Unlocking Motivation: A Simple Hack to Keep You Moving Forward

If you’ve read many of my articles, you’ll know by now that I’m an enormous lover of a well-placed quote or bringing a little saying into your day which you can use to help you to hack your mindset, whether it’s to help you to break a bad habit or to keep yourself on track with doing you’re procrastinating about and resisting.

I stand by this idea so much so that I have no fewer than three quotes actually tattooed on my body:

• “Fortune favours the bold”

• “Nothing is simultaneously created and perfected”

• “No more dead time” - this is a lyric from one of my favourite bands

I’m also a big believer in the idea that the simpler you make things, the more likely they are to be helpful for you in your daily life. The easier something is to use, the greater the likelihood that you’ll be able to just slot it in and use it without the voice of resistance having a chance to rear its ugly head and trying to get in your way.

Bear with me here, this might seem like I’m about to go off on a bit of a tangent, but it’ll all make sense soon, I swear.

As human beings, we’re genetically hard-wired to follow the path of least resistance. Which, when you think about it, makes sense. Why would our brains want us to do hard things, when all its still concerned about, even till this day, is keeping us alive long enough for us to pass our genes on to the next generation?

We might think we’re oh-so evolved, but in reality we’re not that different than our cave-dwelling ancestors. Our brains are largely the same. And yet the world we’re living in is very different.

I recently learned that impediments can be a real blocker (or a help) when it comes to behaviour change.

Apparently, if you have a glass jar of sweets or cookies on your desk, even if it’s see-through, you’ll eat fewer of them if the jar has a lid. Crazy, eh? Just the simple act of having to lift that lid can be enough to put you off, at least some of the time.

So, it stands to reason that if you DO want to do something, then removing impediments will make it more likely that you will. Getting out your gym gear the night before if you want to exercise in the morning, for example. Or preparing your lunch the night before, if you’re trying to spend less money and consume fewer calories on lunches at work.

There are many things in our lives which have been engineered to attract our attention, even to be addictive. Gambling, TV, most social media sites and apps, and of course games on our phones.

Created with Bing’s CoPilot

So, if we want a particular quote or an idea to be front and centre in our minds, and also easily accessible (rather than on a piece of paper, peppered all around your house on Post-It notes or in a note in an app on your phone which you have to open and search for) doesn’t it make sense to put it on your phone wallpaper?

This is a similar idea to my poorly named ‘hand reminders’ idea but with the added advantage that a) no one’s going to see and ask you what your note means, b) it won’t wash off, and c) most of us can fit more words on our phone wallpaper than we can on our hands!

I swap mine out every week or two. Sometimes it’s a quote from a wise person, sometimes it’s a reminder for myself about something I do (or don’t) want to do. Such as ‘Do something else!’ when I’m trying to spend more time reading than looking on social media apps or playing iOS games.

At the moment, mine is the ‘Litany against Fear’ from Frank Herbert’s Dune:

Created with Canva.com

There are loads of apps you can get (just search for Wallpaper in your App Store), or sites you can use to create your own phone wallpaper. I often use Canva.com (there’s a free tier which should be enough to get you started) or you can search on Google Images for “<brand of phone> wallpaper ‘quote here’” to see if someone else has already created one you can just download and use.

So, there you go. Short but sweet today (as I’ve got Covid!), but the simplest ideas are often the most useful and stand the chance of being the most impactful, in my experience, and I hope this is helpful!