Couch Appeal {Part 1}

Exploring the motivational obstacles we encounter & creative ways to get around them

The phrase couch appeal isn’t just a cutesy phrase but a real dilemma for me. I have honestly been baffled by my inactivity in my life at times, all the while my dreams and goals are running rampant through my mind like a herd of adorable puppies. I have things to do and sometimes I get to them, and sometimes I sit on my couch and scroll mindlessly through Instagram.

Why is doing nothing at times more appealing than doing something?

And I refuse to hear once again the taboo saying of “no pain, no gain” and the many, many other forms of that message out in the coaching and self-help arenas. Struggling with a lack of motivation and directionlessness cannot simply be an avoidance of pain or just a fear of failure. I believe there’s something much deeper and entangled in our being that wrestles with our very existence and purpose behind all the “something’s” we are attempting to do. And for many of us, this wrestling has gone on for so long and we have tried everything under the sun to nail down this feeling, that we stop trusting ourselves. We stop trusting our passions and desires. We fear that we have diluted ourselves into thinking that what we do makes a difference or doubting if we are going the right direction in the first place. We become little nihilists to our own dreams which is why the “nothing” is so appealing. This couch may be symbolic or for many, reality. Either way, the obstacles remain.

So the question: where did this nihilistic thinking come from? How do we go from motivation & faith, to stuck & discouraged? We may not be abandoning our faith but somehow we have come to believe that much of what we do is totally meaningless. I am not attempting to explore nihilism and it’s Prophet, Friedrich Nietzsche but simply to draw awareness to the undergirding of our thoughts that ultimately fuel or freeze our actions.

This is not a “pick yourself by the bootstraps” blog series, there are plenty of books you can buy for that but a “pause” moment, you might say. A time to be quiet and look inward because we are never truly without motivation, are we. We are so conditioned to recognize the motivations that enable us to accomplish things

but can we recognize the motivations that cause us to do nothing?

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan to explore this topic and hope to discover more than a “just do it” solution to helping myself and you go after the big (and small) goals we set for ourselves. But before the solutions can come, we need to do some searching first. In Part 2, I want to address the “meaningless” tasks we fill our day with. Some are actually, totally meaningless and some feel meaningless (there’s a big difference). We are creating pathways in our mind every day that fuel our behavior and so let’s take a wake along these pathways together, shall we? Hope you will join me.

With love,