Turning Yourself On On Those Days When You Simply Feel Flat

There are days when we just feel flat – perhaps not dejected, disillusioned or depressed, just lifeless, energy-less and disinterested. And although I’ve been teaching my many personal development clients how to start each day by focusing their minds – and I do it myself – sometimes, within just a few minutes, one ends up feeling, like, ‘I wish I was somewhere else!’ or ‘I just don’t feel like doing this!’ I’m not talking about things going wrong during the day, I’m simply talking about what one client described like this: ‘I get into my office, full of energy, I sit down at my desk, start going through my emails and, suddenly, it’s like I’m in a kind of daze.’

What is it that takes the wind out of our sails so easily? How can we be so fired up one minute and then suddenly so flat? Well, the answer is all too simple – flat is your default state of mind. Yeah, believe it or not, research explains that few of us is tuned in sufficiently to actually be adequately focused and attentive to get through the normal day effectively. As if that wasn’t enough, research also asserts that, left to its own devices, our minds slip towards negativity. It’s the way we’re hard-wired – and all the personal development or self improvement in the world won’t personal development or self improvement isn’t going to change the hardware.

But a committed approach to self improvement will change the programs that we run. Again, left to itself, our subconscious mind is happy to watch reruns – to keep running the same old dysfunctional programs that make our daily lives mundane, uninteresting, repetitive and uninspiring. You need to grab a hold of that remote control! Personal development will teach you how to change channels and stop watching the old programs. It will enable you tune in to reality TV – the real reality of the now.

Sadly, the feeling of mindless-couldn’t-care-less simply invades our minds by default. And that will always, for the rest of our lives, be our default way of thinking unless you cultivate a mindful, focused, tuned in state of mind – and not only have you got to do this each and every day, you’ve got to find some mechanism to ensure that you can recapture that state of mindfulness when you feel that you’re slithering down the inevitable slippery slope towards mindlessness – because, as sure as night follows day, you’ll start slipping the moment you take your eye of the ball.

Sure, I’m mixing my metaphors, between PCs, TV and slippery slopes – but you understand? Our mind is ever-ready to mug us – we’ve got to be on alert as much as is humanly possible.