By Marney K. Makridakis
Does this sentence ring true for you?
“I start out very excited about my creative goals or projects, but find myself becoming bored or disinterested before they’ve been carried to fruition.”
If you find yourself losing steam on a project before you carry it out to fruition (or even before you take it very far), do yourself and your goal a favor and aim to figure out whether or not it really IS true boredom that you are feeling…or if it is another form of resistance that is coming up for you and masking itself as boredom.
If you truly are bored with a project or goal AS A WHOLE, then it clearly isn’t the time for you to be working on it. It’s time to put it aside for another time, because passion is probably the most important ingredient to keeping your motivation alive. If you are experiencing true boredom, you will not have passion. So that means you should change directions, and perhaps come back to that particular project at a later time.
But it’s important to note that there is a difference between being bored with an entire project and being bored by the steps. So the first step in discernment is to figure out if you are finding the steps boring or if you’ve just petered out with the whole darn thing. Here are some clues for discernment. First, get still, quiet, and breathe deeply. Relax into a meditative place where you feel like you can have a real conversation with your inner self.
Then visualize your life as if your goal had already happened. Take in all the senses – what do you hear, smell, see, taste, touch, and “sense”? Then ask yourself these questions:
- Do you still get a charge from this image?
- Is it still something that fills you with excitement and joy?
- Do you feel a sense of satisfaction, from that place of imagining already having accomplished this goal?
The bottom line is to see if you are still excited by the END RESULT of the goal. If so, it could be that you are feeling bored by the steps, tasks, and procedures involved in the project, rather than the goal itself.
If you can make this discernment, ask yourself if there is anything that could make the steps more enjoyable. There may not be – after all, some work is just that, WORK. But perhaps there is a reward or payoff you are overlooking…or a way that you can combine the task with something else to make it more tolerable for you.
One way to see possibilities that you may have previously missed is to involve your imagination. Give the task in question a “human” personality — a name, a shape, and a speaking voice.
Let’s use one of my personal dreaded tasks as an example: cold-calling printers and service providers to get price quotes. So, let’s give the dreaded task a name (let’s call him Mr. Calls) and ask questions such as these directly to the task. Then allow the task to answer back. A great way to open up your entire mind to this activity is to write the question in your dominant hand, and let your non-dominate hand write the answers.
Here are some questions you could ask:
- Mr. Calls, is there something I can do to make this less loathsome for me?
- Mr. Calls, is there someone or something that could help me with this?
- Mr. Calls, is there a way I can add some fun or bliss to this process?
Try it, and see what your “dreaded task” has to say…right from his or her own mouth!
If you can discern that it’s not just tasks you are bored with, but the whole project in general, I have one more step of discernment to take before you move the project aside.
Resistance is a tricky thing. It can mask itself as all kinds of things, including boredom, to keep you from being successful. Most of us have parts in us that are still in need of healing – sometimes therapists and coaches refer to these as our “gremlins”. If you have a gremlin that is trying to keep you from succeeding, it may turn up as boredom.
To discern whether there is something lying underneath the boredom, again, ASK THE SOURCE. Invite the boredom into a dialogue. He/she/it may have much to tell you.
Here’s another personal example. When I was in the third chapter of the novel I’m writing, I realized that every time I sat down to write, I became very sleepy. I thought I was losing excitement about the project and wondered if this was a ‘sign’ that I should just give up. I mean, if I were still passionate and committed to the goal of writing a novel, I wouldn’t be getting sleepy, right? But it never failed – every time I sat down to write, I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
So I instigated a conversation between me and the sleepiness, switching between my dominant and non-dominant hands. “Sleepy, what are you?…” After a bit of conversing, I learned that Sleepy was resistance because in that particular scene in the novel, there was some material that was “close to home” and I held fear in writing about it.
Giving the sleepiness a name allowed me to get inside its “head”, speak to it, and speak for it.
That helped me know what I needed to do to move past the sleepiness and do what I needed to do to get the chapter written. It also gave me the confidence I needed to know that I WAS, indeed, still passionate about the project. It made me realize I did not need to doubt my commitment to it.
So if boredom is a problem for you in this project, or if it is a recurring issue with multiple projects, be committed to discerning if there is something under the boredom that can be dealt with separately. In the example above, I needed to do some inner work about this personal issue before I was safe enough to write about it. My resistance had nothing to do with my goal to write a novel – it had to do with a gremlin that thought it was protecting me.
When you think you’re getting bored with a project and want to drop a dream or goal of yours, make the efforts to engage in discernment. If you can determine that the boredom that you’re experiencing is a true loss of interest in a project, it’s OK! People change, moods change, and motivations change. Specifically, if you are engaged in a process of self-exploration, you may find that you “outgrow” old goals and need to make new ones that are a better fit for you. This is totally FINE! Move on to something else that excites you!
But don’t move on too quickly…just in case the boredom is masking itself as some form of resistance that you can DO something about. There’s something to be said for the old “sleep on it” adage…things often look clearer in the sun of morning, and in the light of discernment.
About the Author
© Copyright Marney K. Makridakis. Marney K. Makridakis’ company, Artella ~ the waltz of words and art, is a magazine and support network for artists, writers, and creative spirits. For more information about Artella’s splashy publications, free teleworkshops, creative e-courses, supportive communities, and the upcoming creative artisan marketplace, visit the Artella Web site at www.ArtellaWordsAndArt.com.