You know the thing you should be doing. You’ve probably known for days, maybe weeks. But knowing doesn’t mean your butt is actually going to get out of the chair and do it.
I’ve learned that trying to force myself through work I hate rarely works. My brain is way too good at finding something else to do. Suddenly laundry looks fascinating, snacks become urgent, and another walk seems completely reasonable. So instead of fighting my brain, I work with it.
I’m sharing three tricks I use to get myself moving when I don’t feel like doing the work. We’ll look at using time away to create natural urgency, changing your surroundings when your usual space invites distraction, and separating planning from action so you stop burning energy deciding what comes next.
You don’t need more guilt or another speech about discipline. You need a setup that makes action easier. Pick the strategy that fits how your brain works, try it, and get the damn thing done.
Key Takeaways:
· Learn why motivation isn’t always the best place to start when you need to take action.
·Recognize how your brain can turn perfectly reasonable excuses into permission to procrastinate.
· Discover ways to design your surroundings so focus requires less willpower.
· Learn how reducing small daily decisions can preserve energy for the work that matters.
· Build a simple system that separates thinking from doing so bigger projects keep moving forward.
About Rebecca:
In 2008, I blew up my life in spectacular fashion. I left a cult, got divorced, and for a time, lost even the few people I had leaned on. I thought greener grasses awaited me. I was wrong. Despite building a wildly successful digital marketing business, remarrying and growing my family to four kids, I felt nothing but dread each morning.
Then came what I now call Epiphany Town. It was that electric moment when I stopped defining my life by what happened to me and began building on purpose. That phase lit me up in a way I had never felt. Now I devote every ounce of my energy to guiding others through their own version of Epiphany Town. I help them find the barriers that are actually holding them back, finally let go of self-sabotaging stories, and leap into a life that is meaningful and deeply fulfilling.
I believe each of us has a story to tell, a gift to offer, and a life worth waking up for. Whether your goal is to impact one person or a million, I am here to help you see your place, claim your voice, and live your life on your terms.
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[00:00:04] Welcome to From Barriers to Breakthroughs, the podcast that helps you create the life, business and love you truly want. Not with silver bullets or magical pills, but by removing what's actually holding you back. Here's what nobody tells you about getting unstuck. It has nothing to do with what you know, but it has everything to do with that switch within that
[00:00:28] allows you to turn that knowledge into action. Your breakthrough begins now. Welcome to another episode of From Barriers to Breakthroughs. As always, I'm your host, Rebecca Mountain. And today I've got for you three awesome tricks to make sure that you can feel like doing anything. And if you feel like doing it, you're going to do it. Think about it. Let's say,
[00:00:57] you know, you know, you know, because there's lots of science that proves it, that going to gym, to a gym or moving can be helpful for your health. But if you don't feel like going to the gym, chances are your butt's not getting there. And chances are those shoes aren't getting on your feet and there is no walk that's going to happen. There's all these excuses we can come up with like, oh, you know, I just don't feel like it or I'm not feeling very good. My body doesn't feel good.
[00:01:24] It's raining outside. It's Tuesday. All of the reasons we give for not doing something sound usually pretty legit, legit enough for us to be feeling okay with the decision to not do it. But at the end of the day, you're still not doing it. You're still not making progress. You're still not feeling in the end good about not doing the thing you don't feel like doing. So here are the three tricks that I use. Pick the one that works best for you or choose all three. I've got three
[00:01:54] different ways of doing that that are very unique. And well, one of them is definitely going to speak to how you are wired, how you like to work, your general personality, or the work that you ultimately do. So the first one, which is my personal favorite, which works really, really well for entrepreneurs, harder to do if you're doing a nine to five. We'll definitely admit to that. But the idea
[00:02:18] is that you go away, you leave, you make yourself incommunicado for at least three days. Here's why. There's a saying, and I'm sure you've heard it before. You never get busier than right before you go on vacation. So why is that? Well, one of the reasons is that before you go away on vacation,
[00:02:40] usually you are having someone else look after your stuff while you're gone. And so while you are getting ready, quote unquote, getting ready, you are making the calls you need to make. You are doing all the followup. You are organizing your work world so that when you're gone, whoever's looking after your work is not like overburdened. It's not complicated and it flows smoothly. So you can imagine
[00:03:09] if you always go away, you're always getting ready. And by getting ready, you're not telling yourself, I'm making calls. I am doing the followup. I'm doing work. And when your brain detects work, especially if it's work you don't really like, or you don't, here we go again, feel like doing it, it will make a decision to do literally anything else. We make hundreds of decisions in a day.
[00:03:39] And in that moment, which we mostly don't recognize because we make so many of these, we have to decide to avoid something or to act. That is an emotionally driven decision. It is not driven by logic because we can use our logic to work actually against us. We can come up with reasons and justifications and explanations as to why we really shouldn't do that thing that we know we
[00:04:04] should be doing. And so if you go away, you are actually doing the work, but your brain doesn't detect a threat because you're preparing to go on vacation. That is anticipatory. There is research that shows that anticipating and preparing for a vacation has a greater impact on our general sense of wellbeing and joy than actually being on that vacation. So if you're always prepping and anticipating
[00:04:29] this really awesome thing you're going to about to do, well, then you're always going to be doing the work to prepare and make sure that everything runs smoothly, that you have finished your follow up, that you're continuing to grow your business. So that while you're away, again, whoever's looking after your stuff doesn't have to feel the burden of it. So I do a lot of work with realtors. It is a phenomenal idea for realtors or anyone in a relationship management business.
[00:04:55] Also works for anyone in entrepreneurial genres or industries. You could make this work technically for a nine to five, but it's a little bit trickier because you may have a little bit less flexibility on going away. And there may be a certain hesitation for people to always be looking after your stuff unless you come to an agreement that this is what everybody does. Can you imagine working in a company where everybody just goes on vacation at least once a month just so that they can stay organized
[00:05:24] and on top of things so that when they're away, whoever's looking after their business doesn't really have to do a lot of heavy lifting. Imagine an organization that does that. I'll tell you, I'd love to work at a company like that. So that's the first trick. The second one is to just change your environment. So I shoot videos all the time and then I have to edit. Now the editing doesn't take too long because I use AI. I use an app that does all the captions and the cutting and the edit.
[00:05:51] It does basically everything for me. So let's say like a 10 minute video would probably take me maybe 25 to 30 minutes to edit, but this brain hates editing and I don't have or don't want to hire somebody for it because it just feels like so small and it's usually just every now and again, project-based kind of stuff. So I don't always have to be editing videos. And so when I have a big project, like for instance, right now I have a big project where it requires me to do about 25 to 30
[00:06:21] videos. Yuck, my brain says, I don't want to do that, but I need to get the editing done. So if I can't find someone else to do it, I have to kind of trick my brain into feeling like it's having fun. Nothing is going to make this job fun, this work, this editing stuff. Nothing in the universe is going to trick my brain enough into saying, Hey, you know, editing videos is fun. Nope. So what I do is
[00:06:47] I change my environment so that my environment feels fun. Now fun for me, for my brain is like a coffee shop. I go to a Starbucks where it's a big one. It's got nice windows. There's a lot going on and there's enough ambient noise and activity that it plays with the ADD part of my brain, keeps me occupied, keeps me amused. And it keeps me in that chair. It also takes me out of my home, which is where I do most of my work. Because if I'm here doing editing, my brain will be like,
[00:07:17] Hey, you know, you should do laundry. You should, you should have a snack. You should have a nap. Ooh, you should go for a walk for the 18th time that day. There are so many distractions that I have in my home that if I'm trying to do work, my brain doesn't like my brain will find a whole new bunch of reasons as to why I should do literally anything else. And it gets to the point of being ridiculous in terms of what my brain actually thinks is a cool thing to do. And looking back at it,
[00:07:43] you're like, well, that was an unproductive day. So if you change your environment, like think about what is an environment in which you feel calm and which you feel energized. For me, it's a coffee shop for you. It might be maybe sitting in a picnic table by the water or on your back deck with your dogs. Or it could be literally anything. It could be anywhere. When I write my books, I take a year to plan out the book. And I go to a beautiful place where I can sit down for five days and write the
[00:08:11] whole thing. That's my process because I can't write sitting in my office. Because it's work technically and writing a book while it's not that hard, it is effort. And I write for 10 hours a day. Well, if I'm in an environment where I can distract myself, I will. Because it's tough. And you have to stay focused. And you want to be in an environment in which you basically don't have a
[00:08:34] choice to not do it. You don't have these amenities or these options available to you in order for you to actually go ahead and skip out on the work you should be doing. So changing your environment, creating an environment in which your brain is really, really excited or really, really calm, whatever brain space you need to be in is going to help you stay focused. So that's the second one. So again, the first one is go away. The second one is change the environment. The third one is for my
[00:09:02] planners in the group. And for this one, it's a matter of avoiding decision fatigue. So decision fatigue is something we experience every day. And it begins the moment we open our eyeballs and start making decisions. What am I going to wear? What should I eat for breakfast? What music am I going to listen to on the way to the office? So all of these actually deplete our brain energy. And once your brain energy is gone in a day, it's gone, you can't nap it back.
[00:09:27] And so what you want to do, especially if you are high performing, you've got lots on the go, and you want to keep your energy up, you want to minimize decisions and maximize instructions. So the way that you do this is the day before, so not the day of never the day of the day before on a Sunday before a week, however you want to do it, you plan out in intricate detail,
[00:09:52] exactly what you're going to do in each day. So if you have a big project, what are the big moves you have to make this week? How do you split that into tiny actions? And by tiny actions, let's say you need to over the course of a week call 10 people. So maybe the project or the recurring event is lead generation for your business. Again, you fit this description into whatever it is that you need to do either repetitively on a regular basis that can get really boring really fast,
[00:10:21] or maybe you have a big project to move forward. And you want to break that down into the tiniest little pieces. And I'm talking like if it's 10 people you need to call, you are saying, I'm going to call two people every single day, but that's not enough. You have to put their name, their phone number, and the reason for the call. So you have to outline exactly what the call is for. If you have any other supporting documents you need to have, or any kind of scripting you need
[00:10:48] to create, you create that ahead of time. So if you are a day before planner, the day before you would map out, okay, I've got to call these two people. I'm calling Lisa and John. This is Lisa's number. This is John's number. I'm going to talk to Lisa about this. I'm going to talk to John about that. You have it mapped out so that the next day when you sit your butt in your chair, you open up that planner and you're like, okay, I'm calling Lisa. Here's her number. You pick up
[00:11:14] your phone, you dial, and you're not even thinking about it because you've already done all of the decision-making the day before. Decision-making and planning and action are tough to do at the same time, especially if it's something that your brain is really kind of struggling with, or it's work that you maybe feel a little insecure about, or maybe it's new, so you don't have confidence, or you just
[00:11:38] don't like it. If you plan and then expect to plan and do in the same day or even in the same time block, I will absolutely guarantee you 90% of the time you will plan your way out of having time to do the work, and you'll put it off until the next day. So procrastinators in the group, my productive procrastinators in the group, this is a very common behavior that I see in that kind of people. And so
[00:12:03] you want to be able to mitigate that and stop yourself from continuing the bad pattern of putting things off and replacing it with decision-making on one day, action the next. And you can just keep moving this along day to day to day. You decide on Monday what to do Tuesday. You decide Tuesday what to do Wednesday. Because maybe things in your work and your life are a bit fluid, and so planning everything on Sunday doesn't really work. However you like to map out your weeks and your days,
[00:12:30] this particular strategy, which I call the art of little chunking, will work for you every single time. So again, to summarize the three different tricks you can use to do any work that you need to get done, no matter how badly you don't feel like doing it, go away. Because when you're going away and you
[00:12:54] do your work in preparation for going away, you're using all of the parts of your brain that are open, there's no resistance, there's no restriction, and you just stay in flow versus calling it work you have to do, which even the sound of that doesn't sound very cool or sexy at all. Nobody wants to do that. So going away regularly for enough time that you can't just back yourself into,
[00:13:21] oh, well, I don't have to go. Or, well, I was supposed to go, but I'm just going to stay back and I'm going to get all this work done. Nope. You can't lay yourself off the hook. You have to commit to leaving for long enough that someone else has to take care of your stuff while you're gone. The second one is your environment. So think about what environment your brain really likes to play with. Is it calm? Is it loud? Is it maybe a combination of both, but it's somewhere where
[00:13:45] you can't just back yourself into other things and other distractions that will pull you away from the work that needs to get done. So that's the second one. And of course, the third one is plan and then do. And planning and decision-making and doing do not go on the same day. They have to go in separate times and preferably in entirely separate days because you're using a completely different part of your brain. And so that is my friends, the trick that I use for myself, for my clients,
[00:14:15] for my family to make sure that no matter what actually needs to get done, gets done every single time, but in such a way that it doesn't feel like work. It doesn't feel like effort. And when you live an effortless and joy filled life and you get all the results that you need to get, your business grows, your career moves forward, you get that promotion, your relationships thrive,
[00:14:40] this is the life we are all striving for. But you have to understand what it is we do to avoid doing the work we should be doing so you can create a plan and make sure that you never ever stall, procrastinate, tinker forever and ever. And instead, every single day is an effortless flow of the work you need to do, getting it done and then getting the results. So pick your strategy
[00:15:04] and have fun with it. And there you have it. Another step closer to removing what's been blocking your path. Remember, you already have everything you need inside you. Sometimes it just takes finding that one domino that's been holding back the rest. If today's episode helped you identify even one barrier you're ready to remove, then we're making some serious progress. To keep the breakthroughs
[00:15:30] coming, hit subscribe so you never miss an episode and visit rebeccamountain.ca for additional resources to help you bridge that gap between knowing and doing. This is Rebecca and you've been listening to For Barriers to Breakthroughs.