How To Motivate Yourself - Self Motivation

Staying motivated is a struggle — our drive is constantly assaulted by negative thoughts and anxiety about the future. Everyone faces doubt and depression. What separates the highly successful is the ability to keep moving forward.

There is no simple solution for a lack of motivation. Even after beating it, the problem reappears at the first sign of failure. The key is understanding your thoughts and how they drive your emotions. By learning how to nurture motivating thoughts, neutralize negative ones, and focus on the task at hand, you can pull yourself out of a slump before it gains momentum.

Reasons We Lose Motivation
There are 3 primary reasons we lose motivation.
Lack of confidence - If you don’t believe you can succeed, what’s the point in trying?
Lack of focus - If you don’t know what you want, do you really want anything?
Lack of direction - If you don’t know what to do, how can you be motivated to do it?

How to Boost Confidence
The first motivation killer is a lack of confidence. When this happens to me, it’s usually because I’m focusing entirely on what I want and neglecting what I already have. When you only think about what you want, your mind creates explanations for why you aren’t getting it. This creates negative thoughts. Past failures, bad breaks, and personal weaknesses dominate your mind. You become jealous of your competitors and start making excuses for why you can’t succeed. In this state, you tend to make a bad impression, assume the worst about others, and lose self confidence.

The way to get out of this thought pattern is to focus on gratitude. Set aside time to focus on everything positive in your life. Make a mental list of your strengths, past successes, and current advantages. We tend to take our strengths for granted and dwell on our failures. By making an effort to feel grateful, you’ll realize how competent and successful you already are. This will rejuvenate your confidence and get you motivated to build on your current success.

It might sound strange that repeating things you already know can improve your mindset, but it’s amazingly effective. The mind distorts reality to confirm what it wants to believe. The more negatively you think, the more examples your mind will discover to confirm that belief. When you truly believe that you deserve success, your mind will generate ways to achieve it. The best way to bring success to yourself is to genuinely desire to create value for the rest of the world.

Developing Tangible Focus
The second motivation killer is a lack of focus. How often do you focus on what you don’t want, rather than on a concrete goal? We normally think in terms of fear. I’m afraid of being poor. I’m afraid no one will respect me. I’m afraid of being alone. The problem with this type of thinking is that fear alone isn’t actionable. Instead of doing something about our fear, it feeds on itself and drains our motivation.

If you’re caught up in fear based thinking, the first step is focusing that energy on a well defined goal. By defining a goal, you automatically define a set of actions. If you have a fear of poverty, create a plan to increase your income. It could be going back to school, obtaining a higher paying job, or developing a profitable website. The key is moving from an intangible desire to concrete, measurable steps.

By focusing your mind on a positive goal instead of an ambiguous fear, you put your brain to work. It instantly begins devising a plan for success. Instead of worrying about the future you start to do something about it. This is the first step in motivating yourself to take action. When know what you want, you become motivated to take action.


Developing Direction
The final piece in the motivational puzzle is direction. If focus means having an ultimate goal, direction is having a day-to-day strategy to achieve it. A lack of direction kills motivation because without an obvious next action we succumb to procrastination. An example of this is a person who wants to have a popular blog, but who spends more time reading posts about blogging than actually writing articles.

The key to finding direction is identifying the activities that lead to success. For every goal, there are activities that pay off and those that don’t. Make a list of all your activities and arrange them based on results. Then make a make an action plan that focuses on the activities that lead to big returns. To continue the example from above, a blogger’s list would look something like this:

1. Write content
   
2. Research relevant topics
   
3. Network with other bloggers
   
4. Optimize design and ad placements
   
5. Answer comments and email
   
6. Read other blogs
   

Keeping track of your most important tasks will direct your energy towards success. Without a constant reminder, it’s easy to waste entire days on filler activities like reading RSS feeds, email, and random web surfing.

When my motivation starts to wane, I regain direction by creating a plan that contains two positive actions. The first one should be a small task you’ve been meaning to do, while the second should be a long-term goal. I immediately do the smaller task. This creates positive momentum. After that I take the first step towards achieving the long-term goal. Doing this periodically is great for getting out of a slump, creating positive reinforcement, and getting long-term plans moving.

It’s inevitable that you’ll encounter periods of low energy, bad luck, and even the occasional failure. If you don’t discipline your mind, these minor speed bumps can turn into mental monsters. By being on guard against the top 3 motivation killers you can preserve your motivation and propel yourself to success.

Sustaining Self Motivation

If you’re anything like me then you experience motivation in waves. One day you’ll feel unstoppable and eager to work, as if success is a certainty. A few days later your confidence will drop and you’ll start to drag your feet and feel discouraged, hopeless, or worse — indifferent.

These ups and downs are a natural part of life, but if you don’t work to minimize the downs you’ll reach a plateau. If every positive step is followed by a down slide, the net gain is minimal. The key to reaching your highest potential is stringing together positive steps and constantly accelerating forward.

Find Friends Along the Way

For people with ambition who operate in a competitive environment, the natural reaction is to view competitors with animosity. There will always be someone who has more than you, who’s making faster progress, or who’s generating more buzz.

While your competitive fire can help increase motivation in bursts, over the long-haul, this form of self-centered negative motivation doesn’t last. For one, it isn’t enjoyable to associate progress with negativity, and secondly, you’ll cut yourself off from from collaboration.

In most cases, life is not a zero-sum game. Another person’s success does nothing to detract from yours and frequently enhances it. Instead of making rivalries, develop friendships. Your competitors are usually the people you can relate the most to. Do what you can to help them. Share advice and recognize good work. This type of giving not only inspires others to return the favor, but it creates an infectious feeling of goodwill around you and your projects. People are attracted to positive vibes.

t’s also important to find happiness and motivation in the mundane. Every day I get dozens of emails through this site, some are random questions or requests for advice, but many are just people saying hello. I could look at all these emails as “something to deal with” but I do my best to answer every single one and make a connection in the process. Enjoying these small personal interactions reminds me of why I started doing this to begin with.

Go Easy On Yourself

Inevitably there will be failures and set backs that humble and demoralize you. In these times it’s important to understand that every failure is a success. Each failure means that you stepped out of hiding and took a risk — something most people never dare to do. This makes you brave, the fact you have survived makes you resilient, and if you’ve learned something, that makes you smarter as well.

It’s important to recognize causes of failure and areas of personal weakness, but constantly deprecating yourself will only decrease your motivation. When criticizing yourself, do it gently, the same way to you would with a subordinate who’s confidence you want to build. Recognize shortcomings, but dwell on strengths and accomplishments. Even if you’ve fallen short of a particular goal there is always something you can build on.

Motivation

Ask any person who is successful in whatever he or she is doing what motivates him/her, and very likely the answer will be "goals". Goal Setting is extremely important to motivation and success. So what motivates you? Why are you in college? If you are in college because that's what your parents want, you may find it difficult to motivate yourself. Sure, it's possible to succeed with someone else providing the motivation for you. ("If you graduate from college, I'll give you a car!" or worse "If you don't graduate from college, you won't get a car.") But motivation that comes from within really makes the difference.

Certainly, you need some intelligence, knowledge base, study skills, and time management skills, but if you don't have motivation, you won't get far. Think about this analogy. You have a car with a full tank of gas, a well-tuned engine, good set of tires, quadraphonic CD system, and a sleek, polished exterior. There it sits. This car has incredible potential. (Have you heard that before?) However, until a driver sits behind the wheel, puts the key in the ignition, and cranks it up, the car doesn't function. You guessed it; the KEY is MOTIVATION.

Interest is an important motivator for a student. So is a desire to learn. When you link these two things together, you create success. Often success in an endeavor leads to more interest and a greater desire to learn, creating an upward spiral of motivation toward a goal you have established.

So be honest with yourself. Are you genuinely interested in being in college? Have you set realistic goals for yourself? How can you develop the internal motivation that really counts? When it comes to motivation, KNOWING is not as important as DOING.

Your Own Life Transformation

When a person says that life is not worth living, then this person certainly knows nothing about life. He might be in the verge of nowhere. There are downturns in life, but that does not necessary mean that you should give up on things. There are still many great things in life worth doing and pursuing. The world is big out there awaiting us to explore. We, as human beings, are truly blessed with talents and potentials to reach all of our dreams. Unfortunately, only some people realize and fully utilize the blessings. What happens to the rest? They don’t have the enthusiasm and the drive to maximize their potentials. Many of them lack of motivation. Motivation is the energy of our actions. There are internal motivation which comes from within you and external motivation in the form of reward, recognition, and support from others. Internal motivation plays a vital role in keeping you energized and spirited. However, internal motivation is not always on a steady state. Very often, it deteriorates especially when you are overwhelmed by problems. Let us take a glimpse of it.

There are some factors to your deteriorating motivation. You might feel bored going through life with routine activities. You might fail along the way thus make you feel desperate and unwilling to proceed. There might be consistent bad influence around you. Pay attention to the people you associate with. Another reason is you don’t know your life purpose or if you have one, probably it needs clear directions. If you don’t have one, make one. Remember a phrase saying “The poorest man in the world is not he who is without a cent, but he who is without a dream.” Redefine, if necessary, your ultimate goals. Be confident about yourself. Get a mental picture of yourself in the next 5 or ten years. It does not matter who you are now, what matters is who you will be in the future.

As common as it may be to anyone, you might not feel motivated all the time. There are moments when you feel miserable and seem to lose your energy. Embrace the feelings and realize that they are only temporary. Even though you fail this one, you will win back at another turn. Life is not about how many times you fail, it’s about how many times you bounce back when you fail. Learn lessons when you fail. Never lose your hopes and strengths. Remember that every cloud has a silver lining. There’s a pot of gold at the other end of the rainbow. Whatever you do now, do it with passion. Being passionate in the things you do is one of the key to success. Even if you are passionate in what you do, problems will still pop up. For as long as you live, you will never be able to go away from problems. Fortunately, you can choose how to respond to problems. When you come across problem or turbulence in life, bear in mind that you are bigger than them. You are the master. You can tell what to do. This mindset is closely related to having a positive mental attitude which in turn defines your self-image. How do you see yourself? Whatever you say to yourself will make you. If you expect positive outcomes, then you have to start feeding yourself positive attributes. Self confidence is likely to become a leading result as a consequence of having positive mental attitude.

When you have them all - motivation, life purpose, directions, self-image – you are more than ready for your next venture. Spread wings, reach for success, strive for excellence, go to the next level and continue to deliver substantial meaning to lives.

Men Jung, S.Kom., MM

To Keep The Good People Around

When we talk about business, we talk about people. No business can be made without people - whether they serve as employees or customers or in whatever position they are. We live in an interconnected web of people - people need others to support one another. As a matter of fact, we work better in teams. There is a group dynamic in which when we work together the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, two heads are always better than one. It means that when working together, people can produce much more than if they work independent from each other. Even when the independent works are combined, the end result cannot match those produced by team work. Team, business partners, friends, family, community, and other ways of forming a group - all serve a multiplicity factor. Like soldiers fighting a war, we simply need others to survive, in business as much as in life.

Therefore, we need others to help and support us. In other words, we need a good team. Except in certain family situations in which bad behaviors are more tolerated, we want good people around. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. How many times do we experience living in a mess - canceled plans, loss of money or possessions, flustered emotions - due to misdemeanors committed by some irresponsible fellows. That doesn't even take criminal acts into account. Sadly, this leads to the conclusion that working with people is like a double-edged sword - they can hurt us as much as we need them. What can we do to minimize the risks while maximizing the benefits?

The first thing we can do is probably to make sure that we can separate the good from the bad. We need others because we need them to support and help us. In other words, we depend on them. A good team work means that each member can depend on the other. An undependable person creates a missing link to the chain that leads to a chain reaction. One missed deadline creates a series of delays, one after another. It works like a domino effect and the cycle will continue. Therefore, it is very important to be dependable that dependability can be the first criteria in selecting the team, the people we want to be around.

When we talk about dependability, we talk about trust. We trust the person to be dependable, that he/she will not screw up. However, dependability goes further than simply not screwing up. Dependability requires ability to complete a task as expected, with quality. So, there are two things that we need to see when selecting people - the person is dependable and he/she will not screw up. At the very least, the person will not screw up - he/she will not do any harm. How can we tell? Do we have to wait until the person screw up? It will be better if we can anticipate it before the bad thing happens. It is much more costly to recover or fix something, if it is ever possible, than to prevent it from happening. What can we do to anticipate? In a formal company recruitment process, there have been a number of psychological tests designed to screen people and to predict their ability to perform. Unfortunately, there are many situations in which we don't have the luxury to execute such tests to screen people. What can we do to predict someone's behavior so as not to let the person cause any harm in the future? What can we do to see if we can trust the person?

There are many ways we can do to see if someone is trustworthy. Some people can see the aura. But for the average people, we can just see the pattern and the person's history. Did the person commit to some sort of violations in the past? History repeats itself, if the person screwed up in the past, the chance is he/she will screw up again in the future. In terms of dependability, we can see the pattern of consistency. Does the person perform in a consistent fashion? If not, there is a chance that the person will screw up at some point.

Nevertheless, we don't want to keep people away simply because we are not willing to take the risk. Human make mistakes and it is part of the learning process. People deserve a second chance as long as they show willingness to keep learning and keep improving.
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