By Toronto Life & Mindset Alignment Coach Stephanie J. Marshall

“I need to stop being lazy”

And other lies…

Do you berate yourself for being lazy?

If you are guilty of this keep reading.

Here’s the thing: You’re not lazy, you’re just being unintentionally strategic. 

When women tell me they are lazy, they often think that motivation is the solution because then they will be able to do what they don’t want to do. But there are two problems with this:

1. You can’t rely on motivation, you can read more on motivation here, but the summary is that you can build the habit of following through for yourself when you are not motivated and that’s one of the skills we teach in Kickstartology.

2. Focusing and emotionally engaging more with what you want to avoid in the moment, than with the results you want to create in the long term will magnify your resistance.

Rewiring Resistance: You’re focusing wrong

When you are focused on the thing that will take effort and be less pleasant than “being lazy” your subconscious will strategically decide that it’s not worth the effort and act to conserve energy. This is why we are SO GOOD at coming up with brilliant justifications to get out of things that seem like too much effort. The subconscious always wants to take the easy way out, we are wired that way as a survival mechanism.

To get past “lazy” (because you’re not lazy) you need to learn to rewire your subconscious resistance, and the easiest way is by using mindset tools.

How can you get your subconscious to really believe it’s worth the effort? Learn to spend more time thinking about and emotionally engaging with the results you want to create. It’s easy to want the results intellectually, but can you connect to the feeling of WANTING the results as much as you can connect to the feeling of RESISTING the things you need to do to get them?

What’s really going on?

1. Why is it worth it to you to do the thing you aren’t in the mood to do?
2. What resistance do you expect to have to overcome, and what will you have to believe in order to push through it?
3. What trajectory do you believe it will take you on if you do the thing and how will you feel?
4. What trajectory will you be on if you keep your current patterns and how will you feel?
5. How will it feel to do the things that you are avoiding, and are you willing to experience those feelings in order to get the results you want?
6. If you begin taking action now and keep going, where could it lead in six months?

The mindset works

The answers to the above will either:
a) Connect you to what you want and nudge your subconscious towards strategically putting in the effort.
b) Help you realize that you don’t really want the long-term results or believe that you are capable of achieving them (and neither of those has anything to do with being lazy, but may invite more mindset work).

Honesty with ourselves is mandatory for mindset work. If you truly want the results and believe you are capable of creating them, you will find a way to get into action. The key is to tap into that desire and start problem-solving from there.

Let’s get to the interesting part.

This stuff works. We’ve seen so many clients change their habits and do things that they didn’t know they were capable of. And that’s why we do this. We want all of you to discover what’s possible and what you are capable of when you decide you want it, and commit to yourself.