LEARNING TO MOTIVATE OURSELVES

HOW CAN YOU LEARN TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF?

Learning to motivate ourselves. If you are suffering from avolition, you are in luck, because you are about to learn the seven major reasons why you are short on the inspirational energy you need to victoriously achieve your goals… And exactly how to fix each of them.

By the time you are done reading this post, you will have the information you need to activate or stimulate the inspirational energy within you.

1. DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT?

One of the causes behind why you are lacking the enthusiasm, this is the most common: Either you do not know what you want, or there is a lack of clarity about what you want. Learning to motivate yourself by knowing this.

Whenever I try to motivate people or interact with people, the first question I ask is, “What do you want in life?” or “What is the reason for you being unsatisfied?”.

You will be shocked by how many of them are not able to give me a convincing answer to this question.

In other terms:

What is the outcome you are after? What would it look like if everything were to go exactly as you planned or better?

It is tough to get motivated to do anything at all when we are not sure about what we are after. Contrarily, once we take those unclear dreams we have and make them the centre of attention by writing them out as goals, then the motivation within us will stimulate quickly.

If you ask a stereotypical sports zealot about their favourite team, they can give you so many stats it would make you feel giddy. They can give you every minute detail you need to know about a team and its players–from speed to points per game and so on…

But when someone asks them about the details of their life–they can hardly remember what they had for their last meal.

And it is not a matter of brain power, either.

I am of the opinion that most people are about as intelligent as they make up their minds to be. If it were a matter of intelligence, they would not have such an in-depth knowledge of their most loved team’s statistics.

Learning to motivate yourself is not about intelligence. It is about concentration.

THEN WHAT IS IT ABOUT?

If you lack motivation in any aspect of your life, it might be because you have not made up your mind in particular of what you want in that aspect. And we cannot concentrate on something if we do not know what are we intending to achieve.

KEY:

The key to the first reason why most of us have avolition is easy. Recognize or realize that you cannot achieve a goal that you cannot see. Learning to motivate yourself by recognizing some interesting, exhilarating aims for yourself in every important aspect of your life – physical, financial, emotional, spiritual, etc. – and note them down, so that you can learn to motivate yourself.

2. ARE YOU IN CONTROL OF YOUR PHYSIOLOGY.

Take a moment to image in your head what a human who has avolition a really looks like, physically.

If a human is not motivated, how do they stand? How do they sit?

Are they having good pose or bad pose? Are their shoulders pulled back or are they flop over forward? Is their back upright/straight or rounded/bent?

Now think what a human who is amazingly motivated will look like…

How does a human with motivation stand? Close and narrow, or open and upright?

How does a motivated human walk? Holding their head low, or holding their head high? Are their shoulders flopped forward, or pulled back proudly as they walk?

How is their sitting position? How is their pose? Is their back-bending forward, or are they sitting upright?

How are they communicating?

How are they standing?

Listen—what if I told you that you could immediately learn to motivate your own self by imitating the picture of a motivated human that you just pictured in your mind’s eye?

KEY:

Learning to Motivate yourself with Movement. Movement leads to motivation. If you are willing to get to learn to motivate yourself, learn to control your physiological state. Here is the answer…

• First, discover what kinds of movements you make when you are feeling motivated…
• Then, do those things and your brain will follow your body.

You will start to feel more motivated when you put your own self in a place to actually feel more motivation. Move like you move when you are motivated. Stand like you stand when you are motivated.

Here is a childish—yet extremely productive—process for using my body to stimulate my motivation: Jump in the air. Clap your hands. And yell out, “WHOHOOHOOHOO!” at the top of my lungs. I remember one of my school teachers suggesting us this solution. She told us whenever you do not feel like studying, shut the door, put on music on high volume and dance your heart out.

Just try either of the above and see if it does not change your mood.

3. AIM HIGH GOALS.

Anything we desire to achieve – writing a book, shedding some pounds, wanting that dream relationship with our better half – it is the level of desire we have to accomplish those goals that end up becoming the critical characteristic of accomplishing them.

But most of them try to set limits on their desire. They tell themselves and others that they do not need wild success. This type of thinking is harmful because when we limit the extent of our dreams, we limit the scope of what we are willing to do to achieve our goals.

If you limit your potential success, you will limit what you are intending to do to create it—which limits your motivation, not to mention your sense of satisfaction about the life you live.

The answer to this problem is what is known as the 10X Rule, which states that:

You must aim targets that are 10 times what you think you want and then do 10 times what you think it will take to achieve those goals.

While some people will tell you that setting imaginary goals will kill your motivation and that it is better to “under promise and overdeliver,” this method of thinking is very foolish.

10X-aims—usually called “stretch goals—will only stimulate you harder, to try and try more than you ever have before. However, even if we fall short of accomplishing our 10X-level goals and ambitions, better to fall short of achieving a huge target than only accomplishing a tiny one… Because if you aim high enough, you will want more from yourself and become better in pursuit of a big goal. This can also be a good way of Learning to Motivate yourself.

DO YOU FEEL STUCK IN THE MIDDLE OF A CHALLENGE?

Here is your solution to getting unstuck and gaining motivation again!

Top of Form

But aiming a high target is just the first step. The second step is to take 10 times the amount of action you think is important to reach that target.

KEY:

When we have got fragile, not so inspiring goals, we tend to feel lethargic and demotivated to accomplish them. On the B – side, when we have got big and aspiring goals, we feel empowered and revitalized to take action to accomplish them.

Bottom line? Set big goals. Take quick action.

Push yourself to your outermost limits. You will feel that the more action you take, the more motivated you become to continue doing even more.

4. YOU ARE TOO OVERWHELMED.

Have you ever been so pressurized, so overwhelmed, under so much stress– that you would rather say, “Damn it, I do not even care,” than to continue moving forward with whatever you are trying to do?

Whatever the reason, one thing we know about being overwhelmed is that it can drain your motivation.

It is hard to get motivated when you are overwhelmed.

Here are a couple of possible solutions to get you back on track…

SOLUTIONS:

I hope you remember that point I stated earlier about aiming higher and 10X-ing your goals to get you motivated to heart. But maybe you also aimed a little higher than your current capacity. If that is the case, lower the bar bit by bit until you hit your sweet spot (which is somewhere between your current capacity and a goal that is just tough enough to achieve that you have got to stretch to accomplish it).

Or, maybe you have just got way too many things on your plate. If that is the case, it is time to slow down and focus on crushing one big goal at a time, rather than trying to do too many things at the same time.

5. You are Prone to Procrastinating:

One more thing that can be a reason you feel overwhelmed that leads to lack of motivation is when we do not have much clarity about what to do next. This uncertainty leads to procrastination. And procrastination leads to decreased motivation.

SOLUTION:

Take whatever it is that you lack the energy to do, and crush it down to a quick, doable next action you can take immediately…

Instead of thinking about everything that needed to get done, I decided to ask myself, what is one thing I can do right now to make development on this goal?” The solution is to write it down. Which I did try. And the sense of enthusiasm that began to bubble up as I started doing it was astonishing.

Learning to motivate yourself by being active.

6. You are Not Being particular Enough to Stimulate your Motivation

Motivation is like a capricious, short-lived, emotional creature. It is wearisome to get it to focus on one thing for a long period of time… Unless you provide it with definite directions.

One of the causes, why you might have a lack of motivation, is because you are leaving things too open.

When things are vague, the motivation will vanish.

Common goals that are way too vague are:

• Wake up earlier in the morning.
• Exercise regularly.
• Eat a healthy and balanced diet.

If you were to choose any of the above examples, here is how things would most likely play out:

You will start off with tons of motivation at the beginning…

But after a little while, you will notice that your motivation will vanish and loses its effectiveness.

So, how to fix it?

KEY:

Give your brain particular and pragmatic directions. Doing this will provide it with the controlled concentration it needs in order to activate the energy you are looking for.

An outstanding way to examine yourself closely and get specific is to question yourself.

Here is a great question that can narrow things down and, as a result, spark some motivation:

“How will I know that I am successful?”

7. DO YOU KNOW THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SEEKING MOTIVATION AND SEEKING HABITS?

The last but not the least reason most of the people suffer from a lack of motivation is simply that, at the end of the day, none of us can be motivated all the time. I have just been meticulous about adopting different habits in the areas of my life that matters the most to me and do not have to encourage myself to concentrate on writing on articles, because I have developed a habit of writing mostly everything I think or feel.

In some cases, I do not have to push myself to do anything that I have become habituated to in my life because habits are things we do regularly and spontaneously with little or no conscious thought or effort.

So, here is an interesting question: How can you develop habits?

SOLUTION:

The best way to reach your goals, and the habits you will need in order to accomplish them, is to trap all your energy and concentration towards reaching each of them one at a time, as follows:

Select your goal

What is one major, long-term goal you are really committed to achieving over the next few weeks, days or months?

Select good habits:

 What is the one new habit you can form, such that by adopting it, you can accomplish or exceed your target? Take a moment to think about it and note it down.

Learning to motivate yourself with everything you can about how to do it correctly:

Example, one of my habits is observing and writing. Most of the things I wrote, I did not publish. And that is fine with me because I cannot get the best stuff without eliminating the not so good stuff first. I write every day because my aim is to continue growing as a writer for the rest of my life. No matter how good I think I might be, there is always room for enhancing my skills.

THINK:

Think about a habit you can do all the time. It needs to be something you can fit into your schedule and implement on a daily basis, no matter what. Eventually, it will be something you can do easily, without thinking about it or needing to get yourself all motivated. At this point, you have got the habit with yourself so it requires minimum endeavour to implement and you can put it on autopilot. And if you want, you can now start to develop another new habit.

CONCLUSION OF LEARNING TO MOTIVATE OURSELVES:

What is your reason for lack of motivation? Recognize why are you not feeling motivated and seize the root cause of your lack of motivation with the above solutions, soon you will find yourself highly, constantly and effortlessly motivated even during the most difficult time!

LEARN TO MOTIVATE YOURSELF!

FIND PEACE WITHIN YOURSELF!