Self-Improvement Slump

By Aaron Potts

We’ve all been there. We get excited about some major new goal in our life, we get all fired up about making it happen, and then…zilch. Nothing happens. The very lives we want to improve via our personal development and self-improvement efforts get in our way, and our dreams of success on a massive scale fall by the wayside.

This is especially common when it comes to financial success or weight loss, and that is probably due to the fact that attaining financial stability or sustained weight loss are both things that take an on-going and consistent effort over the long-term.

The key to pulling ourselves out of this self-improvement slump is to find ways to once again become passionate about whatever it was that we wanted to accomplish in the first place.

A lot of people decide on some sort of personal development or self-improvement program after a negative experience, and their goal becomes not wanting to experience that same type of situation again.

However, is NOT wanting something to happen really a strong enough motivation to keep ourselves on track over the long-term so that we can attain the opposite of that thing?

For example, if we decide that we are finally going to get our finances together because we almost got kicked out of our apartment for not paying the rent, or we walked to work for two weeks until we could afford to get our car fixed, both of those experiences are pretty powerful motivators.

However, once we are back inside the comfort zone of having enough money to pay the bills, and the car is running fine, where is the motivation to achieve financial freedom that will keep us burning the midnight oil and working weekends in order to make that happen?

Another example is weight loss. If someone makes fun of us or if we have some other negative experience as a result of the fact that we are overweight, we’ll have our brand-new exercise and weight loss program planned out before we even get home that day!

However, after the pain of that incident fades, or we find some way to temporarily fill the emotional gap in our lives that in the past has been empty as a result of our health, our motivation to workout 5 or 6 days each week and to eat healthy foods also fades away.

So, the key to keeping our motivational fires burning lies in finding ways to continually be as passionate about attaining our goals as we were when we first decided to do so.

One possible method for doing this could be to mentally relive the time in our life that caused us to decide to make changes in the first place. However, that definitely smacks of “living in the past” as well as “focusing on the negative” so a more proactive approach would probably serve us better.

Instead of thinking back on bad times that caused us to want to make positive changes, why not envision future good times instead?

What would life be like if we had more than enough money to pay our rent or mortgage each month, or we had two or three nice cars in the driveway, all expenses were covered, and we still had “play” money left over?

Consistent and repeated visualization of what life will be like when money is no longer an issue will keep us motivated to do what it takes in order to achieve financial success.

The same process can be used for weight loss or any other area of your life that you want to improve. Put powerful and emotional pictures in your mind of the life you will lead once you have achieved your dreams, and focus intensely on those images as often as you can—preferably several times each day.

The key to this process is consistency. It has already been shown that humans have the ability—indeed, the very habit—of getting motivated about their dreams, but then not following through. If you do not consistently dream about and feel passionate about your desires, you will simply fall right back into the same trap that has already kept you from attaining success.

There is a saying that goes something along the following lines, and you would do well to put this somewhere that you will see it often. Paste it up where you will see it during the parts of your day when you have the most difficulty sticking to your success plan: “Do today what others won’t, so you can do tomorrow what others can’t.”

Winners and successful people do whatever it takes day in and day out, month after month, and year after year in order to achieve success.

Do you want to be a winner, or do you want to just let yourself fall back into another self-improvement slump?

Aaron Potts is the founder of the Today is that Day Success Community, and the author of Energy Harmonics, which teaches about self improvement, vibratory alignment, and the Law of Attraction. Visit his site to learn about Energy Harmonics and to get his free newsletter, or visit his blog at www.todayisthatday.com/blog/