I’m sat alone, on my bed, my cup of Nespresso cappuccino at the side of me and a blank screen in front. First, I open Facebook…the Google+, then I open a few of my favourite business blogs and see if there’s any inspiration there.
Crickets….
Nothing at all going on. It’s still early in the UK, 7am, but I’m up and showered and ready to make the post of my day; the trouble is, I have no idea what to do with it.
The thing is, about a year ago now, I decided to go part-time at my job as a senior manager in order to focus on me more – spend more time in Wales with my family, be around nature more, do more yoga and concentrate on my counselling work. It had been going really well, and I was loving my clinical placement in a bereavement service, helping people reclaim their identities and sense of self after substantial loss…and then I finished all the academic work for my advanced diploma in psychotherapeutic counselling.
After that, something strange happened. I discovered the unsettling feeling of a complete lack of motivation to do anything else.
In my head, I was focusing on my academic work and then once I’d finished that it would be full steam ahead again. I’d have more time to actually see clients, which would be great.
It didn’t feel great.
It didn’t feel great because I didn’t really know how to go from ‘student’ and ‘worker’ back to ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘counsellor’. Ironically, this had never come up in my personal therapy (all counsellors need to be in personal therapy – we practice what we preach!) but it felt like I was going through a real shift, and I wasn’t at all motivated for it.
In the end, my logical brain won out and I realised that I had to do something. I talked through what was going on with my counsellor and got myself a business coach to kick my butt when I got lazy (you may have seen a LOT more social media from me in recent weeks – I’m getting strategic don’t you know!) and starting making waves again.
Moral of the story – sometimes motivation evades you; it hides in the dark places of your mind and leaves you wondering if there’s any point even looking for it. In those moments, remember that [research shows] happy people tend to surround themselves with other happy people and happy stuff, just as depressed people look for the depressing stuff. Fight the urge and surround yourself with stuff and people that remind you of what you want and try to understand what’s going on for you. For me, I had some blocks around moving away from studying to being a fully fledged, self-employed counsellor but obviously you will have different stuff going on.
[Tweet “Surround yourself with stuff and people that remind you of what you want”]
Remember, if you are feeling like you’ve lost yourself somewhere along the way, you may find one or two sessions with me super helpful to reconnect with your true self and move forward from a place of intuitive knowing. If you are interested, schedule a chat with me to find out more.