How to Keep Going When You Feel Like Giving Up

If you don’t want some plain old common sense on how to keep going when you feel like giving up, just scroll to the next article my friend.

When you’re feeling crappy, a spiel on the failures that successful people experienced once probably won’t help (if you’re anything like me). Because they are not you and you are not them.

The thing is, you don’t need to be them. You just need to keep going as you.

Start with a clean space

You don’t need to feel like it. You just need to do it.

A great way to get to cleaning when you feel like crap is mini-tasks. It’s like a little mind game that actually works.

Say, for example, you need to do the dishes but that seems impossibly overwhelming. Your first mini-task will be to get off your bed. Crawl on the floor if necessary.

Once you’re up, you might as well straighten the sheets on your bed, right? Then maybe you can straighten the pillows. And surely you can fold that blanket.

And just like that, you’ve accomplished a task you didn’t even set out to do! That means that you can definitely walk to the kitchen sink.

Once you’re there, just wash one dish.

Just one.

Once you finish that, guess what? You can wash another. Keep going, just setting yourself a goal of washing one dish. And then keep going until all the dishes are done.

Then, give yourself another mini task. Need to vacuum? Or hoover (for my Brit friends)? Just get the vacuum out of the cupboard. Since it’s out, you might as well plug it in, right? And once it’s plugged it, why not vacuum just one little piece of carpet? Then maybe you can do another piece? And another?

If it will help, put on one of those clean with me videos on YouTube to keep you company while you clean one small part of your home at a time.

Before you know it, you’re finished. Bravo!

Take a breath

With a clean space as your background, take a moment to really breathe. I love the Wim Hof method, but any mindful breathing exercise will do.

Inhale, then exhale. That’s how you’ll get through it.

Author Unknown

Once you’re in a blissful oxygenated state, let’s talk about why you felt like you didn’t know how to keep going.

What was Your Trigger?

Do you feel engulfed by something beyond your control?

Research shows that people under stress are more likely to continue on after failing if they believed that the failure was determined by circumstances that they could control. On the other hand, stressed people faced with failure caused by circumstances beyond their control are more likely to throw in the towel.

However, here’s the thing: there is always something in your control in every situation: YOU.

What’s in Your Mind?

When the only thing within your control is you, your mindset becomes a fundamental part of how to keep going.

Do you believe that you can learn to succeed? Or is it a luck of the draw?

This is not a simple question. Resist the urge to pick the logical answer and really examine your thoughts on this.

It can help to write things down to sort out the thought/emotional spaghetti inside your head.

The answer is important because research shows that mindset is the determining factor for how to keep going.

People who believe that “the view that talents and abilities could be developed and that challenges were the way to do it” get on much better than people who don’t. This is called a growth mindset.

If your journal exercise reveals that you don’t have this mindset right now, you can choose to develop it. Developing a growth mindset requires us to learn from the process leading to the failure. It’s not just about the effort, but what ‘failure’ teaches us. As Prof. Dweck herself said, “Praise the effort that led to the outcome or learning progress; tie the praise to it. It’s not just effort, but strategy … so support the student in finding another strategy.”

This ability to adapt following failure is how to keep going.

FYI, if you’re really interested in learning more, you may want to check out Prof. Dweck’s book “Mindset: The new Psychology of Success”. There’s an animated short version here – but you know what they say: the book is usually better than the movie.

We can always change our mindset. It just takes more work. Start with reframing one thought. Just one.

Reframing Each Thought

Instead of –

“I can’t do this,”

say

“I can do this.”

Instead of –

“Nothing can change”,

say

“I can always change myself”.

Instead of –

“I’m a failure”,

say

“My failures do not define me. I am defined by how I react to failure, which is completely within my control.”

Instead of –

“This is an absolute mess”,

say

“My effort and my failed outcome are part of my success.“

Lastly, ask yourself “What can I learn from this?”