Some Days Are Hard. Here’s What Keeps Me Going.
Motivation is easy when everything’s going right. But when you’re stuck—mentally, emotionally, or logistically—it feels like moving through mud.
This blog post is for you if you’ve ever sat at your desk, stared at your to-do list, and thought, “What’s even the point today?”
Here’s the truth: staying motivated has less to do with mindset and way more to do with systems. If you’re wondering how to be motivated when you feel stuck, the answer lies in creating structure that works for you—even on your worst days.
What You’ll Learn in This Post
- The 3 biggest reasons women lose motivation
- 5 systems that keep me focused and consistent
- Easy ways to reset your energy and reclaim momentum
Why You Might Feel Stuck—and How to Be Motivated Anyway
1. Overwhelm
Too many tasks, too little clarity. If you don’t know where to start, you’ll likely shut down completely. That’s one of the biggest blocks when figuring out how to be motivated when you feel stuck – you’re paralyzed by uncertainty. This is why I created the Overwhelm Culprit Quiz—it helps you identify what is actually draining your energy.
2. Lack of Clear Direction
Clarity and alignment are key when learning how to be motivated when you feel stuck. When your goals feel abstract, outdated, or misaligned, it becomes hard to take meaningful action. You can’t move toward a goal that doesn’t feel real.
3. Emotional Resistance
Self-doubt. Imposter syndrome. Fear of failure. These hidden blocks often feel safer than taking the risk to grow. But staying stuck feels worse.
How to Be Motivated When You Feel Stuck: My 5 Go-To Systems
1. Use a Task or Project Management Tool When You Feel Stuck
I use Asana to break big goals into bite-sized tasks. On hard days, I still make progress by picking one small thing and moving the rest. That rhythm keeps me consistent, not overwhelmed.
2. Never Miss my Weekly Recap Ritual™
Every Friday, I do a non-negotiable reflection. What went well? What didn’t? What will I do differently next week? This practice gives me clarity, closure, and direction—even when the week was a total mess.
3. Adopt a Day-by-Day Mindset
Not every day needs to be productive. I ask myself: What’s the bare minimum I can do today to stay in motion? That small action still counts, and sometimes it’s exactly enough.
4. Use Sensory Anchors
I wear a necklace that reminds me to go with the flow. My vision board is my phone wallpaper. These tiny, visual cues bring me back to purpose when my brain is anywhere but present.
5. Journal the Process
When I’m spiraling or stuck, I write. Just one page. One thought. Documenting my process helps me track progress and reconnect with my “why.” It’s one of my favorite tools for remembering how to be motivated when you feel stuck in your head or in your business.
Bonus: Quick Wins for Stuck Days
- Celebrate small wins: I keep a file of 800+ audience testimonials I revisit when I doubt myself.
- Change your environment: A library or coffee shop can shift your energy.
- Reconnect with your why: Listen to my podcast episode on finding your why for a quick spark.
- Re-read this post: Bookmark it for future reference on how to be motivated when you feel stuck—because you’ll need reminders on the hard days.
Final Thoughts:
Systems > Willpower
If you’re stuck, remember this: motivation is fleeting. But structure creates consistency. You don’t need to be “on” every day. You just need a few reliable systems to help you stay in motion.
Need more support on how to be motivated when you feel stuck? Take the Overwhelm Culprit Quiz and get custom strategies based on your burnout type:
Click for transcript
[00:00:00] You know, some days motivation comes easy. Other days it feels absolutely impossible to get anything done. Truth is, I actually just received this question in an audience q and a, where they asked how do you keep up your motivation even when you’re feeling uninspired to do so. Even when the days are hard,
The truth is maintaining your motivation has nothing to do with willpower. It’s all about having systems in place that allow you to easily continue to show up even when you don’t have the energy or feel like doing so.
That said, motivation isn’t something that you wait for, it’s something that you create, and that’s exactly what I’m gonna share with you how to do today.
You’re listening to the Next Step with Cory Low, where we transform overwhelm into Confident Action. I’m Cory Logis, keynote speaker, coach and working mama of four here to help ambitious women just like you. Take the next step, whether that be leadership at work, at home, or in your community. Let’s get started.
This is a very extreme example. Trauma can definitely cause you to, lose your motivation and your focus, but a lot of [00:01:00] times there’s other ways that you can lose it as well that aren’t quite as severe. So first up is just feeling overwhelmed . That you have way too many tasks, you don’t know where to start.
You might be dealing with one of the five overwhelm culprits that I talk about here on a regular basis. If you’re new to me here, I have a free quiz you could take. We will drop it in the chat, the overwhelm culprit quiz, and you can learn where the source of your overwhelm is so that you could figure out where to start.
So first one, you are not gonna be motivated if you are feeling too overwhelmed at that time and you don’t know. Which of the five culprits is causing it? Next up is a lack of clear direction, right? So if your goals feel way too far away or they feel abstract, or maybe it’s been a while since you’ve visited your goals and they don’t feel aligned anymore, that’s definitely gonna cause a disconnect.
And you’re gonna feel, like why are you even showing up? And lastly, it could be emotional resistance. You could have self-doubt, you could have imposter syndrome, you could have fear of failure. These are all [00:02:00] things that are almost, in a way, a self-sabotage that hold us back for our own safety.
Because it’s easier to remain where we are and not deal with the self-doubt, the imposter syndrome, and the fear of failure than it is to potentially fail by moving forward and doing what it is that we wanna do. so those are , the core reasons why you can lack focus.
That, or you can, like I mentioned before, experience a trauma like I did, and all of a sudden life didn’t seem to really have much of a purpose. I was a little bit aimless at that time. So over the years I’ve learned that there are five things that I’m able to do that help me remain motivated, as well as focused even on the hardest of days.
Truth is it has nothing to do with mindset. It has nothing to do with mindset at all. It has more to do with the systems that you build for yourself to ensure that you show up consistently because you don’t have to mentally be fully present in that moment to be able to take Aligned action to move you towards your goals, and it’s really those small, tiny steps that we take towards it, that [00:03:00] compound over time that have the biggest impact. So these five things really help you do this and and stay motivated long term. The first one is making sure that you have a task or a project management system,
because having this, it’s gonna help you break your goals down into manageable and bite-sized tasks. You don’t want to be moving forward towards a big kind of ambiguous goal because you’re definitely gonna be. Demotivated by that because it’s gonna seem like it’s too big of a mountain to be able to scale.
But when you’re able to break it down into small, tiny milestones and you have a task or project management system that helps you track your progress along the way, it makes it so, so much easier. So on day is when I’m feeling, not a hundred percent, or maybe not that motivated to wanna get much done.
It makes it very easy for me to come into my project management system. I use Asana for me and my team. I could come in and sometimes whatever I had scheduled for that day might not be the best thing for me to work on because I’m not in the right mindset, but I could chip away at other things that I do have the capacity to do.
[00:04:00] Reschedule the ones that I don’t feel like I have the capacity that day and still remain on track as long as I stay consistent to making sure that I am doing everything by the deadlines that I set for them. Number two is I never ever miss my weekly recap appointment.
So the weekly recap is something that I do. I do it weekly. I actually do it daily at the end of my workday, I do it quarterly, and then I do it annually and it’s scheduled on my calendar. It’s a non-negotiable. It’s completely blocked out. My team even knows that it’s protected. My family knows that it’s protected.
You can’t get into that. And this is the time that I set out for myself on a regular cadence to reflect, reset, as well as plan and adapt for what’s next. So a lot of times I might have a week where I’m doing my, Friday weekly recap and I’m like, you know what? This was a really tough week. I don’t really feel too good about it.
And as part of my process for this, I always reflect on what went well, what didn’t go well, and what could I do differently next time. So by making sure I hold this appointment and actually [00:05:00] reflect on, okay, well, I. This week I wasn’t really very motivated. Things weren’t going well. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’m setting aside intentional time to reflect on, okay, well what can I do differently next time to maybe avoid this or to maybe solve what my feelings are that I’m feeling kind of out of my element.
Number three is to adopt a day by day mindset, right? So many people are so tied up in the long-term results. That instead, they kind of lose sight on, okay, well what is the bare minimum I need to get done today? Because a lot of times the bare minimum is sufficient, right? You don’t have to do your entire checklist in one day.
You’re allowed to reschedule. You’re allowed to create time and space if you need it, in order to be productive long term. So one of the things I learned a long time ago is sometimes it requires you to take a step back in order to take two steps forward. but as long as you’re taking that day by day and having that mindset, it makes it that much easier for you to, kind of recognize and be self-aware that today’s a day I need to take a step back, or today’s a day that I’m feeling great and I’m fired up and I’m really motivated.
So [00:06:00] let’s, you know, run ahead those three steps and take off. There’s a push and a pull to it.
Next up is I use sensory anchors. So what are these sensory anchors are things like vision boards. They could be physical reminders. This necklace I wear is actually one of them. It means go with the flow. So I’m constantly reminding myself of that day-to-day mindset thing I just talked about. But for example, on my screensaver on my phone. It’s on my computer desktop. I have my vision board. It’s the vision board that I set for this year. Sometimes I set them quarterly. It depends on what I’m working on, but this year it felt right to do it for the year, and so every single time I’m using and picking up my devices, I’m seeing.
What my intentions are. This is beautiful process because I don’t need to be like firing on all cylinders that day in order for me to be visually reminded of what I’m working towards. So this is actually really, really helpful because it keeps your goals visually present, as opposed to you relying on it being in your head and for you being in that mindset.
And lastly, the very last one is I love to [00:07:00] journal, to document the process. I. This helps me track my progress. It helps me acknowledge my growth and it helps me reconnect with why I’m doing it. So if I’m having a really kind of like down and out like me day, a lot of times I’ll just pick up my journal and just write what’s going through my mind and be okay with closing the book and moving on with my day.
‘ cause tomorrow is always a new one.
Some other things that can really, really help out on Tough Days , celebrate your small wins, right? Recognizing progress as small or as huge as it might be, can really help your momentum get going. So a lot of times after, let’s say I give a presentation or something and it doesn’t land quite the way that I want to, and I start second guessing myself in my abilities, I’ll go through, I have a whole database of, at this point it’s over 800, audience testimonials of what people have said about me and my talk.
So I’ll go through and I’ll look at those and they always pick me back up and get me motivated to keep going again. So create that kind of like compliments file that small wins file. That’s something that you can look at when you’re feeling kind of down, you know about your career and your situation.
Another way [00:08:00] is by completely changing up your environment. I work from home. Uh, this is my home office. I share with my husband. That’s his desk over there. But a lot of times too, like I, I just need to get out. And not be in my house. Actually I’m in my basement right now.
That’s why it’s always so dark. But sometimes a simple reset by going and working from a coffee shop or going and working from the library, or even maybe meeting one of my friends to co-work at a coffee shop. That makes a really, really big difference. So sometimes just changing up the environment make helps a lot.
And lastly, make sure you’re taking time to reconnect with your why. I did an episode on this. We’ll drop it in the show notes. So you can go ahead and check it out on how to determine your why. But at the end of the day when things are really, really tough and you’re just not feeling it, sometimes it’s as simple as going back and revisiting why you’re doing what it is you’re doing and what you’re working towards that could really help kind of re stoke and rekindle that flame to keep you going a little bit further. Even just for that day.
So remember, motivation is fleeting, but discipline and structure is what ultimately creates consistency. Everything I shared with you [00:09:00] today was more about systems, processes, appointments, and different things that I put in place to keep me accountable and moving forward. So to recap everything that I talked about today, I shared with you five different ways I personally keep myself motivated, even on my hardest of days, and that includes using a task or project management system, never missing my weekly recap appointment, adopting a day by day mindsets using sensory anchors like vision boards and physical reminders like my necklace, and making sure that I’m journaling on a regular basis to document the process.
So I’d love to know, is there one that I missed? Go ahead, drop it in the comments. Would love to, be able to share there what tools work for other people. ’cause I might not know something that you’re doing that’s awesome that I might wanna try and share on a future episode. So let me know what you’re working on and also I would love to hear which one of , these five you’re going to focus on and try to test out moving forward.
So drop me a comment, send me a dm. I’d love to hear from you.
Corrie LoGiudice: Thanks for checking out the next step with Cory Lowe. If [00:10:00] this episode resonated with you, share it with a friend, subscribe and leave a review. Together we’ll transform overwhelm into action and we’ll keep taking the next step towards competent leadership. See you next time.