4 Tips to Help You Escape a Valley

Life is certainly not always one big high.  Even the most successful, or happy, or content people you know have all weathered tough times.  Our journey is series of peaks and valleys, as well as left and right turns.  It’s a rollercoaster, and although we know intellectually that we need to embrace it, let’s face it…it’s rarely easy.

In this article, I provide you with 4 tips to help you escape a valley or rut in your life.

Resistance LOVES The Valleys

What is the valley?  It’s that time, whether its days, weeks, or months long, when your energy is low, when you’re uninspired, and when you are questioning whether you can do it, or even if its all worth it.  Maybe the valley has occurred because of a forced transition (lost a job…medical issue…relationship?), or maybe you’ve sunk into a low point gradually, it doesn’t really matter, but you are there.

Resistance LOVES and feeds on our valleys.  Resistance brings all of its tools to bear on us: fear, lack of faith, lack of activity, DISTRACTION.  When you’re in that valley its tough to be consistent, to be positive, to see the vision, to have faith, to be thankful.

How to Escape a Valley

So what to do?

One important concept is to recognize the valley for what it is: a temporary condition…a season.  It may not seem temporary, but just as winter lasts only for a time, so too will this valley.  Look back over your life, and you will see both peaks and the valleys, so you know intellectually its just temporary.

But you may be saying, “OK, great, I see that, but how do I shorten that time NOW? How do I get out of it NOW?”  It’s a process, but the key is in your activity.  Escaping a valley is about doing.

Here are 4 excellent activities that help you escape a valley:

1. Help Others
2. Engage in Daily Intentional Gratitude
3. Get Yourself a New Fitness or Health Plan
4. Take Consistent Action

Let’s look at these in detail…

Help Others

One of the best ways to break out of the slump is to simply help others.  Help someone else and you are helping yourself just as much. Here’s why it’s helping you also:

• Provides perspective – Let’s face it, its really easy to become inwardly focused, and then start to dwell on all of the things we don’t have.  When we help others, we start to break that mindset because we realize that we are fortunate.
• Sense of purpose and making a difference – There is a deep psychological need that most people feel, and that is that we want to make a difference in this world.  When we leave it, we want to have made an impact.  Helping others feeds this need because we feel that purpose.
• Meet new people and gaining new opportunities – New opportunities usually come through people.  It’s that simple.  Many times the thing that propels us out of the valley is a new opportunity, and meeting new people by helping them is a likely path to new opportunities.

Helping others, and receiving personal benefit doesn’t have to be a grand gesture.  You don’t have to donate enough money to build a new wing onto the local school. Nor do you have to spearhead a campaign in your community to bring awareness to the plight of the homeless.  Although these certainly would be awesome ways to help others.

You can engage in some very simple gestures, and they can be personal or anonymous.  You can help others simply by making eye contact and smiling, or holding a door for a stranger.  Think about the last time a stranger smiled at you…How did that make you feel?  It likely brightened your day just a bit.

Next time in line at the coffee shop, tell the attendant that you would like to pay for the person that is 3 back in line from you.  It’s anonymous, and you’re likely to be gone by the time that the person realizes that you did that for them.  But how will that person feel?  How would it make you feel if you were the person whom had the bill paid by a random stranger?  You might have an extra bounce in your step.

Be that person.

Intentional Gratitude

Intentional gratitude has similar perspective altering benefits that helping others does.  It keeps us grounded, helps us to understand that we are indeed lucky, and keeps our mind focused on the positive rather than the negative.  “Intentional gratitude” means that you are intentionally applying thought to that for which you are thankful.  When you do it everyday, it changes your perspective.

Here’s a couple things you can do to be intentionally grateful each day:

• Make a list of 20 things for which you are thankful – Look at it and read it to yourself everyday.
• Start each day with a prayer or meditation in which you consciously find several things to be thankful for in the day ahead.
• Add at least 1 new item to your list everyday – Take your list of 20 and add at least 1 new thing to everyday.  You will NEVER run out.
• End each day by looking back and being thankful for at least one thing that happened – Rounding out the day with a look back is an excellent practice for being grateful.

New Fitness or Health Plan

Sometimes the best way to escape a valley is to simply make some personal changes. A great place to do it is with your fitness or health plan.  The benefits to our mind by having good physical health are well documented and undeniable.  Especially when we start to age, our physical condition makes a bigger impact on our ability to think as well as our emotional state.

Here are some tips for helping you to change up the health plan:

• Set a new endurance or fitness goal – Put a 5k, 10k, 1/2, or full marathon on the calendar.  Find a powerlifting meet and sign up.  Sign up for a Spartan Race.  Buy a fancy, expensive bike and get on it.  Decide you want to start doing triathlons learn how to swim.  Then, most importantly, commit to the training.  The magic is in the daily training.
• Change your diet – Notice this is NOT “go on a diet”.  This is a commitment to make a real change, not take on a “diet plan”.  Real health comes from doing the right things for your body on a daily basis, not for a period of 30 or 90 days.  If you need help in this area, please contact me, I can help you get started on the right path.

Take Consistent Action

The magic is in the action.  When you are slumping its so easy to not do the things that have moved you forward until then.  It may because there are lots of things you don’t like to do.  It may be because of the Resistance.  Regardless, at the end of the day, its the action that moves you forward.  Here are couple of tips for you

• Find a new, or rededicate yourself to a daily routine – Each and every day you must be doing the things that move you forward.  Having a defined routine is a powerful way to make sure you are doing the right things.
• Turn your brain off – What?  Yup, sometimes the reason you’re not taking action is because you’re inside your own head. And sometimes, you’re so worried about thinking your way out of the situation, that it hinders you taking the action that is necessary to get you there.  Thinking may be important to help with direction, but its the action that will make it happen.  Stop over thinking and over analyzing and Just Do it!

Some times, maybe not every time, but definitely some times, you will start to actually be THANKFUL for those valleys.  You will start to realize that those valleys have actually helped you move forward.  Those valleys have spurred you on to take ACTION.  Action that you weren’t previously taking, and that action has led to the next PEAK.

And here’s the great thing about those valleys…When you look back, you realize its those valleys that made you what you are today.

Have a great day!