Character vs. Actions

Lately, I’ve been trying to improve my productivity. Specifically, I’ve been trying to spend more time working on advancing my goals, instead of playing games or reading fiction. And it went pretty well for several months. But then it stopped improving. Not only that, I started doing worse than the previous week. That trend continued for several weeks until I finally took a step back to assess what happened.

After hitting my goals out of the park for a while,

I stopped making progress. After each week, I’d review what I did recently, and think about how to change things. As I continued to struggle, I started to make everything about my character instead of my actions. The problem was that I was lazy, or unmotivated. It wasn’t that I had stayed up too late the night before, or that ate an unhealthy meal. I stopped thinking about ways to change my actions. Why would I? They weren’t the problem. The problem was my character.

This is of course crazy. I needed to change my actions, and as I stopped thinking about ways to do that I faltered and then crashed. How could I continue working when I was constantly calling myself lazy and pathetic? Who would work under those conditions? Not me. I started feeling disgust at my failures. That led to me pushing my past self away, instead of trying to understand what about that situation had contributed to my failings. 

Once I stepped back,

 I started to walk through the actions around my mistakes. I tried to feel the things I felt in the past as I repeated my past actions in my mind. I had felt harried, and stressed, and afraid. I just wanted to avoid thinking about my goals because that brought on more feelings of inferiority and helplessness. I realized that I had a great deal of emotional baggage weighing me down. And that there was no reason to continue holding onto it.

I started to look at the past in a new light. I assumed that I was not the problem. Because that required me to really look at my failures. I could no longer push them away and be done with it. Once I started looking, I found a few ways to improve my actions.

Each week had become an evaluation where my soul sat on trial. Any failures were devastating, and led to me becoming disheartened. I needed each week to become an experiment, where I tried various methods to see how well they helped me accomplish my goals. I needed to judge my actions and processes because these are things that I can change.

What about you?

Are you stuck on anything? If so, do you look for ways to improve after you fall short? Do you make everything about your character or your actions?