Looking Forward with Regret Can Be Very Motivating

Are You Really Motivated?

Most of the experts recommend having goals and picturing yourself experiencing them with an intense clarity. It’s a great idea and it can help a lot of people to keep themselves moving forward. Sometimes though, you need something more powerful than potential happiness to get you moving. Most people will do a lot more to avoid pain than to get pleasure (including me), so here is what I like to do when I feel that I may have lost some motivation. It can be pretty intense, so I’m not really telling anyone to do it. It is just what works for me…

Looking Forward with Regret

This is something I heard described a long time ago. I think it was when I was in a class where we were talking about living a life without regrets.

Do you want this in ten years?

This is a very simple exercise, but it can be extremely powerful and motivating (at least for me). I do this if I feel like I’ve had a couple of days that were unproductive.

The first thing I do is find somewhere where I can be alone. I know that can be tough, especially if you have kids. That’s why I usually end up doing this very early in the morning, before anyone else wakes up. Sometimes, I’ll even drive to a nearby park and find a place to sit in the car by myself. It’s best if it is quiet and there are no distractions. I picture myself in the future, but I take a different approach than you might expect. Instead of seeing myself where I want to be in the next one, five, and ten years, I picture where I’m headed if I don’t take action. For me, that means in the same job, doing the same things that I absolutely can’t stand doing. I think of the reasons why I cringe as I wake up at 4:50 AM on work days. I picture with extreme clarity what it would be like to still be sitting in meetings talking about things that I could not possibly care less about. I picture my boss’s face, ten years older, as she tells me about the next “initiative” that we will be putting in to place. Then, I picture my own face as I imagine it would look after ten more years of doing something I hate. Next, I force myself to feel every ounce of pain I would feel as I looked back and regretted not taking action and making things change. I let myself soak in that regret for about a minute. Finally (and most importantly), I refocus myself and realize that I am still at the point

I finish up by realizing that today, I'm actually at the beginning, NOT the end.

where I can make the changes that have to be made. I can start taking action NOW to ensure that the future I just imagined will NOT happen. Usually at this point I’m able to easily fire off a list of four or five things that I could do that very day to get things moving (and I actually DO them).

Just to make sure I start my day off right, I also follow this exercise by visualizing myself achieving my goals and experiencing THOSE feelings. The contrast is amazing. The fear of living a life filled with regret is enough to get me moving and taking actions that I previously had been scared to take. The image that comes to me is standing next to a pool of cold water. Jumping in seems daunting, but if an angry dog came charging at you, you’d probably take action and jump in to get out of the way. My current fears about taking action and trying things I’m unfamiliar with, are the pool. Dealing with my same work situation in ten years is the angry dog.