You always have a choice. It's your life to live.

Getting out of the zero-sum mindset. Don't think of it as choosing between work and play. Support the podcast and become a Patreon. Artwork by Knut J Håland Music by Chris Haugen

We make it harder than it needs to be

Stop beating yourself up when you don't live up to expectations.

Uncertainty is a scary thing. Especially when being an adult often means learning to "suck it up" and "deal with it". But where are the instructions on how to do that?

The success of others highlights how much of a failure I am. Sometimes I wonder why I even both working so hard when I can never seem to catch up.

When life smacks me around, I want to run away. And when various aspects of my life gang up to bully me, I want to hide. When I feel overwhelmed by life, I need to find a way to turn it around instead of making it worse by ignoring everything.

I never want to do the dishes, so they just pile up and make my living space feel cluttered and gross. It's a simple task that I acknowledge I should do, yet I avoid it. I need to understand why I resist such a simple chore so I can get myself to do it.

Setting goals and resolutions are easy. They take no real effort. Following through is where I fall down. It's so easy to put stuff off, to fall into traps I've set for myself. It's only by following through that I can do what it takes to achieve my goals.

Procrastination can also be the result of simple laziness. Sometimes I just don't want to do something even though it's for my own good. I'm not afraid of it or trying to avoid it, I just don't care enough right now to do anything about. Deadlines can provide the motivation to overcome laziness but I need to be careful not to introduce so much pressure that I feel anxious about the deadline and procrastinate just to avoid it.

We all know procrastination is bad, but we do it anyway. Procrastination is the symptom of a deeper issue, it's the avoidance of anxiety. Deadlines create anxiety and we react to anxiety by procrastinating. In order to stop procrastinating, we need treat address the cause and not the symptom.

We can't avoid mornings. They're a part of literally every day life. And by making our mornings better, we can make a big impact on the quality of our lives.

Getting lost in regret can leave me paralyzed and unable to do anything. Learning from the past is important, but I can't get lost in it, or it'll only distract me from the present and building the life I want to live.

No one wants to do boring, tedious stuff, like practice. But if I want to achieve certain things, I need to find a way to get over this.

  Artwork by Knut J Håland Music by Chris Haugen

It's hard to work towards big dreams, because they're so intimidating. I struggle to get started because the road ahead is long and daunting. The more I dream the worse this becomes. If I want to achieve my dreams, I need to stop thinking about them and focus on the present.

Confidence is hard to find, not because it's hiding, but because I don't know where to look. Confidence is believing in yourself, but that's hard to do when I never feel like I'm good enough and this is the problem. I can't accept who I am, because I'm too busy wishing I was something more.

It's tempting to focus on jump-starting motivation, but it's even more important to look at how to maintain it and keep it from slipping away. One of the ways motivation slips away, is through unexpected hiccups that derail our plans. While, it's convenient to pretend they're unexpected, often, we choose to blind ourselves to the obvious. Why do we do this? And how can we keep our eyes focused on what's truly ahead?

Goals are important. The more important it is, the bigger and more daunting it tends to be. But the more daunting, the more likely I am to find an excuse not to complete it. This ends with never achieving what really matters. Breaking down big scary goals into small bite-sized ones ends this vicious circle and allows me to make the progress I want.

Some decisions are terrifying to make, especially when they will have a big impact on my future. But if I can't face these decisions head on, I'll never be able to move forward.

I wanna spend more time with family and loved ones, but I also want to advance my career. It wouldn't hurt to have more time to myself either, I might even pick up a hobby. Finding time for one thing, means taking it away from something else. So I'm often going back and forth, trying to squeeze out more time. But that never works, and there's never enough time, so it feels like I'm failing on all fronts. I think this happens because I can't make up my mind about what's most important to me....

I wanna be successful, but it always seems out of reach. Sure, I've had success in some of the things I've done, but that's not the same thing. I don't feel successful, so does that make me a failure? I feel like I'm stuck in quicksand and unable to make any forward progress? Am I destined to feel this way forever? I've asked myself questions like these, over and over again never really knowing what to do with them. But I think I may have stumbled onto the answers to at least a few of these...

Sometimes, I feel like time is going by too fast. It's almost October and I’ve barely done any of the things that I wanted to do. What happened to getting back into shape? What happened to working on this podcast, or trying to read more? I just didn’t seem to have enough time. But where did all the time go? I refuse to believe that it vanished into thin air, and there must be a way to claw some of it back. I'm Daniel Lam and this is Inner Monkey.

Everyone’s set a new year’s resolution at some point. And for me, this kind of goal, it almost never works. They don’t work because my Inner Monkey is constantly tempting me to forget about it. So why is my Inner Monkey working against me? And how can I get him to work with me, instead?