Motivating yourself is hard. Trying to sustain your drive through a task, a project, or even a career can sometimes feel like pulling yourself out of a swamp by your own hair. We seem to have a natural aversion to the persistent effort that no amount of caffeine or inspirational posters can fix. But effective self-motivation is one of the main things that distinguishes high-achieving professionals from everyone else.

So how can you keep pushing onward, even when you don’t feel like it?

Positive and negative motivation
Motivation is what drives you towards a goal, gets you up in the morning, and keeps you working through a task, determined to succeed when things get tough. But motivation can be both positive and negative:

• Positive motivations focus on the positive things that will happen when you take action. For example: ‘Finishing this assignment means I’m only a step away from being qualified.
• Negative motivations focus on the negative backlash that will occur if you don’t take action. For example: ‘If I don’t finish this assignment in the next few hours, I’ll fail my course.

One of the keys to getting motivated is to make it easy to start.

How to Get Motivated and Take Action?
Many people struggle to find the motivation they need to achieve the goals they want because they are wasting too much time and energy on other parts of the process. If you want to make it easy to find motivation and get started, then it helps to automate the early stages of your behavior.

Here are some practical effective tips to help you with your motivation meter:

Schedule your motivation
Setting a schedule for yourself seems simple, but it puts your decision-making on autopilot by giving your goals a time and a place to live. It makes it more likely that you will follow through regardless of your motivation levels.

Create a Ritual
The key to any good ritual is that it removes the need to make a decision:
What should I do first? When should I do this?
How should I do this? Most people never get moving because they can’t decide how to get started.

Ritual Examples:
Here are some examples of how you can apply ritual and routine to get motivated:

– Exercise more consistently: Use the same warm-up routine in the gym.
– Become more creative: Follow a creative ritual before you start writing or painting or singing.
– Start each day stress-free: Create a five-minute morning meditation ritual.
– Sleep better: Follow a “power down” routine before bed.

Eliminate Procrastination
Procrastination is the silent killer. This is the number one ailment to sap our motivation. If you want to stay motivated and achieve your dreams, you have to eliminate procrastination from your life. It’s not easy. But it’s necessary.

Change your location
Sometimes, to stay motivated, we need to just change our location. We’re all creatures of habit, but picking up and going to a place where we can be more productive is helpful at times.

Get outdoors
Taking an outdoor break gives us a mindset reset. Even if it is a 10 minutes break; you will be refreshed to get back to your task list.

Meditate
My personal favorite. Meditation is the art of being present, and it has powerful and transformative properties that help to align your physical self with your spiritual self. Often, we lead hectic lives, but meditation centers us, helping to remove the clutter in our minds, and renewing our sense of spirit and motivation.
Come try a virtual class with us!

Visualize your success
Write down your goals; short-term and long-term and visualize them.
Once you have your goals, you can get and stay motivated by visualizing your future. What will life be like when you achieve your goals? Where will you live? What will you do for work? What will you enjoy in your free time?
Spend some time visualizing your future by writing out a detailed description of how life will be like when you achieve your long-term goals.

Master your time management
Time is the great equalizer because we all have the exact same amount of it. No one has more time than the other person. No matter where they’re from, what they do, or who they know. Stay motivated by organizing your time and limiting the time-wasters.

Gratitude List
Motivation can come from some unlikely places, but it can also come from very likely ones. When you write out a gratitude list, you detail the things that you don’t take for granted in your life. This has a profound effect on your attitude, state of mind, well-being, and desire for motivation.

Use rewards. Promise yourself some sort of reward each time you complete a step/task.

Don’t do it alone. Join a class, or find a teacher or someone you can share the experience with. Other people’s encouragement to keep going can be a big boost to your motivation, particularly when you’re doing it tough.

If you’re really finding it hard
If you’ve tried but failed to get motivated, then it might help to talk it through with someone you trust. Sometimes it can be hard to achieve things on your own, so having a good support network may help when you’ve taken on a big challenge.
Feel free to reach out to me at [email protected] I am right here for supporting you.

Love and light
Manali