Mood Follows Action

It’s a Monday. Not my favourite day of the week. I’m in a bad mood but have to write my weekly blog post, and I’m just not feeling it.

I start up my computer to write, but I can’t seem to focus. My mind is all over the place. So I look for the slightest distraction. I see a fly in the room. Yes, a fly and I stop what I’m doing and start chasing it. But, of course, it flies off, leaving me frustrated.

Next, I get an alert that my website is down. That’s a sufficiently big enough excuse to stop my writing and focus on trying to get it online again. (of course, I fail after an hour and call the website developer)

Now I’m feeling defeated and start listening to some melancholic music and tell myself that I wasn’t feeling it. I wasn’t inspired to write. Today wasn’t my day, and it is okay to miss a day of writing.

However, I quickly started to feel guilty and miserable.

We all think that motivation leads to action. So if we feel good and energised, we can get into action and do whatever we want. It is true that on some occasions, like last Saturday morning, I was in the mood and wrote for three hours non-stop.

However, what about when we don’t feel motivated. Do we not write or pause on what we had planned to do. How many motivated days do we get a year?

Creative work, exercise or focused work requires discipline, overcoming struggle and a grand purpose to keep us going. But unfortunately, there is always resistance from our inner critic that forms a mental barrier between us and the doing.

That resistance is fear. We are constantly judging ourselves, our work and our performance.

“Fear doesn’t go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.” ― Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle.

Accepting this resistance and knowing how to overcome it distinguishes the winners from the losers. The professionals from the amateurs. The achievers from the procrastinators.

Understanding that our motivation levels are finite means that we can look to other ways of doing. It is not always the case that when we feel better and more energised, we are more likely to take action.

We can’t control our thoughts or our feelings. And the more we try to suppress our thoughts and feelings, the stronger they become.

The only thing we can do is alter our physical behaviour, changing our mindset. That could mean a walk, a workout or dancing to a song that moves us. The point is to get out of our heads.

True, it’s not always easy to take action when our thoughts and feelings tell us otherwise. But the best way to do so is to snap out of the analysis and jump straight into action.

Ultra-athlete, Podcaster and self-improvement guru Rich Roll coined the phrase: Mood follows action.

“If I’m down or in a rut, I force myself to move my body, even if only a little bit,” says Roll. “This helps shift my perspective and reset my operating system — and more often than not, the sun starts shining again.”

I quickly stopped feeling sorry for myself and went for a short walk. I then sat my ass down on the chair, faced the computer, plugged in my AirPods and started to write.

Again, my body led the way, and inspiration followed.

Let me repeat Roll’s mantra: Mood follows Action.