Many hope we don’t get into a situation that makes us feel guilty. Of course life is difficult for everyone, and I’m not a stranger to this feeling.
Life doesn’t always make sense. I mean it doesn’t have to. Right? But, I sometimes feel we get stuck in a situation that forces us into making a difficult decision of which it might result in an unexpected outcome. Occasionally, those outcomes are favorable to most alternatives, but we have to make them.
I have been amazed by the power of Guilt. Like most negative things that have the potential to be used for something good. An example would be the stress being used to build self-confidence. What I’ll be talking here is using the feeling of Guilt to your advantage. Specifically, I’ll be talking about doing the yet unaccomplished tasks by feeding from a feeling inside you.
This method works better for people who easily feel guilty over most matters in life. I don’t recommend you to feel sad, I just want you to use any negative feeling to empower something deep inside you. So let’s begin.
Guilt
Here is a definition from Psychology Today:
In my opinion, guilt is a reflection of the choices we’ve made to understand more about ourselves.
The important thing about guilt is not the feeling itself, rather the reflection you have on yourself. The reflection can be a powerful source of a motivating factor in which people create actions from.
To-Do Lists
The great thing about To-Do lists is having a skeleton-like shape of our desires and the projects we would want to achieve.
To-Do lists are great when it comes to getting a sense and an idea regarding the outline of things we need to to be satisfied with ourselves.
That is at least how I define it and I believe that the root cause of being satisfied with ourselves is different from what we tend to believe about us.
To understand what I mean by that, I’ll be creating a fictional character called Emily to make an example.
The Case of Emily
Emily, an 18-year-old getting ready for some exams and tests with the hope of getting accepted at Harvard. Of course, many people love big names, it’s no mystery that going to that university comes with some great advantages. But, what we might not know about Emily is the whole psychological world around her. How do we know if she is doing the best for herself studying to go to the university?
Emily is having 90% of her time focused on studying to get the perfect score so that she could go to a prestigious university. What Emily doesn’t know about herself is her biases and how she creates ideas and beliefs about her life from things she has heard from people around her; whether that being her family, friends, or anybody she considers important in her life.
To examine her current state of mind, we have to question not the what of her desires, rather than the values which come from why questions.
It usually goes like this:
- Emily: I want to go to Harvard. It is my dream.
- Me: Why do you want to go to Harvard?
- Emily: Being a student at a prestigious university is my goal.
- Me: Why do you value being at a prestigious university?
- Emily: Most people I know who are successful have been to great universities.
- Me: Why do you want to be like your them?
- Emily: They have a great life with lots of money to spend and infinite time to travel anywhere.
- Me: Do you consider traveling and money a successful life?
- Emily: (Thinking for a moment) I love to see people around the world and I had a tough childhood when we didn’t grow with much money in our hands, so I want financial freedom.
- Me: Do you think spending years of your life to study for something you have little to no desire in is a great choice? Specially since eventually, you’ll be working for the money and finding the time to travel?
This is where the conversation becomes interesting because at this stage she is reconsidering what she considers valuable in her life — Whether going to the university and spending so much money and time would be a great choice.
Back to the To-Do List
Emily might be surrounded by the lists of things she has to do for the next 10 years of her life. They are based on the idea of going to the university, and all the outlines of her list is educational accomplishments.
Once you have a To-Do list that resonates with your ideal life, then you’ll have a foundation of what things you need to accomplish to progress in life.
How guilt makes us accomplish tasks
Guilt has strong emotions attached to it. It makes us motivated to right a wrong and that is precisely what we’ll be doing for our tasks.
Suppose you have a project in mind, that project is to memorize one thousand French words.
In your To-Do list you have a task:
[ ] Study and memorize 25 words
Most people procrastinate. They keep doing this to most of their other tasks, projects and get stuck inside a loop of why am I not doing what I should have done to improve my life?
The Solution
Here is my solution, and it is rather a simple one:
[x] Study and memorize 25 words
Some Recommendations
- Make sure to use a system or an app that allows you to see the items you have marked as complete because having them hidden will cause issues to forgetful people.
- Don’t get used to doing this hack for multiple tasks since we might forget some and feel extra guilty at an inappropriate time.
- Be realistic with the tasks with the amount of time required to accomplish them. Otherwise, some might not be able to sleep through the night until it is accomplished.
- If you can accomplish a task without using this technique, certainly do it and resort to using the feeling of guilt for things you procrastinate over a long period.
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This post was previously published on Change Becomes You.
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