5 Ideas for Fighting Discouragement

By | June 17, 2011

How do you fight discouragement?

Doubt and uncertainty can be almost paralyzing. So, try these ideas for moving past discouragement:

  1. Pray. Call your best friend, husband, or sister and ask them to pray for you, too. Ask God to show you a clear direction for your work/idea/pursuit. Ask him to shut doors that should not be opened and fling wide open doors through which you should fly.
  2. Focus only on the positive aspects of the situation. Keep in mind the possibilities and the opportunities, not the obstacles or the challenges.
  3. Eat your elephant one bite at a time. Sometimes discouragement comes from feeling overwhelmed at the task before you. Break it into small jobs and work through them one at a time.
  4. Pick one aspect of the job/task/project that will give you satisfaction and do it first. Save tasks that may not show “results” until later.
  5. Prepare to receive. Look forward to what your work will yield. Perhaps the reward won’t turn out exactly how you had planned. But one thing is certain: God will use the experience to grow and refine you. Adopt the attitude of, “Let’s see what God’s going to do with this,” and get ready to be changed.

The last piece of advice is this: just get to work, even if you’re not quite “into it.”

I heard an author (of The Charlatan’s Boy: A Novel) this week talk about ways he fights laziness, procrastination, and so-called “writer’s block.”

He says that he equates his writing with plumbing. He says that the plumber doesn’t wake in the morning and say, “I don’t want to fix toilets today ’cause I’m not ‘feeling’ it.” No. The plumber fixes toilets. Writers just need to write.

I think that’s a great tactic for keeping the right perspective so that you can move forward.

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Mary Bernard is a Nashville-based writer and mother of three. She's worked in a variety of corporate and creative environments, but none is more comfortable than the dining room table in her own home. Mary loves to help moms discover God's unique call to look in their own houses for their priorities, passions, and provision.

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