Tag motivational

Friends will keep you moving!

Wuffles Leave a comment

Good morning!

It’s been about 3 weeks now since adopting a new workout routine and it’s been awesome to be doing it with friends again. For those who don’t know (which might be all of you), I used to follow a strict and rigorous workout routine with my best friend. We’d meet up at 6AM at the gym, Monday thru Friday, and crank out a muscle group for an hour with a bit of cardio to begin with. I gained about 30 pounds over a year and I was in the best shape ever. However, he eventually moved out of state and I suddenly found it much harder to get to the gym and keep it up. You’d think doing it for a couple of years would’ve locked it in as a habit! The best I could do was light maintenance just so I dont fall apart. However, like plenty of others for other types of tasks, I sometimes need that extra motivator of having a friend handy to boost me further.

Friends motivate each other by keeping each other accountable! You all decide to work out? Great! One of you doesn’t feel like it one day? Those other two will get you into the gym! Plus, nobody wants to look like the flake so you’ll keep yourself moving in order to keep from being the weak link. On top of that, your friends know how you’ve been doing lately so they’ll also keep you from taking things too easy. You probably aren’t going to get away with doing a session of light stretching when your friends are right there hitting the weights and panting up a storm!

It’s not just the gym. Develop an art jam schedule with friends and show up to draw or write or whatever. As long as your group, whether it’s 2 people or 4 (I’ll explain that a little further down), contains a person or two who is feeling dedicated that day, you stand a greater chance of continuing and succeeding. At the very least, it gets you to show up and spend the time on the topic, skill, or whatever it is you need to work on.

So why do I mention 2 or 4 people? Well, unless you’re leading the group and they’re all depending on you, it will become easy to fade into the background with a larger group. You stop showing up and the group carries on without you and, because they may not miss you as much, any guilt about the situation is reduced and the entire point of you joining the group fades away. Sometimes a fuzzbutt requires a little more intimacy rather than just feeling like a face in a crowd.

I’ll end with how my new workout habit is performed with friends who live as far as Europe! Does not apply to everyone but we have VR! We log into VRChat together, find a certain place called the Squat Gym, and do a bunch of squats togethers! It’s gamified and I spend a little time coaching my friends! They’re so eager to get into better shape that I can’t get away with taking a day off. The squats have expanded to other calisthenics (since working with weights in VR is hard) like pushups or sit-ups and we drive each other to perform better. Reminders in the morning on our workout days also mentally prepare us to get together! It’s just fun and we spend time lounging and chilling out afterward, getting in some good social time after the workout. I hope to keep this going longer and I hope you can find a way to get your friends together and motivate each other to develop yourself!

Good luck, fuzzbutts!

Wednesday Tailtip: Your “why” can change!

Wuffles Leave a comment

Good morning fuzzbutts!

Sometimes you have a good reason for setting a goal. You pick something you want to work on and you know exactly what the goal of it is and why you want to do it. You get that motivation for a while and you keep at it. Yet your discipline and motivation fails at some point and you stop working on it as much as you did. Eventually, you stop working on it entirely. You know why you should do it. The why is still there. However, it’s not enough to keep you going! What a predicament, furry friends!

I went through this recently. I’ve had piles of fur and sewing materials for a long time now. YEARS! I bought the fur to make tails or to make paws and fursuit stuff and then poof. Poof. Making paws was too hard. Making tails didn’t pay enough. Still, despite one of my earlier posts to declutter and get rid of stuff, I couldn’t bring myself to toss out hundreds of dollars in fur. There’s still value in making tails, even if it won’t replace my job. So the fur sat, me without enough motivation to finish using up the fur and selling it. I know my why was “make money” but that’s not good enough. So what changed?

I moved into a much smaller room from my apartment. 900 sqft of stuff crammed into less than 250. That wasn’t quite enough to get rid of the fur so it sat in the corner by my window. However, it’s August and there’s a heatwave now and no AC where I live. It’s affecting my sleep because it’s so warm at night. So what do I want now? A standing, portable AC unit to hook into the window and cool down my room. What do I need for it? I have the money already. What I don’t have is space in front my window. I can’t shove the fur into another spot because there’s no space. If I want that AC unit and to cool down and feel better overall, I need to start burning through that fur or get rid of it.

I can’t say that’s the only reason I’m able to work on this. I had found already that I can draw in the mornings. I’m lazy after work and it’s hard to work on my goals. So now my goal is to work on the fur in the mornings. It’s easy. I can dedicate a whole two hours before the gym and before work to just sew tails. In two days I was able to hand-sew a tail and a half when it didn’t feel like work at all. The “making money” will be a side effect of me selling these tails after they are finished.

Is “I want an AC unit in my room” some grand nebulous goal to motivate you? Maybe not you but it’s working for me! Your why doesn’t matter as long as it gets your tail moving toward your goal and getting things done. After that, what else is there for me to do? Once the fur is gone, maybe it’ll go back to purely drawing or maybe I have another short-term goal to work on. We’ll have to see! In the meantime, understand why you want to do something and don’t be afraid of changing your “why” as long as it gets you going.

Good luck fuzzbutts!

When Things Get Frustrating

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Hello fuzzbutts!

How did it go this week for you? Pretty good? Did it drag on and on and on? Desperate for the weekend? What about your work? Has the fire gone out and you’re just rolling with the flow while being bored or just hating it? How about anything else like these drawing habits I’m trying to build? You just sit there, despising it but unable to make a change. You need that job! You need that income! Maybe it’s not even that there’s anything in particular to hate about your job but you’re just bored now.

It can be very frustrating to feel this way in your day-to-day life. The fire just… went out. Now you’re miserable and just there.

When this happens, it’s important to find meaning in what you’re doing. I work in a lab and now I handle the operations side of things. I don’t go into the lab anymore to do all the sample prep or even analyze the data. It drove me crazy for a while since now my job went from being active and walking around to just sitting at my desk and sending tons of emails to coworkers or vendors. However, that ended when I decided to focus on my new purpose and why it was important. My job is to ensure everyone else can get their jobs done. I go from my own little bubble or preparing stuff to actually helping my coworkers do better. I also get to call the shots on how to arrange things in our laboratory now. Anything that can be done to optimize somebody’s work or the space? Boom. That’s this wuff’s call now. Sure it can feel a bit slow as I wait for emails or for other people to make certain big budget decisions but it’s still fun.

Your job has a meaning to it. If not some nebulous great reason in the universe, then remember you go to that job to fund *blank* or so you can get *blank* job later. If you can’t do it, then maybe start looking around for something else.

I get that I used a job as an example but this still applies to new habits you want to cultivate. Remind yourself why you’re working on this habit and why it’s important to you. Remind yourself why you’re building new skills!

Good luck, fuzzbutts!

Wednesday Tailtip: Motivational Videos?!

Wuffles Leave a comment

Hello fuzzbutts!

I hope this blog has been helping you and others to avoid living in mediocrity and, instead, has been helping you grow and focus on your life’s path. This week’s tailtip is to check out youtube. There’s all kinds of tutorials and things to learn, but sometimes it helps just to get inspired in general. Motivation is a bad girlfriend or boyfriend but think of these videos as one of the few things you can do to get that significant other to show up for a little while.

So here’s the tip: Go on YouTube, search for “Motivational video” and you’ll come up with channels and channels of videos and collections of motivational speeches and successful people giving insight and thoughts that you can use to push yourself more. The more you listen to these, the greater the chance you’ll hear something that resonates with you and gets you motivated to get stuff done!

Love you all and good luck, fuzzbutts!