How to Motivate Yourself to Do Something Difficult
The next time you come across a difficult, time-consuming, or boring task, don’t tell yourself that you will do it later. Tell yourself that it will be difficult, time consuming and boring. Admit that you will hate every minute of it. Allow yourself to admit that it sucks – and then, oddly enough, you may be motivated to end it.
Recent research by David J. Hardisty and Elke W. Weber (from the Universities of British Columbia and Princeton, respectively) shows that people tend to end positive experiences as quickly as possible and postpone negative experiences for as long as possible, which is in itself it’s kind of an easy task, but there is a slightly interesting twist to the story. Let me quote directly from Hardisty and Weber’s book Impatience and Pleasure Versus. Fear :
While expectation of positive events includes positive experiences of pleasure but also negative experiences of anticipation, anticipation of negative events includes negative feelings of fear and negative experiences of anticipation.
In other words: the time between the present moment and a positive experience is filled with both good and bad emotions. The time between the present moment and the negative experience is filled with only bad emotions . For example, every time you look at a pile of papers on your kitchen counter, you experience both negative feelings of dread and negative feelings associated with the realization that you are still putting off this difficult, time-consuming, and boring task.
This brings us to the point of curbing the shit. Here’s how Fast Company puts it :
The key to keeping tasks off your to-do list is to curb the psychological discomfort of fear, which is negative and unpleasant, and therefore, most people seek to get rid of it.
It’s kind of an extrapolation of Hardy and Weber’s ideas, but it’s an interesting concept. Instead of dealing with the slow flow of negative feelings you get every time you hear, like dripping slowly from a bathroom faucet that you still haven’t repaired , you can accept the fact that you have a bunch of things. negative feelings: frustration, boredom, confusion, the special feeling that comes with the knowledge that the task you were hoping for may take only ten minutes, in fact it will take the whole day … If you admit that it will be terrible, And – here’s the thing: you already experience this fear every time you think about the task ahead, and in any case, you may find yourself motivated to finally cross it off your to-do list.
Fast Company notes that this also works well for difficult conversations. In my personal experience (and I can’t be the only one who is true), the agony of repeating potential arguments over and over in my head is always much worse than anything that happens during a real argument. Tough conversations are difficult, but sometimes they are much easier than imagining all the ways they could go wrong.
So the next time you find yourself walking past this pile of paperwork, washing your hands under a leaking tap, or worrying about a conversation you would like to postpone indefinitely, tell yourself that you are not going to throw whatever you want. this is bigger. You are going to do it and it will suck, but then it will be done and you can stop being afraid of it.
If you can’t do something right now, add it to your calendar to do it in the near future. This way, you can start to happily anticipate all the positive emotions you will experience when this awful task is finally completed.