Motivating Yourself to Succeed
When you first begin working towards your goals, you are naturally highly motivated. You have just finished working on your action plan and you are brimming with energy and confidence to meet those goals. Then as days pass by you will find it a little harder to get motivated, the obstacles seem to get bigger till you find it a real challenge to motivate yourself everyday. If you stick to your action plan and work on it bit by bit, you will reach your goals. But you do need to know how to constantly find the motivation that will keep you wanting to work towards your goal.
In fact, this is what separates most successful people from the others. Ordinarily when we find ourselves running out of steam, we tell ourselves that the goal we are trying to achieve is too hard and give up on it. Those who manage at such junctures to find various ways of motivating themselves so that they can conquer their complacency and keep moving in the direction of their goals are the ones who will eventually be successful.
We will try and look at various sources, which can lend us inspiration but before that, let us understand what motivation is and how exactly it works.
Motivation is wanting to do something really bad. This is what gets you out of bed on cold winter mornings so that you do not miss a day of workout and this is what keeps you up at night trying to finish a report. Of course, there are positive and negative motivations. If you are working on an office report till late at night because your boss has threatened to get you fired, then that is still motivation but it is negative motivation. On the other hand, if you are working on a school assignment and trying to finish it because you know how important it is to your getting the degree, this is positive motivation. You will find that positive motivation works far better than negative motivation.
You will therefore need to know where you have to look for when you feel the need for some positive motivation. Every now and then, especially if the goals you are working on are long-term, you may feel dispirited. You need to immediately take action so that you are back to working towards your goals.
The best way of motivating yourself is to be really excited about your goal and constantly wanting to achieve it. Whenever you are feeling low in spirit, look for ways in which you can remind yourself of the importance of your goals, what they mean to you and the benefits or value they will bring to you. This way you can sustain your efforts till you have finally made it.
Here are some tips on how and where you can find the motivation to stick to your action plan.
• When you first start working on your action plan and start striking things off your to-do list, you feel highly excited and enthusiastic about the whole process. You are simply raring to go and do not mind listing quite a few things to do every day. You actually manage to finish them in the first few days and feel supremely confident. Then there will come days when nothing goes right and you are hardly able to achieve anything on that day. After working the whole day at a job for an over-bearing boss, you may find it difficult to get back to your books or attend your evening classes. Your enthusiasm level starts to drop and it affects your self-confidence too. The solution to this is to start slow. When you first start out, keep yourself to only half of what you think you should be doing, whether it is a new workout or reading the pages of a novel. This way you will find that you can easily achieve the targets you had set out for yourself. You may be tempted to attempt more but restrain yourself and just enjoy the satisfaction of having accomplished your task for the day. This will prevent you from raising false hopes but will also keep your self-confidence high as you keep moving from day to day.
• There will of course be some days when you simply do not feel like working on any part of your plan. You do not feel like heading out for your workout or you feel you are too tired to read anything. At such times, do not think too far ahead. Just get started and that too step-by-step. Get out of bed and wear your jogging shoes. Then head for the door and before you know it you are in the middle of your workout and actually enjoying it. Similarly if you have to work on homework assignments and feel too tired for it, just pull out your books and slowly start reading. Quickly, you will find yourself excited about your work. The key here is to get started no matter how you are feeling.
• If you are the only person who knows about your goals, your action plan and your efforts in trying to reach them, then chances are it will be much easier for you to quit trying. On the other hand, if you commit yourself in public, say by speaking to some of your friends, family members, support groups or even to supporters on an online blog, you will find that it is harder to quit. For one, you have many people supporting you and providing you words of encouragement. Secondly, when you speak to them, you want to report your successes to them and not your failures so that they too can take pride in what you have achieved.
• It is absolutely normal for you to have negative thoughts when you are working towards your goals especially the harder, long-term ones. However, you need to be able to identify them, clear your head of the negative thoughts and replace them instead with positive ones. When you are facing problems and start thinking ‘This is too hard, I cannot do this’, bring yourself to say’ I know this is hard but if that person can do this, so can I’.
• Part of avoiding negative thoughts is to avoid overly negative people or people who are only critical of you. While your friends and family members may only be wanting to protect you, at some point they have to realize that you are determined on achieving some of these goals and that they have to be supportive of you. If you find that they are only being critical without offering solutions, you may want to avoid them as much as you can. If it is difficult to avoid them tell them gently but firmly that this is your decision and that you would like their support.
• Always remind yourself of the benefits and values that achieving your goals is going to bring you. This is the advantage of writing down the reasons for your wanting a particular goal. When you start feeling a little dispirited, move your thoughts away from how hard something is to how good achieving that goal will be for you. Thinking about these benefits will help energize you.
• There is no doubt that it is difficult to maintain the same kind of excitement and enthusiasm you felt when you first started out. However, even thinking about or reliving those moments and what got you so excited is sufficient to get you motivated again. What made you so passionate about your goals? What is it going to bring to you, your life? Thinking about all this will keep you going in the direction of your goals.
• If merely thinking about your goals is not enough to motivate you, try and read up on the benefits of achieving them. Read books or online blogs that talk of stories similar to yours, where people with less than you managed to stay on track, achieve their goals and make a difference in their lives. In fact, it may be a good idea if you read a little bit everyday, so that you can keep your focus and stay determined.
• Working all by yourself can be tough at times. Especially on the long-term goals. It can be extremely helpful if you find a friend or someone who can partner you in your program. Perhaps a neighbor can join you in your workouts every morning. You can probably find another student from your school to work together with you on assignments. You can motivate and encourage each other to keep working towards the goal. If nothing else, you will have someone to share the problems that you are going through and maybe also offer some words of advice and support.
• Seek inspiration from various sources. Your goals and your reasons for wanting them need not be the only source of motivation though they are probably the best. Look for inspiration in other’s success stories. There will be many like you who would have achieved exactly what you would like to achieve or may currently be in a process of doing so. Read about them in books, magazines, and even online blogs. Understand how they managed to overcome the challenges they faced and how they stayed motivated throughout their journey to success.
• Make sure that you take time to celebrate. Do not wait till the final goal has been achieved before you do so. While this may work for smaller or small-term goals, waiting till your last final goal has been achieved may only leave you dispirited in the meantime. Identify what milestones are important to you and make a note to celebrate once you reach those milestones. When you celebrate even your small successes, you will have a sense of accomplishment, which you can take forward while working on the remaining steps or remaining goals.
• The best way to celebrate when you reach a goal is by rewarding yourself. However, you have to make sure that you do not get carried away and keep the reward proportional to the milestone you have achieved. If you have managed to stick to your diet and had regular workouts throughout the week, do not treat yourself to a royal binge all through the next week - just treat yourself to a small dessert that weekend. Similarly, getting the promotion that you wanted does not mean you should treat yourself to a holiday in the Bahamas – treat yourself at a nice parlor.
• It is very natural for you to experience some low points in your life when you find it very difficult to stay motivated. Do not fight these feelings or read anything more in them. This is just a temporary phase and all you need to do is to keep reading about the goals you want to achieve, why you want to achieve them and perhaps other life stories as we have mentioned here. Slowly the clouds will clear and you will again find yourself full of energy.
• You may find it very difficult to reach your goals if you are working towards it on your own. If you take help from your friends and family, you will find that it makes it that much easier. You may find someone willing to work with you towards your goals or they will always be available with words of support and encouragement. They will not let you go of your dreams so easily and will try at all stages to find solutions to your problems so that you can keep working towards your goals.
• You may also find the support and help you need not just in your friends and family but also in online blogs. There are some very closely-knit communities that provide great support to their members. They lend a willing ear and prove to be great sources of information when you need anything. You can also find help and assistance by joining some support groups. For example, if you are working on quitting smoking, it may be very helpful to join a support group where members try to help each other out in the most difficult stages of the program.
• Tracking your progress is very important as you keep working on your action plan. Not only does it have a practical value since you know if you need to modify or revise any part of your action plan but it also has some motivational value. When you look at the milestones you have achieved so far, you realize that even with all the difficulties you faced, you have made considerable progress and this will give you the confidence that you will be able to achieve all your goals. Of course, you will find that there are days on which there was not much or no progress made. You should learn to accept that this is natural and so long as you have been moving forward, this should give you enough motivation to keep working on your goals.
• When you are aiming for harder, long-term goals, you need something in the meantime to keep you motivated, for you to want to go on. The trick is to break up your one main goal in to smaller sub-goals till you have to do just one or two tasks per day. Identify some stages as your key milestones and take time out to celebrate. This way, while you stay focused on the main goal all the time, the smaller goals help you to stay motivated during the course of achieving it.
• You may find it very helpful to attend some classes or appoint a coach if you are finding things difficult to do on your own. For example, if you are trying to learn a foreign language, joining some classes may help. Or if you are unable to workout on your own, a personal trainer may be a good idea. Of course, these options do cost more money but they are proven to be highly effective.
• You will have days when you simply do not want to get up from bed. Or all that you want to do is take off from work and watch re-runs of some old movies. All of us experience this sense of lethargy from time to time. Taking a day off may in fact be a very good way of recharging yourself physically and mentally. The only precaution you need to take is that this does not spill into the next day as you will find it increasingly difficult to slip back into a routine. Grit your teeth and make sure that you are back to working on your action plan the next day, no matter if it is a Sunday or a holiday.
• You may have heard a great deal about the effectiveness of visualization techniques but may not know how to go about it. Perform this simple mental experiment. Choose any one of your goals that is very important to you and the achievement of which means a great deal to you. Now close your eyes and imagine that you have already reached this particular goal. How do you feel? Where are you, what are you wearing? How are others reacting? Form a very clear mental picture of the entire proceedings – the people, the place, the sounds and even the smell. Feel the sense of accomplishment and empowerment filling inside of you. Now open you eyes, you will still have the same sense of pleasure and experience the same sense of self-confidence. Here is the next step: Perform this experiment everyday for a few minutes, preferably before you begin the day as this will give you the necessary motivation to not only get through the day but you will feel energized enough to want to achieve your task for the day.
• Doing the same thing again and again everyday does bring with it certain monotony. You know you need to go for your workouts regularly but after some time, boredom starts to creep in. Guard yourself against this monotony, as it is a surefire thing to bring your motivation down. Try changing your routine from time to time to make it a little interesting. Perhaps instead of using your treadmill, you can try jogging in the nearby park. Instead of attending evening classes everyday, you might want to attend a related workshop for a few days.
• For some time now, psychologists have been informing us that humans tend to associate every action that is performed with either pain or pleasure. Obviously if the actions are associated with pain, there is reluctance in performing them and one finds it difficult to motivate oneself in performing these actions. On the other hand, if the action is associated with pleasure, one finds it a lot easier to perform those actions. When working towards a goal involves actions that are associated with pain, we may find ourselves slowly losing interest. For example, it is possible that when you are thinking of going for a workout, you are associating it with the morning rush to head for the gym, aching muscles and the boredom of working out alone. Now try this simple exercise - instead of associating this action with pain, try to associate it with pleasure. The pleasure of knowing that you are losing weight as you are working out, you will look and feel better and more importantly you will be leading a healthy life. As you slowly start associating only the benefits and advantages that any action will bring to our lives, you will unearth an internal motivating force and your attitude towards that particular task will undergo a sea change.
• Do not be disheartened by any false steps that you may take. As you work your way towards your goal, if it is a long-term one or a particularly tough goal then chances are that you will face some failures or make mistakes. If you are trying to quit smoking, you may relapse and get back to smoking. If you are working towards a college degree, you may fail in one of the exams. However, use each one of these failures as a chance to understand what you need to do to avoid making the same mistake twice. Perhaps you need some more support in your fight to quit smoking; maybe you need some tutoring to help you with your studies. However unpleasant it may be, carefully go through what may have gone wrong and include steps to rectify it in your action plan.
• Having friends and family to help you and support is wonderful. However, you should also consider having a mentor who may not only support you and encourage you but also provide valuable advice and guidance. If you are trying for a management degree, it is possible that a senior colleague may agree to act as your mentor. He may have had years of experience in this field and will be able to provide you with great tips on how to go about achieving your goal. After all, any success that you achieve will reflect well on him as well.
• Constantly evaluate whether your lack of motivation is because the goal no longer reflects your values or your priorities in life. You may have been very keen on gaining a promotion in our job but later realized that your young children need you more and that you need to spare time for them. Evaluating and revising your goals to keep in line with your changing priorities will help bring back the motivation to achieve them.
