Motivation

Ten days ago I decided to challenge myself: Can I write one blog post every day for ten consecutive days? Today, the results are in. It turns out, yes, I can.

But I am a little surprised how I feel today when reaching this goal.

Ten days ago I expected to feel much more satisfied on day ten. I thought it would feel great to look back, and I would be proud to achieve it. Today I even feel embarrassed to admit that expectation. Ten days doesn’t seem like a big enough accomplishment to be proud of, at all.

When I have to make a difficult decision, I have these voices in my head. One voice that says I should pick this one option, another voice that says I should pick the other option. When I learned to listen more closely, I realized that there are even more voices that have an opinion about the situation. I believe most people experience a similar thing. Have you?

Friedemann Schulz von Thun developed a model that captures this experience, when he was teaching Psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, from 1975 to 2009. He called his model “The Inner Team”. I first learned about the Inner Team when I read his book Miteinander Reden 3, probably around the time when it was published in 1998 or 1999. This book was never translated to English, but I would roughly translate the title as “Talk to each other, part 3”.

I recently listened to a bunch of episodes of the Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids podcast. What is it about? The title says it all: grownups get up on a stage and read from their diaries they wrote as kids.

It seems that many people wrote letters to their future self when they were kids, usually prompted by their parents or teachers. One of the letters, or rather one particular sentence from one of these letters stayed in my head:

Baking your own bread is simple, but strangely satisfying. I don’t usually bake my own bread, I buy it from a bakery or grocery store, like most people that I know.

To prepare your own bread, you only need some very basic ingredients that you can find at any store: flower, salt, sugar, and yeast. And water. (Actually, yeast is only one option. The yeast’s purpose is to make the bread rise. This is called “leavening”, and there are different leavening agents used in different regions of the world.)

I don’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything original to say. All of it has been said before. People don’t want to hear about the things I have to say. I don’t have the time. I don’t feel like it. I am boring. I am not good enough.

Other people have said it better.

Other people have said it butter.

Other people have said it bitter.

I can do bitter.

I am a software developer in my forties. Here are four things I wish I had learned and practiced earlier in my life:

• Your logical mind will often deceive you when it comes to important things in life. Learn to trust your emotions. In order to do that, I needed to first learn to recognize my emotions, to actually feel them, notice them, instead of ignoring or censoring them.
• We humans all have the same basic needs for safety, connection, and growth. If you are unhappy, recognize this and figure out, which of your needs are not met.
• If your instinct is to always do everything yourself, learn to ask for help. If your instinct is, to always ask others for help, learn to do something yourself.
• Learn to live with your negative self-talk, your doubts. But more importantly, learn to take them less seriously. You might not be able to make them go away, but you can practice ignoring them once in a while.

Have you ever noticed that you are putting off doing certain things all the time, again and again? Like doing the taxes or getting started on that personal project. Of course, you have. When I put things off for too long, my mood suffers, and sometimes this leads to putting off even more tasks. Feels bad.

Here is a little trick I came up with that helps with getting unstuck: Create an emotional brain dump of all your current tasks.

Are you like me, making plans in the morning but find that you are not sticking to them when evening rolls around?

I don’t eat particularly healthy. As with everything in live, I go through phases with my diet. Sometimes I eat less unhealthy, sometimes I eat more unhealthy food.

This week was especially bad.

Last weekend I received a nice little food basket from some of my friends. It was a very sweet gesture, and I was very happy to receive it. Upon closer inspection I noticed that there were some nice, unhealthy “treats” in there:

As you might be able to tell from the title, this is not going to be an academic article about self improvement. Instead, I am trying to convince you – and myself – that there is one key element to improving yourself and your life.

Let me start with an example.

Remember when you were a kid? Let’s assume I’m young again and let’s assume I don’t know how to do simple math, like adding numbers. Now, let’s assume, your job is to teach me to add small numbers.

This is my first Day of Writing. I came across the idea of theming my days when I recently watched a bunch of Youtube-videos. You know the one: your typical productivity porn videos by your typical productivity experts. The ones that make you feel productive without actually accomplishing anything.

Who are these videos for? Who is watching these videos? Probably a bunch of losers like myself who watch productivity videos to procrastinate. Well, to be honest, I don’t watch these videos anymore to procrastinate. But that’s what I used to do, and I definitely get that fuzzy feeling of pseudo-productivity when I watch them.