily. So, you have to be persistent and willing to overcome any barrier or adversity coming your way. Push yourself beyond your limits and persist to achieve your goals. Do not let setbacks, circumstances, or even the opinions of others influence your actions and your determination to become successful.
To experience a productive mindset, you have to be at your best. That means you have to take care of yourself. Getting some rest and enough sleep each night is essential. You have to eat right and give yourself a few small breaks during the day. And you should always be aware of how you feel.
- Write a to-do list for the day the night before. It will help you keep focusing on what you need to get done so that you will have a more productive mindset.
- Get enough sleep, because if you do not, your fatigue will eat away at your productivity. A lack of sleep has an apparent impact on any mental performance.
- Be motivated as it is a crucial element in working towards your goals. You need to have something that is pulling you towards achieving the success you want in life.
- Start your work with the most essential task. It is an excellent approach if you have the discipline to see to it.
- Cultivate the persistence to keep going, even when it is hard. To be persistent and never giving up is essential to any long-term success.
- Always hold a mental picture of the vision of the life that you want for yourself. It is that vision that will guide you and help you to create a more productive mindset through your day.
- Control your attitude and how you feel about things, no matter the circumstances. Even if you feel like you cannot control outside factors, you should positively view everything as it is an absolute necessity.
- Create a routine that helps you awaken your brain and mind, give you motivation and shows you a clear picture of your vision.
- Have an evening routine. Following the same ritual every evening, such as making yourself a caffeine-free hot drink, brushing your teeth, then dressing for bed, helps you get into the right state of mind for sleep.
- Take time to regenerate, recharge and refresh. That way, you will always keep a productive mindset.
Finally, whether you are already committed, wandering on the path of least resistance or basking in the waters of procrastination, you now have different tools to be more productive. To be productive means that you are doing what you said you would do, and usually in a specific time frame.
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Mastering Motivation - Lessons in Creating Forever Change - How to Stay Motivated When You Don't Feel Like It
Self-Trust
What to Do When Motivation Runs Out
Nobody feels motivated permanently, and waiting to feel it before you act is the quiet reason so many good intentions never make it past the second week.
A Note From the Elite VIP Circle Editorial Team
If you have started something with real excitement, watched that excitement fade within weeks, and quietly assumed something was wrong with you, we want to offer a different explanation: nothing is wrong with you, motivation was simply never built to last on its own, and the people who keep going are not the ones who feel it more often, they are the ones who stopped waiting for it.
Why "Motivation" Is Such a Slippery Word
Ask ten people to define motivation and you will get ten different answers, and it is worth knowing that this is not because any of them are wrong, it is because the word is genuinely being asked to do too much work. For one person it is a feeling that shows up before a run. For another it is simply a reason they have to do something, five children to provide for, a father's heart attack to avoid repeating. Fear can motivate. Vanity can motivate. Hunger can motivate. The word covers all of it, which is part of why it feels so hard to pin down, and why advice about "finding your motivation" so often falls flat, it is trying to locate one thing when what is actually being described is a whole family of different pushes and pulls.
This article is not really about that whole family. It is about the specific kind of motivation people mean when they talk about lasting change, the new habit, the improved health, the different relationship with money or work, and specifically about what happens to that motivation once the initial excitement wears off, which it reliably does.
The Problem With Treating Motivation as a Feeling
For most of us, motivation shows up as an emotional state, a genuine lift, and for a while it works exactly as advertised. You feel it, you act on it, things move. The trouble is that feelings, by their nature, fluctuate, they always have, and when the feeling fades, which it will, the behaviour built entirely on top of it tends to fade with it. This is not a character flaw. It is simply what happens when a changeable thing is asked to be the sole foundation for something that needs to last.
Editorial Insight: Most of us alternate between can't-be-bothered, kinda-motivated and genuinely in the zone, often within the same day. That alternation is not evidence that something is broken in you, it is closer to the default operating condition of being human, which is exactly why building anything lasting on top of it alone rarely works.
This is also, honestly, why most people who start things do not finish them. Not because they lack ambition or willpower in some deep sense, but because the plan was quietly relying on a feeling to stay constant when nothing about feelings works that way. We start the book and get to chapter two. We join the gym and go four times. We change how we eat, for three days. None of that is a personal failing so much as a predictable outcome of the approach.
The Shift That Actually Works: Behaviour Before Feeling
The more useful reframe, and the one this article is really built around, is that motivation works better as a commitment and a choice than as a feeling you wait to arrive. That sounds like a small distinction. In practice it changes almost everything about how you approach a hard day.
The pattern tends to run in an order most people assume is backwards: you choose to act, you act despite not feeling like it, and only afterward does the feeling of motivation actually show up, often within a short amount of time. Acting first is not a trick or a workaround, it reflects something genuinely true about how emotional state tends to follow behaviour at least as often as it precedes it. Change your posture, your pace, your tone, your follow-through, and the internal state has a way of catching up to match it.
Try This: Next time you catch yourself thinking "I can't be bothered today," do the smallest version of the task anyway, just the first two minutes of it, before deciding whether to stop. Notice whether the reluctance is still as strong once you are already moving.
How to Actually Keep Going
Decide before the moment arrives, not during it. Waiting until you are standing in front of the decision, gym bag in hand, alarm going off, to figure out whether you feel like it, hands the whole outcome to whatever mood happens to be passing through that morning. Deciding in advance, the night before, the week before, removes the negotiation entirely, there is nothing left to talk yourself out of in the moment because the moment was already decided.
Act the part before you feel it. Posture, pace, tone, and follow-through can be chosen independently of how you feel, and choosing them tends to shift the feeling that follows. This is not about performing enthusiasm you do not have, it is closer to giving your own state something concrete to catch up to.
Attach the goal to a plan that expects the bad days. Spur of the moment, purely emotional decisions rarely produce change that lasts, because they were never built to survive the inevitable dip. A plan that already accounts for the fact that motivation will run hot and cold is a plan that does not collapse the first time it does.
If perfectionism or over-preparing is part of what keeps a plan stuck at the planning stage, our guide on how to stop overthinking and start moving forward goes deeper into that specific pattern.
Let small, finished things count. A ten-minute version of the task, completed, tends to do more for your follow-through over time than an ambitious version that gets abandoned halfway. Finishing, at any size, is the skill actually being practised here.
Expect the fluctuation instead of being derailed by it. A bad day, a flat week, a stretch where nothing feels exciting, is not evidence the plan has failed. It is simply what the middle of any real change tends to feel like, and knowing that in advance tends to make it far less likely to actually stop you.
Books That Can Support This Practice
Reading is not a requirement for any of the above, but for readers who want a more structured companion, here are two resources from our approved library worth knowing about.
EDITOR’S CHOICEAtomic Habits by James Clear. We recommend this first because it is built entirely around the idea at the centre of this article, that consistent small systems outlast dependence on feeling, and it gives that idea far more practical structure than a single article can. It is best suited to readers who want a concrete system to build, not just a mindset shift, and it complements the "decide before the moment arrives" practice above directly.
SUPPORTING RESOURCEStop Overthinking by Nick Trenton. This one is here for a different reason, for readers whose stalled plans have less to do with lacking motivation and more to do with getting stuck circling a decision before ever acting on it. It suits anyone who recognises the "ten years of planning" pattern in themselves, and it pairs naturally with the point above about deciding before the moment arrives.
What This Looks Like in an Ordinary Week
Picture the morning the alarm goes off and the honest first thought is that you cannot be bothered. The version of this that actually works is rarely a burst of sudden enthusiasm talking you out of that thought, it is getting up anyway, doing the smallest possible version of the plan, and letting the feeling catch up or not, since either way the action already happened. Do that enough times and something genuinely shifts, not because the flat mornings stop coming, they will not, but because you stop needing them to feel a certain way before you are willing to move.
Key Takeaways
- Motivation is a fluctuating emotional state, not a fixed resource you either have or don't
- Behaviour can precede feeling, act first and the motivation often follows, not the other way around
- Deciding in advance removes the in-the-moment negotiation that derails most plans
- Lasting change depends on a plan that already expects the low days, not one that assumes constant enthusiasm
- Small, finished actions build the habit of follow-through more reliably than ambitious, abandoned ones
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do I lose motivation so quickly after starting something new?
Because the initial burst of motivation is an emotional state, and emotional states fluctuate by nature. If the new habit was relying entirely on that feeling staying constant, the habit tends to fade at the same rate the feeling does.
Is it possible to feel motivated all the time?
No, and expecting to is part of what makes the drop feel like failure rather than simply what was always going to happen. Most people move between low-motivation and high-motivation states regularly, sometimes within the same day.
Can you really act motivated before you feel it?
Yes, and for many people this is the more reliable direction. Choosing the behaviour first, posture, pace, follow-through, often shifts the internal state to match it, rather than waiting for the state to arrive on its own first.
What is the single biggest mistake people make with motivation?
Treating it as something to wait for rather than something to decide in advance. Plans made in the moment, based purely on how you happen to feel that day, are the ones most likely to collapse the first time the feeling dips.
Conclusion
Motivation was never going to hold steady on its own, that was never really the problem to solve. The more useful question is not how to feel motivated more often, it is how to keep going on the days you do not, and that turns out to be entirely learnable, through decisions made in advance, small actions that get finished, and a plan honest enough to expect the low days rather than be derailed by them.
Want a Structured Way to Put This Into Practice?
The VIP Performance Playbook walks you through building consistency, confidence, and follow-through into a single, practical system, the natural next step once you have read the theory.
Affiliate Disclosure: This article may contain Amazon affiliate links. Elite VIP Circle may earn a commission on qualifying purchases made through these links, at no additional cost to you. Every recommendation reflects our genuine editorial assessment.