How to Inspire Yourself to Action

I am the queen of laziness. I am excellent at procrastination and lack of motivation. My house is a disorganized mess. I have piles of things like dirty clothes and papers. I am also a perfectionist, which is why all this makes perfect sense. Perfectionists will not do anything they think they will fail at. If they do not do it perfectly or successfully, they will find a reason not to do it. So, when it comes to motivation and action, there are things we perfectionists can do to inspire ourselves to action.

1 Lose the perfectionist mindset

This is the toughest thing to do, in my opinion. When you have lived your whole life under the umbrella of perfectionism, it is hard to learn to set the umbrella down and let the rain fall on your head once in awhile. We have to give ourselves some grace. We have to allow ourselves to make mistakes or do things imperfectly because truth be told, we will never achieve perfection. It is impossible, and making mistakes allows us opportunities to grow and learn from.

2 Focus on the big picture

We need to take time to really ponder what it is we want to accomplish in order to start. If we think about the big picture, we have an end goal in mind. However, we might need to remind ourselves that we are not working toward perfection; we are working on improvement.

Read also – 8 Ways to Be More Mature and a Little Calmer

3 Break it down

Then, in order to achieve that big goal, we need to think about what we need to do to achieve it by breaking down the steps. We need to make the steps small enough to be able to attain success and then celebrate each little success. Breaking down the steps is another way to give ourselves some grace.

4 Just keep swimming

Let’s allow ourselves to make mistakes so that we can learn, grow, and become a better person for it. Like Dory says in Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming,” we need to keep working on the mistake so that we can improve and learn from it.

5 Reward yourself

We need to reward ourselves when we do something successfully. We need to celebrate any success – big or small – that gets us closer to our big picture. Rewards and celebrations can be incredibly inspiring and can motivate us to do a job well done (not perfectly).

6 Reflect

After we have met our goals and celebrated our successes, we need to take a step back and reflect on the process. How did we overcome our perfectionistic view? What did we learn? How do we feel? Reflection is a great way to inspire ourselves to continue taking action and accomplishing the things we want and need to.

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Inspiring ourselves to action is not an easy thing to do, especially when we have always wanted perfection. We become frozen in our mindset or become lazy so that we do not feel like failures. We need to take it one step at a time and enjoy the process the journey of doing something well rather than perfectly.