Raise Your Mood By Overcoming Obstacles

WE HAVE GOALS — things we want to accomplish. And we really do want to accomplish them; we’re not trying to fool anyone or pump things up. But sometimes we give up on our goals. Why?

All goals have obstacles to their achievement, things in the way. These are problems or difficulties we meet on the way to the goal that we must handle in order to achieve the goal.

What makes us give up is when it looks like we won’t be able to overcome the obstacles. They seem too big or too numerous. When we feel sure we can’t do it, we tend to give up.

What are the alternatives to giving up? Below are three. They are stated simply. Please do not discount them because of their brevity or simplicity. The fact that they are stated simply and briefly merely makes them easier to use and therefore more powerful, not less.

Get help. There are people who want to help you. Enlist their aid. The more help you get, the sooner you’ll succeed.

Tackle the obstacles one at a time. When you try to tackle all the obstacles, or just look at all the obstacles at the same time, it can overwhelm you. The feeling of being completely outgunned can take the wind out of your sails before you even get started. Pick one obstacle — an easy one — and tackle that first. Don’t even think about the rest of them. It’s likely that after you’ve tackled one obstacle, you’ll be in a better, stronger position to handle the next one, and so on.

Get some training or knowledge that will make you more able to deal with the obstacles. Read, study, practice. As you gain in ability, the obstacles shrink in comparison.

NEXT TIME you are overwhelmed by obstacles, try one, two, or all three of these alternatives to giving up. You’ll find they work. Using them, you’ll discover new strength and zeal to keep your dream alive and accomplish your goal.

The article above is a chapter from Principles for Personal Growth.

When you have five minutes to watch a video, check out a good example of someone overcoming the obstacles to losing 120 pounds, and raising his mood in the process: Prepare to Be Inspired.

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Screen-Free Week

SCREEN-FREE WEEK is here (April 18-24, 2011)! It's an annual celebration where children, families, schools, and communities turn off screens and turn on life. If you haven't done it yet, try going one day without any viewing any screens.

The motivation behind this annual event begins with this simple fact: Excessive screen time is harmful for children. Time with screens is linked to poor school performance, childhood obesity, and attention problems. And it is primarily through screens that children are exposed to harmful marketing. Regardless of whether they are consuming “good” or “bad” programming, it’s clear that screen media dominates the lives of far too many children, displacing all sorts of other activities that are integral to childhood.

Screen-Free Week is a fun and innovative opportunity to improve children’s well-being by reducing dependence on entertainment screen media, including television, video games, computers, and hand-held devices. It’s a chance for children — and their parents — to examine their relationship with entertainment media and rediscover the joys of life beyond the screen. That’s why more than 60 prominent organizations have endorsed Screen-Free Week.

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Raise your mood with one finger

Accomplish more and have more enjoyment by forgoing the screen

Find out more about Screen-Free Week

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Get Out of a Funk

I OCCASIONALLY have what I call a "doubt funk." It usually happens when I'm in the middle of a big project and I start thinking maybe there is a better use of my time; maybe I should be doing something different; maybe this project will fail; maybe my destiny lies somewhere else and I'm wasting my time.

I never seem to get a doubt funk between projects. I'm great at thinking up new goals and I get very enthusiastic about them. But I suppose it is "the grass is always greener" because no matter what I am working on, I can think of a hundred other projects that might be a better use of my time and I have doubts about what I'm doing. I've aborted a lot of perfectly good projects because of it. I have several half-finished books sitting in my filing cabinets. Lots of projects of different kinds down through the years never saw the light of day because a doubt funk came along and deflated my motivation.

I just had a doubt funk recently about this article, but doubt funks don't stop me any more. A few years ago I learned the right way to handle one: Finish the project. That will get the most done with the greatest fun in my lifetime. Half-finished projects are a waste of time. To spend all that time getting something halfway done and then stopping means all the hours spent on the project were wasted. Wasting time is demoralizing.

I got the answer to doubt funks when I read a true story by A.J. Cronin. When Cronin was 33, he was a doctor in London. Once in awhile, he experienced doubt funks, thinking maybe he should specialize in a different kind of medical practice. He worried that what he was doing wasn't good enough. He eventually developed an ulcer and his doctor prescribed the standard treatment of the time: six months "complete rest in the country on a milk diet."

He went to a small farm outside a village in the Scottish Highlands. After about a week, this man with overactive adrenal glands was climbing the walls. His mind was thrashing around for something to do. Then he realized he'd always wanted to write a novel if he ever found the time, and now he had the time! So he began.

After three months of being engrossed in the project, he sent his handwritten pages to his secretary to type up for him. When he received his first chapter and read it, he was devastated. It was terrible. He realized he had no business trying to be a writer. In his anguish he grabbed the whole manuscript and threw it into the trash.

Feeling glad and relieved that he had "come to his senses," he went for a walk. He saw Angus, the farmer, and stopped to chat, as he often did. When Cronin told Angus what he had just done, Angus was silent for a long time; then he said, "My father ditched this bog all his days and never made a pasture." He stopped digging and looked at Cronin. "I've dug it all my days and never made a pasture. But pasture or no pasture," said Angus as he pushed the shovel back into the bog, "I canna help but dig. For my father knew and I know that if you only dig enough a pasture can be made here."

Angus kept digging. Doggedly. Relentlessly. Unmercifully. Cronin stood there watching him, and while he watched he experienced an intense personal crisis and then a revelation. Cronin saw his situation as the pattern he'd followed all his life: He would start off in a particular direction and never get anywhere because doubt would overtake him halfway through it.

And then he saw it as a pattern and revelation not just for himself, but for all of humanity. He wrote later, "In this present chaos, with no shining vision to sustain us, the door is wide open to darkness and despair. The way to close that door is to stick to the job that we are doing, no matter how insignificant that job may be, to go on doing it, and to finish it."

Cronin stomped back to his room and pulled his manuscript out of the trash. He was angry, ashamed, determined. He got back to work on the manuscript and would not stop, no matter what kind of doubt or frustration he encountered, he kept working until he finally finished the damned thing.

He randomly chose a publisher out of a catalog and mailed off the manuscript. Then he relaxed and recovered from his ulcer.

Just as he was finally preparing to head back to London, he received a telegram from the publisher: they were interested. Unbelievably, this manuscript that he had thrown away was published as a novel and sold three million copies. It was even made into a Hollywood movie.

The answer to a doubt funk is the same for you and me as it was for Cronin: to go to work on the current project, determined and resolute, and to finish it.

Another important factor affecting your feelings of doubt is your "explanatory style," that is, the habitual way you explain setbacks to yourself. Some ways of explaining setbacks leave your determination intact or even strengthen it. Other ways demoralize you and can lead to doubt funks. Learn more about solving that problem here.

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Curing Your Sense of Futility

HOW MANY TIMES have you stayed busy all day only to feel at the end of the day that you really accomplished nothing? Do you know what I'm talking about? Does it ever feel like your actions are futile? Do you ever think, "All that work, all day long, and it feels like I didn't do anything worthwhile?"

It's not very good for your mood.

But how can this possible? I wonder if a hunter-gatherer ever felt that way? Probably not. At the end of the day, he's got a pile of nuts or a dead deer to show for the day's work. Does a bricklayer ever feel like her actions are futile? I doubt it. When she started the day, the wall was only two feet high. By the end of the day, it is eight feet high.

What I'm driving at here is that the problem is not you. It's the tasks. The modern world is full of invisible, hard-to-remember activities, like banking online. And these activities are not in any way futile or unimportant. They can be very important. But they aren't visible. Once you finish your banking task, you close your computer, and what happens? Your desk, your world, looks exactly as it did before you started, as if nothing happened.

I've discovered a simple solution for this sense of futility: Make a list of what you do as soon as you finish it. It's like making a to-do list backwards.

As soon as you finish your banking, for example, write on a piece of paper, "did the banking." Maybe even put a check mark next to it. Do the dishes, then write it down and check mark it. Do that throughout the day, and then before you go to bed, read your list.

What will happen if you do this? It produces three very helpful results:

1. You will no longer feel your actions are futile. You won't be demoralized by the sense that you're spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.

2. It's motivating. When you see that you are, in fact, getting things done, and when you see that many of those things are important to you and move you toward your goals in life, you're motivated to do more.

3. You will find out how you spend your time. This can lead to an improvement in the way you use your time, without even really trying. At the end of the day you'll look at your list. Sometimes you'll see that many of the things you've done were not very important. You haven't really noticed that before because those activities have also been invisible (what is visibly different after two hours of watching television?)

Make a "done list" every day, adding to it every time you complete even the smallest task, and at the end of the day, read it over. It will take very little of your time, but it will go a long way toward counteracting the futility-inducing demoralization of modern life.

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