Quite a lot of us have experienced periods in our lives where we’ve felt stuck and unable to move forward with our goals and aspirations. Alternatively, we might have been unhappy in our current circumstances, but couldn’t quite gain the impetus to help us claw our way out of them.
It’s certainly hard, but the practices listed below can be immensely helpful for overcoming that inertia. Each one is like a ladder rung that you can use to climb out of the hole you’ve been trapped in, so you can move forward.
1. Start with a literal clean slate.
This refers to both your environment and your own body. If you’ve been feeling stagnant and stuck for a long time, the best thing to do first is to clean your house. This doesn’t have to be an epic top-to-bottom deep cleanse: focus on things being hygienic rather than immaculate. If things are still a bit messy, that’s okay — at least it’s a clean mess!
If you find the task overwhelming, see if you can get someone to take it on with you to act as a body double to help keep you on track. If there is no one who can be physically present, even having a digital accountability buddy can help to keep you on task.
Once that’s done, take a long, cleansing bath or shower. By establishing a clean slate across the board, it’s easier to establish and maintain healthy long-term habits and practices. These will help you exponentially on your road forward. There’s nothing worse than trying to achieve a daunting life task when everything (including you) is grungy and in need of scouring. Or a cleansing fire, depending on the day!
2. Declutter your life.
Our outer environment reflects the inner (and vice versa). As such, if you’ve felt stuck and in a state of inertia for quite a while, the next step to take after a thorough cleaning is to declutter your home, your body, and your mind.
If you like music, put on something that motivates you, and start going through all your belongings. Be ruthless about getting rid of all the unnecessary items, and arrange what’s left in an organized manner.
After that, change the music to something more calming (Ludovico Einaudi is a great pick), and try some meditation to help you declutter and focus your mind.
In particular, try to fully visualize and focus on the purpose you have in mind. If visualization doesn’t come naturally to you (or at all), try journaling about your goal instead, or mindfully describe it out loud to yourself. The aim is simply to connect meaningfully with your purpose, without all the noise and distractions of life.
These actions will grant you both a tidier space to breathe and help you gain forward movement in your life endeavors.
3. Choose one thing to build a consistent discipline around.
A good way to overcome inertia is to choose something that you can rely upon yourself to do daily. This way, you can prove to yourself that you’re capable of doing something with diligence and dedication.
Once you learn that you can trust yourself to do these little things on a daily basis, you can add bigger tasks to that daily list with full confidence that you’re capable and disciplined enough to get them done. For example, you can add evening yoga or a morning walk, or even read five pages a day.
Doing something small like this consistently every day helps you build immense faith in your own abilities. If you can do this, even when you truly cannot be bothered, you’re improving your willpower across the board. This is exactly the thing you need to achieve the bigger goal(s) you had in mind.
Should you find that you’re having trouble remembering to do them at specific times, consider setting reminders on your phone or using gamified to-do list apps like Finch, Habitica, or EpicWin to help you out.
4. Clear your plate about the things you’ve been procrastinating about.
Something that can be a massive help to build momentum and overcome inertia is getting rid of everything that’s been languishing on your to-do list. Sometimes a river gets clogged by a lot of wood and other detritus, and the best way to get it flowing again is to clear all that baggage out of the way.
Take stock of everything you’ve been meaning to take care of, from annoying little DIY projects and irksome paperwork to the ever-dreaded dental visit. If you can, rather than endlessly putting them off, get all of these things done so they aren’t competing for your time, energy, and most importantly, your mental focus.
Once you have these done and out of the way, you’ll have much more mental bandwidth to give to the main issue in question.
5. Remove negative things that are anchoring you.
In addition to doing healthy things to build momentum, it’s important to sever the ties that have been holding you back. These could be unhealthy habits, stifling relationships with friends, partners, parents, etc., or distractions that you indulge in rather than focusing on your goal.
By removing the things that are distracting or deleterious to you and your efforts, it makes everything easier to accomplish.
If it’s too difficult to cut these ties immediately, then reduce them as much as possible and distance yourself from them gradually if you can. You might also want to consider professional support, if it’s available to you, to help navigate these situations.
6. Get assistance with the things you aren’t certain about.
A huge impediment to things moving forward is personal uncertainty. Even the most energetic and capable people often hit an internal wall when they don’t know how or which way is best to proceed with. This often happens when a person can’t see viable options because they aren’t familiar with the territory. To them, it’s all a confusing mess.
When you’re unfamiliar with how to go about doing things, the best thing to do is some research.
Look at how others have accomplished this same goal — or even better — get some advice and assistance from those who are experienced in this field. Book time with a professional if you have the means (for example, a financial, academic, health, or career advisor, depending on your goals) and work with them to determine the best path forward for you.
Doing this can massively shift your goals in the right direction, because you now have a path to follow with tangible landmarks to work towards, rather than flailing through the underbrush alone.
7. Think about where you’d like to be, and draw a map of what it’ll take to get you there.
If you look forward and hold the ideal outcome you’d like in your mind’s eye (or even better, put it down on paper), you can start working out a blueprint to get there. The best endeavors almost always have a consequential plan behind them. One does not simply jump from the starting line to the finish line: there’s always a beginning, middle, and end to any substantial life path.
Many people fail at their endeavors because they don’t factor in everything that they have to do, nor everything that could potentially go wrong, so they can make contingencies for them. As a result, they’re quick to throw in the towel when things don’t go as planned.
But when you have a solid plan with contingencies for when things go sideways, you’re much more likely to reach that end goal successfully.
8. Make a plan and start taking small steps towards it.
Once you have a master plan in place, don’t feel intimidated by it: you don’t have to tackle it in its entirety today. You’ll likely have to get all your ducks in a row first, and then you can take small steps on the path you’ve laid out.
Many small steps and little actions add up to great forward momentum. Besides, it’s both easier and more viable in our hectic day-to-day lives to regularly get a few things done towards the plan than to take gargantuan strides and exhaust ourselves in the process.
Big strides may cause you to slip or trip, or you put forth so much energy in undertaking them that you have to rest and recover from the effort. But with smaller, more regular steps, progress is much easier to manage. In this case, less is actually more, and this approach is far more effective in getting you where you want to be without burning yourself out.
Final thoughts…
Each of these practices will help you to build momentum so you can finally move forward towards the goal you’ve had in mind for so long. Any time you feel yourself slipping, take stock of where you may have fallen behind and address that issue while it’s small — before it becomes big enough to become an obstacle in your path once again.
See this like making small wheel adjustments as you’re driving: a little nudge here and there will keep you from veering off into a ditch, and you’ll reach your destination in fine fettle.
