How to pull yourself together

No one is immune from stressful situations, and when emotions begin to get out of control, the question arises: “How to pull yourself together and calm down?” We offer several simple recommendations that can help out in almost any difficult situation when concentration and endurance are required. So, let's look at some stressful situations and ways to control emotions.

Do you have a lot of dreams, but none of them come true even with very careful planning? Even the most popular technique for achieving your goals, which includes lying on the couch and visualization (a detailed representation of the final result), is no substitute for action. To achieve any results you need to act. You need to pull yourself together, find strength and energy.

We all know how difficult it is to get up early in the morning, get ready for school and work. And such difficulties appear every time with all things, when a person is lazy or simply doesn’t want to do something. But what about successful people who have 10 business meetings a day and still need to resolve business or work issues? How do they manage to pull themselves together? Of course, they are also lazy, they may really not want to do something, they may be uncollected or confused. Human nature is such that our emotions override reason and cause us to do nothing. But successful people have a different view on such things - they clearly understand that their inaction will not achieve anything, that procrastination is a waste of time and does not help in achieving what they want.

There will be no words if you don't speak. There will be no movement if you sit still. There will be no food in the refrigerator unless you buy it. There will be no slim body without training. Everything is obvious: you just need to pull yourself together.

Why is laziness dangerous?

If laziness does not bother the person himself, then it does not annoy anyone except those around him. Although, of course, his personal development suffers. But if a person avoids something through laziness, and also understands that he does not have enough abilities to overcome a problem situation, intrapersonal conflict and nervous disorders may develop.

Awareness of your own laziness can affect self-esteem. Such people really need help, despite their negativism and stubbornness. After all, in reality, this is nothing more than fear of life’s circumstances and lack of confidence in one’s abilities.

How to start a new life

Many people want to radically change their lives. Get rid of routine, debts, introduce useful habits, make your desires come true. But the emotional state of impossibility suppresses any attempt to change anything. Let's figure out how to pull yourself together and start taking action:

Develop willpower. Decide for yourself whether you want change and strengthen your willpower. Otherwise, if you cannot pull yourself together, you will not achieve your goals.
Set the right goals. The easiest way to pull yourself together is to set a big goal and start moving towards it. If you have chosen the right goal for yourself, then you will definitely find the inner strength to act.

Take care of yourself

A great way to motivate yourself to do something is to start developing yourself. Every day, brick by brick, drop by drop. Don't like your appearance? Don't like your income? No friends or significant other? It's time to do something about it and stop relying on life. This blog has many motivational articles that may be helpful. For example, what is self-development? I also recommend studying what a comfort zone is.

How to gain confidence and strength

It’s quite easy to pull yourself together; a few simple tips will help you with this:

Create an environment around yourself that you would like to be a part of. Give up people who drag you down, insult you, and don’t support you in anything. Surround yourself with like-minded people and those who inspire you, who motivate you to pull yourself together and move towards your goal.
Use relaxation techniques. This will help you to properly rest and relax, which means your body will recover strength faster. This will help you quickly pull yourself together and get down to business.
Be clear about where you are aiming. Visualize the end result of your actions every day. Understand what you are investing in your aspiration, why you should achieve this. When you are clearly aware of everything, it will be easier for you to pull yourself together.
Give free rein to your feelings and emotions. But only at a specially designated time. Spend 5-10 minutes whining to free your body of negative energy that prevents you from pulling yourself together. This technique will help give additional strength in gaining confidence.

How to find the strength to take action? If you are asking this question, you probably have plans that you should implement, but just can’t do it. Something is delaying and blocking you. Are you scared? In the end, it even seems to you that you definitely don’t have enough strength for these actions. Today I will try to give you some guidelines that will help you cross off things that have been hanging on your “waiting list” for a long time.

1. Measure the cost of your inaction.

I want you to stop reading now and write down the following on paper. Fast forward to the future and imagine that you still haven’t found the strength to take action. And everything that you should do now remains undone. After all, it’s much easier not to take action!

Imagine that you continue to follow the path of least resistance. What is your life like after 5-10 years? This will help you appreciate the true cost of your passivity. Inaction also has its price. Yes, things often cost us a lot of effort, time or money. But we forget to measure the price of today’s “peace” not only in the future, but also now.

All the things you should do (and know about) but don’t do weigh on you and completely kill your self-confidence. So measure the cost of inaction:

- in money;

- in self-esteem;

- in relation to work.

And also think about how much it costs now and how much it will cost you in the coming years.

This exercise alone helps you find the strength to start moving forward.

2. Try to find out why you really want to move.

We have just seen that taking action will require strength from you. This is exactly why you are reading this material - to find this strength within yourself. And your strength, your fuel for action, lies in the cause. Why do you need this? What are you going to work hard for? Why should you make an effort, leave your comfort zone? Why on earth should you choose difficulties and give up what has been easy and pleasant until now? You are not going to do all these actions out of pure pleasure or do just for the sake of doing?

You are going to take action because you have some purpose behind it. This will allow you to acquire something or improve yourself. Feed from your true reason, look for energy in this depth.

It may happen that there is no real value for you behind the actions that you have imposed on yourself. This will explain to you why you haven’t really done anything yet, it will help you realize the error of this direction and stop investing in what is not important to you.

3. Understand that action fuels action.

The less I do anything at all, the more difficult it is to move on to any other actions. We've all experienced those days when we had complete setbacks, nothing worked out, or nothing happened. Then we ourselves don’t want anything either, and we find ourselves in a situation of more or less prolonged forced idleness. Sometimes it is useful as a kind of relaxation. But sometimes this is very difficult to experience: in the evening of such a day we even feel bad, enormous fatigue falls on us, although we understand that we have not done anything that day.

And when we are constantly busy with something important and meaningful to us, we do many things related to each other in the correct sequence, by the evening, instead of tiredness, we actually feel full. And it seems that we have taken a big step forward in terms of self-realization.

That is, you need to realize that action feeds action. And the price for this is your feelings. Tell yourself that the more you do the right and consistent things to move forward in both your personal and professional life, the better you will feel, the more strength and energy you will have.

4. Don't wait for fear to disappear.

People often say that fear prevents them from doing a lot, blocks their way. But fear cannot take away your opportunities until you allow it to. As soon as you start listening to him, he takes the lead and closes all paths. Why are you allowing him to do this? Once you stop doing this and start to accept the principle that fear is part of the path itself, it will stop blocking you.

I would even say that fear is an obligatory and integral part of the action itself. I had a coach who told me that if I didn't do anything that scared me, it meant I was setting the bar too low for myself, not doing anything that was meaningful to me.

5. Stop being attached to results and goals that must be achieved.

Often what prevents us from taking action is the fear of error or failure, because we set a goal for ourselves. We believe that a certain action should lead to a certain result. This will be, in our understanding, success. This is where we are completely wrong. How many times in our lives have we been surprised by the results of our actions? We thought that everything would work out, but nothing worked out. Or, on the contrary, they were sure that nothing would work out, but in the end they received a wonderful surprise. Or simply a different result that was very different from what we expected.

Nothing is more paralyzing than the expectation of a specific result, the desire for perfection and absolute attachment to the goal. Therefore, in order to find the strength to move on to action, I urge you to stop focusing on the result, do not set yourself the obligatory goal of succeeding, and do not formulate specific criteria for success.

The simplest goal is enough - to finally get down to business. And the beginning of the action is considered the result. For example, when I sign up for a course or training, my goal is simply to participate, reach the end, and do my best as a simple participant. If I also manage to win some prize, that will be wonderful. But that's not the main thing. The main thing is that I did the best I can.

From the editor

Marketing Director, digital strategist Ksenia Popova discusses whether you need to force yourself to do something if you don’t even want to move. Read her conclusions in the article:.

Or maybe the reluctance to do anything is due to simple fatigue? How to understand that you just need to rest, explains doctor of psychological sciences, writer Sherry Burg Carter: .

Sometimes our inaction is due to fear of failure. Why try if “it won’t work anyway”? Psychologist and business consultant Olga Yurkovskaya tells how to overcome this fear: .

How to start losing weight

This question worries many female representatives. There are various methods that promise to lose weight, but, as a rule, women fail already in the second week of exhausting diets. To pull yourself together and start losing weight, follow these recommendations:

understand your desire to lose weight. Sometimes such a desire is overly hyped, imposed by fashion trends and trends.
hold off on losing excess weight. You can’t just lose 10 kilograms in a week. In this situation, it is necessary to act measuredly, slowly, so as not to expose the body to unnecessary stress, which can trigger the opposite result.
give up restrictions. As many psychologists have discovered, what we limit is what attracts us most. Therefore, restrictions lead to breakdowns that will definitely not allow you to pull yourself together. Don't completely give up on what brings you joy, but take it one step at a time.

Remove uncertainty: record your plans and make a schedule for their implementation

The first stopper of movement is the contradiction between the desire to eat the whole hippopotamus with a complete lack of understanding of how to do this. The mouth is small. I want a million a month, but I don’t understand how to do it yet and that’s why I’m standing still.

The first stage from which training begins at my school is the “Big Plans” training course. I teach how to cut a hippopotamus into pieces. I’ll tell you step by step how to specify your desires and create a business plan for achieving them. We are talking specifically about a business plan, since the main task of a business is to provide resources to fulfill the desires of its owner. We budget for the student’s desires and draw up step-by-step parameters for business development that will allow them to achieve these desires.

One of my students just opened a new office in Moscow. He had been nurturing this idea for a long time, but it happened after we sat down with him and outlined what steps and resources were required for this. One of the limiting beliefs that stopped my student was a large budget for implementation. When we laid everything out in detail and went through several options, it turned out that he was within his budget.

Bottom line

What would you do if something that once belonged to you was taken away from you? Most likely, you would make every effort to get it back. Then why don't you do the same when you want to possess something? Why do your desires remain desires, although you may simply begin to act as if you need to return what once belonged to you?

Just take what's yours. If you want to have something, possess something, achieve something, then start behaving as if you already had it all, just someone took it away from you. Take back what should be yours, even if you never owned it. It is the very understanding that you need to return your thing, feeling, person, that makes you act as if you are confident that you are doing the right thing.

While you just want to achieve something, you have a lot of doubts and excuses why you can do nothing to achieve what you want. But as soon as you begin to think as if you need not to gain, but to return what should belong to you, then you begin to behave accordingly. You no longer think about what you need to do to achieve your desired goal, but think differently: what do you need to do to get back what should belong to you? Now you no longer have doubts or worries about whether you should fight for what you want to achieve. You are already sure that you need to have your goal, you just need to act to achieve what you want, and not doubt anything. You must not gain, but return what you want to have!

Charge yourself with positive energy

Be sure to include regular sports in your schedule - running, swimming, rocking, cycling, skiing... It is important to get enough sleep regularly. Review your diet and remove everything that makes you weaker. At a minimum, cigarettes and large doses of alcohol. Take time to “sharpen the axe” - that is, to analyze what you have done and improve your personal effectiveness. Get out into nature regularly. Travel. More impressions and emotions - films, theaters, photography. Learn to think positively, perceiving all obstacles along the way as areas of growth (according to my observations, believers are much more positive than non-believers. In their picture of the world, if God gives trials, he always gives resources to overcome them).

Get started now

“I’ll start testing this sales channel later”, “I’ll work on this method of growing the average ticket later”, “I’ll think about this marketing tool later”, “I’m in a bad energy state right now, I’ll launch this product later”, “cool sales case - I need it implement later."

People are waiting for Monday, better times, lucky stars, a sign from above.

I give you a sign from above - start right now! Do something right now that you have been putting off for a long time. Put a clear deadline in your calendar for the next 72 hours to take the first step towards your goal.

Continuing the case of the student with the opening of the office - He went on reconnaissance to Moscow almost immediately after our conversation. He did this one day - he left in the morning by Sapsan, and returned in the evening. I collected a lot of useful information, visited competitors and looked for a place for an office. Based on what we collected, we made several hypotheses, which he began to test.

An example of how to start right now with a complete breakdown from Evgenia from Petrozavodsk:

I took action and opened my first business in a state of complete loss of strength. After a long illness, I sat with my mother all winter and watched TV series, and one spring I thought “to hell with it, let’s try,” since there was nowhere to go any lower, I just started doing it, and my appetite came while eating)... That was a year and a half ago and now I have two working businesses, the first (hairdressing salon) has paid off and is in the black, the second (coffee to go) is not yet).

Rule 3-3-3

This method is suggested by How to Stop Feeling Anxious Right Now by psychologist Tamar Chansky from the Pennsylvania Association for Behavioral Therapy. If you're feeling really nervous, do the following.

Look around you and mentally name three things you see around you. For example: “Table, flower, chair.”
Listen and name three sounds you hear. “Birds screaming, beeping, creaking.”
Move three different parts of your body. For example, with your right foot, left hand and any finger.

When performing the exercise, you should stand straight with your shoulders back. According to Chansky, when we are in a stressful situation, we instinctively hunch over, protecting the chest with the heart and lungs. By standing or sitting straight, spreading your legs shoulder-width apart and opening your chest, you will give your body a signal that it is out of danger.

Chewing gum

It may seem quite strange, but chewing gum helps keep your mind clear in stressful situations. Thus, one study of Chewing gum and stress reduction from psychologists at Cardiff University in Wales showed that subjects who were forced to chew gum at work experienced improved mood and a decrease in tension and anxiety. In addition, their symptoms of depression decreased.

By the way, Navy SEALs and sailors in the US Navy also chew gum. Only special, military ones. They add caffeine and other stimulants to make the fighter stay alert longer even with a lack of sleep.

An earlier study by Chewing gum alleviates negative mood and reduces cortisol during acute laboratory psychological stress by Swinburne University specialists from Australia also showed similar results: people who chew gum are less sensitive to irritation.

Scientists aren't sure what causes this, but they speculate that chewing causes an increase in blood flow to the brain, which in turn somehow helps the body regulate cortisol levels.

Why is it important

An interesting observation: Overthinking involves incessant worrying. This approach seems to prevent a person from moving forward. Why? Because he constantly thinks about the past. This is human psychology. For example, his thoughts might revolve around the following: “I shouldn't have said those things in the meeting yesterday. Everyone thought I was an idiot." Or: “I should have stayed at my last job. I would be much happier now.”

Persistent worry also includes negative (often catastrophic) predictions about the future. Thoughts might include: “I won’t be able to handle this presentation tomorrow; I’ll forget everything I need to say.” Or: “Everyone else will get a promotion, but not me: no one notices my work.”

Learn from your mistakes

There is a lot of truth in what Henry Ford said when he said that the only real mistake is the one we don't learn from. Failure teaches you like no one else can teach you. You must learn from your mistakes and “listen to the lessons of failure,” as Bill Gates said.

Draw conclusions from your mistakes. Accept them, learn from them and never repeat them. Identify your weaknesses, work on them and turn them into your strengths.

8 Important Life Lessons to Learn Before It's Too Late

Start with simple steps - once you gain momentum, it will be easier to move on

Among my students there are married couples where the husband and wife are involved in business. One of these couples, having received homework from me to test drive their dreams (this is a mandatory exercise in the Big Plans training course), went to look at 3-room apartments.

Having learned the cost of the objects they liked, they were at first saddened. According to the most optimistic estimates, it would take approximately 3 years to collect the required budget. The deadline did not suit them, but the idea of their own home captivated them.

They began to sort through the options and came to a brilliant solution: buy land and build a house. After thinking a little more, they came up with a 2-step scheme. Buy land, put up a temporary building on it (they have already found a contractor who is ready to build it in a month), move in there and calmly build a permanent house. The time frame was reduced by 3 times. The couple is now encouraged and the business has seen sharp growth.

Measure your results

You can only manage what you can measure.

I teach my students to monitor their movement weekly and monthly. There is a special accounting table that records the achievement of planned indicators (usually personal income, turnover, number of contracts), what was achieved and what could have been done better. As soon as a student has statistics on his movement, his results begin to grow.

Keep a chart of your results and take regular measurements of your movement.