Inspirational Quotes help you get unstuck and make the Days count

On Sunday, January 8th I posted on my Facebook Page the following inspirational Quote:

This was the start to something new and, more importantly, to some insights that I want to share with you here.

I love inspirational quotes!

One source where I find them is the Personal Dashboard Momentum on the internet that I have installed as a Chrome extension.

Every Day Momentum greets me with another breathtaking photo from somewhere in the world and a great, mostly inspirational, Quote. (The research for this article revealed that Momentum is actually “Made with Love in beautiful BC, Canada”. That’s where I live, what a surprise!)

I also see and find quotes on Facebook and I have also googled “inspirational quote” before and got lost in reading one after another after another (Alert: time sucker).

Eventually, I started to collect them. Now whenever I see an inspirational quote that resonates with me, I clip it to Evernote into my notebook “Quotes” with a tag “inspirational”. I tag them because I also started to collect quotes around money and finances, these ones get tagged “financial”.

I ended up collecting Quotes like other people collect paper clips from magazines but never do anything with it, or books they want to read but never do, wool they want to knit with but never get around to it, photos they want to make collages and vision boards one day.

We collect all these things to use in the future. One day we might need them. One day we want to use them…. One Day we have the time…. and

One day never comes

Because there is no “One Day” in any calendar and anybody’s life. Unless we decide to pick a specific day and make the time to actually start doing the stuff we labeled “One Day I will…. ” whatever we are collecting is simply Clutter.

About a year ago or so, I started to take one of these inspirational Quotes, find a nice image to go with it, pick a font I like, and create a Social Media post to share with the world.

This was a fun little project but then at the beginning of this year, when I was working on posting the above quote from Muhammad Ali, I thought:

Why am I doing this?

What good does it do?

Does it actually do anything other than taking up time?

The thought that came to me was: While I am creating the Social Media post I’m actually deliberating the quote. I engross in it way more than if I would simply read it and then go on with my day.

Interesting.

This sounded like a valid reason, a good enough one to invest the time, right? But it came to me, maybe I could do better and go one step further. So I had the idea, that I wanted to make it a habit of posting an inspirational quote every Sunday and then use the

quote as a theme to guide me through the upcoming week

So throughout the following week I would think here and there, how could I make today count? How could I make it a good day?

One of these days I looked over my (very long) To-Do list and saw a task that I had been procrastinating for a long time because I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it.

We often procrastination when we are overwhelmed, stuck and don’t know where to start. I wrote about procrastination before, you can read it here and here.

Then I remembered something that I heard Michael Hyatt say (I am paraphrasing here)

In order to accomplish a task, we don’t need to know every single step. The only thing we need to know is the very next step and then do that one. We can make this next step as tiny as we need to to get us going. Because if we just start working on the task, no matter with how small of a step, it gets us moving, it gets us unstuck and as a result out of procrastination.

That’s how I got the ball rolling on my task that I had procrastinated on for so long, I decided to make a very small step, then the next day I made another very small step, this got me unstuck and the task is about to be completed now.

In order to keep this momentum going, I chose the following inspirational Quote as a theme for this week:

I intend to start making progress on other ‘old’ To-do’s on my list by taking the first (tiny) step, and then the next one and the next, until the task is done.

Now one funny coincidence I have to add here is, I did not realize until the day after I posted this Inspirational quote on Facebook, that January 16, 2017 was Martin Luther King Day. I wonder what other forces where at play when I chose exactly this quote for the week……

Over to you, do you have quotes, inspirational ones or others, that got you do accomplish certain tasks or projects? I would love to hear about the, please post in the comments below.

With Love,