I often hear the phrase “I don’t feel motivated” or “I didn’t feel like doing that”. There is a very critical flaw in that line of thinking.
Behaviors drive feelings. Feelings don’t magically appear out of nowhere. So, if you want to change the way you feel, you need to behave your way into that feeling.
We aren’t saying that feelings aren’t important, they are. Do not ignore how you feel. Instead, pay attention to how you feel and use that awareness to drive new behaviors.
For example, if you’re exhausted or burned out use that frustration or pain to drive making some hard changes to change the way you feel in the future. If you feel great after a workout use that to fuel other positive behaviors that will maintain that feeling.
Ask questions
As we’ve covered, feelings aren’t things that happen to us, we create them. This is why we often ask our clients how they feel. That information really isn’t for us. We just want to drive self-awareness as an agent for change.
When you have clarity about how you feel and believe that you’re in control of changing your feelings through behavior you’re now in the driver seat of your life.
Wrap Up
Ask yourself how do you feel on a day to day basis and what behaviors you could change to modify the way you feel?
By following that process, you focus on behaviors and pay attention to what feelings that leads to. You can then learn what behaviors work and what don’t to modify behavior in the future to change the way you feel.
