My Two-Word Trick for Getting Over the Hump When You Have ZERO Motivation to Work On That Awful Client Project and You Sorta Kinda Hate Life and Humans In General and SOMEBODY SAVE MEEEEEEEE

When you’re having trouble finding the motivation, reframe it.

Back in the day when I was young and silly and wasn’t selective about the types of clients I was writing for (AND WE ALL KNOW HOW FAR THAT RABBIT HOLE GOES), I’d often find myself doing work I didn’t particularly want to be doing. Can you fucking imagine? Work that felt like actual, physical torture. I’d look at the page and my brain would be like, SHUT DOWN NOW! SHUT DOWN NOW! DO NOT WANT TO THINK ABOUT THIS! (Try writing case studies for large medical device companies who are coming out with the latest innovation in hardware for surgical screws…..annnnnnnd I rest my case.)

There was one trick I had up my sleeve, though, that always made the work 10x easier—and about 50x more enjoyable. Two words:

Award-winning.

Every single time I was struggling, I’d shift the focus from “this work I hate and cannot stand” to “if I had to turn this into an award-winning piece of writing, how would I do it?”

Reframing the work into a personal creative challenge—something I was doing for me, instead of a client that was rather unbearable—always helped me shift my mindset and get into the right headspace. And as an added bonus?

When you aim for award-winning work, you end up with award-winning work.

Sometimes, you just need to remind yourself that every project is an opportunity for you to be great—even if the work itself isn’t.