Getting Out of a Rut and What I've Learned | The Mazes

Hard, but definitely worth it!

It was when things were going on pretty well - I was sleeping, eating, moving, and healthy, that like every time, my routine took a toll on me. Whenever things are going well for me, a resistance arises all of a sudden outta nowhere as if to test my ability to stick to it. And in all honesty, there are more times I failed than not. I am not ashamed to admit this constant struggle I have with myself, but here, I want to share insights from those few times where I was able to come out of it with a win. It is a kinda weird process, but once you get back on the other side, that's when you know you won this time.

Being in a rut is always a very hard process for me - there are 'n' no. of things you wanna do, you know where you wanna go or even if you don't, you know the things you should be doing, or the things you should avoid. All these come as a side effect of having exposure to all of the self-improvement content from books and videos I consume on a regular basis. It is good to have the awareness of it all than not, but being able to have such a commanding awareness contrasting with being stuck on every single productive thing you wanna do and not being able to move, is a tragedy in itself. I don't know how to explain it's depth, but once you face it, you will understand, or if you probably already have, welcome to the club.

Days pass, time's running away, and the feeling of left behind in life, ironically watching all the successful people climbing their way up on our smartphone screens, all it can being up is smoke - the smoke of where you want to be vs the brutal reality of where you are.

Indeed a tragic battle, working towards the former sounds like an impossible task, a stretch too much for your current imagination based on what you've seen from yourself in the recent times. But what if I say, if I may, that there is a way to get out? Yes, there are ways out of it, to get better, to get back to the routine, to try working towards where you wanna be, while enjoying the struggle of who you are. Let me explain.

Step 1: Identify the priorities list - identify all the important things that you want to do. Pick the most important three and place them in their order of importance.

Step 2: Identify one step you can do to contribute to each one of them, in a day. Write them against the three, the required actions of the listed three, in very minimal forms. List the laziest action you could contribute, not the big one.

Step 3: (If that is too much for your current momentum of the rut that you're in:) Pick the single most important one - and pick a step for it. Again, a lazy start is what you need, not the perfect one. Understand this, and implement accordingly or you will have difficulties starting, based on your current situation.

Step 4: Start with the first one and the most important one. Lazy steps one day contributes to better ones in the upcoming days.

As you go on, as you make sure the first has been consistently being done for more than two weeks, you can add to it the rest, but in the same fashion as we started with the process. Remember where you came from, congratulate yourself on your achievement, but without rewarding yourself with laziness. No, laziness is not the way to go. The reward must be more of what the good activity contains, do more and more of it to reward yourself. And as the story entails, you will be in a better position with one proper implementation of a single step rather than being worried about a thousand ones all at once, and not being able to do even one.

Congrats if you've done it before.

All The Best to all who's gonna go for it this time.

And to those who has done it and fell back into the loop - remember, you have done it once, you can do it again.

Thank you for reading, hope it helps!