Regain Your Enthusiasm

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Regain Your Enthusiasm
With These 5 Tools

Learn the little recognized secret of success- enthusiasm.
- Dale Carnegie

Once you have experienced life enthusiasm and loose it, you know how important it is. Use these 5 tools daily as a quick fix to find enthusiasm right now or as a way to build and restore your enthusiasm over time.

1) The Good Things List

One powerful way to regain your enthusiasm is to make a list of the good things about something. This works whether you are trying to restore your life enthusiasm in general or generate enthusiasm for something specific, like eating more vegetables. In both cases, start with a list of all the good things on that subject you can think of. Push yourself to think of at least 10. I usually find the first 3 or 4 are hardest and after 7 or 8 the positive thoughts start to really come to me and I end up with a longer list. This technique gets more powerful with repetition. Have fun with it by coming up with new subjects to create good things lists for, or creating lists that you post or carry with you.

An enthusiastic attitude is fundamental to self-fulfillment. It guides us to positive thoughts and actions. It creates positive energy that imporves our relationships with others, our willingness to be open to new ideas, and our health. When our thoughts are propelled by an enthusiasm for life, we find we have unlimited power to develop our own unique potential.
Dale Carnegie

2) Get Physical

Enthusiasm is energetic and action oriented. Take a cue from the cheerleaders and jump up and down. Shout. Make up silly cheers you can move to. I have always liked the basic cheer 2-4-6-8 who do we appreciate? Then fill in the blank and jump up and down. Another favorite cheer is that is even more active is move to the left, move to the right, stand up, sit down fight fight fight. The fact that these cheers are silly, helps get your blood moving and your laughter bubbling. Once that happens, you are bound to regain your enthusiasm a little.

3) Keep Score

One element of games is that we have clear and immediate feedback about how well we are doing. There is something about this that motivates us to do just a little better- to compete even if it is with our previous score. I find that I can often increase my enthusiasm for repetitive tasks my timing myself and then trying to beat my best time. Before I know it, I am caught up in improving my score and the job becomes a fun game. Another common way of keeping score is to write a status report. Start with a list of projects or areas you are working on, then list your recent accomplishments in each area and finally, what you have left to do. This is a very effective way to regain your enthusiasm.

4) Use your Strengths

The good life: using your signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of your life.
Martin Seligman

In their book, Now, Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham et al define a strength as something you like to do and do well. You might be a talented pianist, but if you do not enjoy it, it is not a strength. You might have a strength for analysis or for convincing strangers to adopt your ideas or for building things. Whatever your particular strengths are, if you can use them to accomplish something you will become more enthusiastic about it. For example, one of my strengths is analysis and one of the things I am always working on developing more enthusiasm for is eating in a healthier way. When I purchased a computer program that helped me analyze the nutritional content of my food, I developed more enthusiasm for eating in a healthful way.

5) Let Go

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?
Oscar Hammerstein II

It is possible to want something or focus in on something too much. When I start to feel like that goal or activity is life or death, or must be done to some perfect standard, I actually loose enthusiasm for it. I try too hard and loose sight of why I started on that goal in the first place. When I let go, if the goal is truly important to me, my mind will keep coming back to it and before long my enthusiasm returns, usually without the perfectionism. If this does not happen, I sometimes find that there was a good reason I couldn’t generate enthusiasm and by backing off I can see this new situation. Either way, I end up in a better place.

Enthusiasm is energetic, passionate, spontaneous, happy and powerful. Enthusiasm comes from the ancient Greek and means filled with God. Life enthusiasm generates its own energy and puts you in an upward spiral. You can regain your enthusiasm and enjoy a rich and happy life.

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