A common sense action to change something you want to do in a different way and with different results is to stop doing that something. I was to write ''it is a piece of cake'', an expression we use to point out something easy to do - but lets pay attention to the... cake, 'cause we all know is difficult to do ''not stop bye''-action. And this is the stepping-stone of a new perspective: when you are trapped in an habit you are already stopped! Waiting for Godot is being stopped in a place and doing the ''waiting''-action.
Marshall Goldsmith was recently recognized as the #1 Leadership Thinker in the World and the top 5 Management Thinker at the Thinkers50. And he himself recognized inertia as a ''mindless routine''.
Indeed, inertia is to be carefully differentiate from the useful routines that enhance our efforts to develop, to create - to pursue a meaning we find precious to fulfill in our life. But nothing comes ''for nothing'' in our behavior. Sometimes ago, it was a meaningful purpose inertia was the best answer for: we get something good for being ''inert'' - something close or even exactly what we take for happiness at the time.
If you don't know why you are still waiting, learn what your benefits were. People do not do things to make them feel bad. Respect your feelings. Even if is a feeling of guilt - at some point in your life they used to serve you to achieve something good: attention from a significant person in your life. Maybe they didn't pay attention to you except when you being guilty. It was what you payed (!) to be worth to pay attention to you. Respect yourself. Admire yourself: you've find a way to survive! And trust yourself. You can scan your actual reality, detect pastime ''viruses'', quarantine it - let them extinct in there. Look at your present life, evaluate the gain of your inertial actions: are they fit with you, with your actual needs for attention, meaning, and happiness? Are they mindless for your present life? What could you do be mindful to you, to really matter? Be creative. Be childish! Take baby steps to do new actions. It was the very mechanism that help you to build inertial system for to thrive. Remember?!
If it was a way, there is a way - I use to say in my workshops. And in my life*. Maybe too much focus on goals - and ''the future is better'' - depressed us (literally, cut pressure to act) because of the emptiness of surroundings ahead. "Nature abhors a vacuum.", the saying attributed to Aristotle, works for human nature as well. A what-to-do place keeps you in that place. Consequently, inertia could seem to be an action of choice! Okay. Lets acknowledge what-it-is as being there. Take the good part of forming inertia. Recall your memory of doing things, empower it with your actual level of awareness of life, spice it with your forgotten but genuine (sic) curiosity. In fact, inertia is.. being in the flow! Create a mindful routine.Use the mechanism, but choose your flow.
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*I was very fond of English language in high school, but back in communist Romania, it was quite difficult to find original writings to read.So, in my 16, I decided it is possible to do something ''to reach my goal'' (lets do remember the long, but beautiful phrases we used at the time instead of poor language Jane Austen wouldn't understand :)). But it wasn't she I spotted - it was Shakespeare. It was in late 70 - no Internet, if you can believe that! I have applied the ''if it was, there is''- tool: if Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, there is a museum over there. And I wrote a letter to Shakespeare Museum, the address mentioned before, Great Britain! And I've got an answer. Two months later, my mom and my grandma was really scared to find an opened (!) envelope written in another language. The envelope was opened by police, of course.. I don't know what they thought about. For me this is resourceful memory for getting things done.
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