The satisfaction–when you do something you don’t want to do

For the past week I have been working with the same stack of papers at my job……this stack is as thick as a phone book. I’ve slowly been doing this paperwork and it has been mentally exhausting because some of it dates back to early August and honestly I don’t remember early August at this point. I also don’t like to sit still. Sitting at my desk for extended periods of time makes me go stir crazy. I loose focus and my mood sometimes becomes noticeably unpleasant. Friday morning when I went into work I decided there was no time like the present. I could spend the day doing this paperwork and finish or I could put it off until next week. I opted to do it Friday just to get it over with so it wasn’t hanging over my head all weekend and making me dread work on Monday.

Later Friday night I had to do a workout. I absolutely didn’t want to do this workout. I was feeling tired all week, I felt like I was getting sick–now I am sick, and overall I felt drained. I knew if I didn’t do the workout I would have to do it after the meet Saturday and that was an absolute impossibility. My teammate didn’t want to do this workout either so we weren’t helping each other get focused or motivated. It was a Friday night (I’m not a fan of Friday workouts) and we were both exhausted but this was the only time we could do the workout. The situation then got worse. The track we went to had 2 fences surrounding it and one was way too tall to climb without risking injury. We walked all around the stadium trying to get into the track and had no luck. If this wasn’t a sign to not do the workout I don’t know what was. After having no luck we decided that maybe we could run the workout around the stadium on the grass outside the fence but when we attempted that we ran into another lower fence that would have to be hurdled each lap–another sign to not do the workout. Eventually, after some stalling we did the workout on the road using our gps watches.(4x1mile & 4×200). This isn’t the funnest workout and its defiantly not a workout you want to do on the road. It was decent though. I ran 6:08, 6:04, 6:17, 6:17 and the 200s were just kind of approximations. I didn’t feel great running and my times weren’t awesome or even consistent but it felt so good to finish that workout and put it behind me.

The point is that when you do the things you don’t want to do, things you have to do, you will feel a sense of satisfaction because you accomplished something you didn’t even want to do in the first place. It’s easy to do something if you want to do it but it’s difficult to do something if you don’t want to. I could have stalled on Friday but I didn’t because that would have made my life worse and not better. By making myself do what I did not want to do my weekend is better than it would have been if I avoided these unfun responsibilities. I also feel like I accomplished something great–I did. I overcame the negative thoughts I was having and I gained mental strength.