Welcome to reThink Your Perspective’s blog. Helping you to unlock your potential, empower your mindset, create productive habits, and boost your motivation. Today’s topic is how to get motivated.
How Do You Get Motivated?
Today’s post (video version can be found below) is key to the setting of goals or resolutions. Motivation keeps us going regardless of what’s going on around us. Without a strong motivator, we ultimately give up. We haven’t made a committed decision, just decided that we’d like to do whatever it is that we set as a goal. But we haven’t changed enough within us to be successful because the goal just isn’t big enough.
We hit one relatively small hurdle. And give up.
However, it must be pointed out that our motivation usually comes AFTER we’ve started a new behaviour. All the friction in a task is at the beginning. Once started, progress occurs more naturally, and it is easier to finish than it was to start.
“Objects in motion tend to stay in motion. Once a task has begun, it is easier to continue moving it forward.”
Newton’s First Law
Thus, one of the keys to getting motivated is to make it easy to start. And you start, by deciding what you want and then making a committed decision.
Committed Decisions Are The Key To Being Motivated
Many of us know what we would like in our lives. But we couple that with thoughts that we could never do it because of x, y, z. This could be not having enough money, a fear of flying, no spare time, having people that depend on us… The list is endless.
But one day we decide no more. We want that thing and we set a goal to get it. It is usually around this time of year that many people set new goals for the year ahead. I will get fit. Be a nicer human. Drink less. Stop smoking. Be more productive. All worthy goals, but without a committed decision, it will never happen.
A committed decision is such that nothing on Earth will stop you from following through. It is the decision to get fit. To stop drinking. Give up smoking. REGARDLESS of the outside world. REGARDLESS of other people’s opinions. This is your life, it is your decision what you do. There is no, “I’ll get fit, when I have the money for a personal trainer”. A committed decision would see you following along with free YouTube videos in your house, or walking / running around your area.
There is also no “I’ll stop drinking, except for when I go out with my friends”. The committed decision is to stop drinking regardless. If your friends don’t back your decision and pester you to drink, then maybe you need consider their ‘friend’ status? But they might even join you!
Once you have made the decision to do something the next step is to get fully involved with the thing you want. I have discussed this process in a previous post.
What is Motivation?
The simplest definition of motivation boils down to wanting. Our human desires. We decide that we want a change in behaviour, thoughts, feelings, self-concept, environment, and relationships.
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.”
Zig Ziglar
The dictionary definition of motivation is:
“a reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way.”
This, to me, infers that our motivation for motivating ourselves is the particular behaviour we want to achieve. Motivation is what will shift our subconscious mind and upgrade our paradigms to reach the thing that we want.
Very Well Mind describes motivation as why a person does something. It is:
“the driving force behind human actions… the process that initiates, guides, and maintains goal-oriented behaviours.
For instance, motivation is what helps you lose extra weight, or pushes you to get that promotion at work. In short, motivation causes you to act in a way that gets you closer to your goals. Motivation includes the biological, emotional, social, and cognitive forces that activate human behaviour.
Motivation also involves factors that direct and maintain goal-directed actions. Although, such motives are rarely directly observable. As a result, we must often infer the reasons why people do the things that they do based on observable behaviours.”
Types And Components of Motivation
Motivation can come from anywhere and is dictated by the individual. Something that motivates one person will have no effect on another. But all types of motivation can be grouped into three broad groups:
- Extrinsic. Things outside of the individual. External rewards such as material objects, money, praise or recognition.
- Intrinsic. Arising from within the individual. Internal rewards such as gratification or pride from completed a complicated puzzle.
- Family. Arising from the need or want to support your family. This can include going to work to provide financial support for your family, even if you don’t want to go.
This leads into the three components of motivation. The degree of each of these can impact whether you reach your goal. The more you put in, the more you will get out.
- Activation – the decision to initiate a behaviour, such as enrolling in a course.
- Persistence – the continued effort toward a goal regardless of obstacles. Such as showing up for your course after a late night.
- Intensity – the concentration and vigour that goes into pursuing a goal. One student might coast through the course, while another engages and participates with discussions and wider study.
Why Is This Important To Understand?
Motivation underpins everything we do. Have you noticed that you are much more able to do something to a good standard when you WANT to do it? And much of a burden and a drag something is that you don’t want to do but have to?
Understanding how motivation works can:
- Increase your efficiency
- Encourage you
- Drive you
- Help you avoid unhealthy or maladaptive behaviours
- Give you more control of your life
- Improve your well-being and happiness
Sometimes it is really easy to find your motivation.
Other times, it is nearly impossible to find your motivation. One minute you are in a whirlwind of excitement. The next? You’re trapped in a death spiral of procrastination.
At some point, your motivation will make it easier to change than stay the same. It will be easier to take action and feel insecure at the gym, than stay home sitting on the sofa in self-loathing. While reaching for another biscuit. Feeling fat and unhappy. It will be easier to make the sales call, swallowing the awkwardness, than to feel downtrodden when looking in your bank account.
Every choice has a price. Motivation allows us to bear the inconvenience of action over the pain of remaining the same. Our paradigm will continue to fight us to stay the same, but a big motivation will enable us to change the paradigm. One decision to act at a time. This means that after, potentially weeks of procrastination, it becomes more painful to not take the action than to actually do it.
So What Can Motivated Us?
Let’s start with some theories of motivation. Psychologists throughout history have proposed many different theories. These are some of the major ones.
- Instincts – the suggestion that fixed behaviours are motivated by instincts. They include biological instincts such as fear, cleanliness and love.
- Arousal Levels – Behaviours motivated by the person’s optimal level of arousal. For some this is low, so they pursue relaxing activities. For others it is high, so they pursue more exciting, thrill seeking behaviours.
These are but three of numerous different forces that direct and guide our motivations. What enthuses and pushes you forward will be completely ineffective for another person. And what enthuses someone else will fall flat for you.
Tips For Improving Motivation
Everyone experiences fluctuations in their motivation and willpower. When you are low on motivation there are many things you can do to improve it. And these will be different for every person. What works for one person, won’t motivate another.
The following is a list of things you can try until you find what works for you:
- Check your goal. Make sure it focuses on what you really want. Disregard any thoughts of how you can’t have it, just focus on how you will feel when you have achieved it.
- Break a challenging situation down into smaller steps. Then focus on one small step at a time. Each small step will build to a goal completed.
- Improve your confidence. Practice and hone your skills, and never stop learning new things.
- Remind yourself of how far you have already come and what your strengths are.
- Use incentives carefully. If someone is intrinsically motivated, then adding more reward externally will backfire. Incentives should be used to increase motivation to engage in an unappealing activity, but don’t overuse them.
- Introduce new challenges to your current behaviours. Incremental challenges can help to improve your skills, feel more motivated, and bring you closer to success rather than stagnating where you are.
- Take control. Ensure that you, and everyone else if working in a group, feel empowered and influential to the project. Focus on things you can control and influence and work on those area.
Causes Of Low Motivation
As said above, everyone has different things that motivate them. The same is true for things that will cause low motivation. These include:
- All-or-nothing thinking, where you believe that you must be perfect or there is no point. One small mistake will completely zap your motivation to keep pushing forward.
- Believing in quick fixes. You must understand there is a Law of Gender that states that everything has a gestation period. Everything, including ideas and goals, has a set period of time that must elapse before it comes about. But know that as you work towards your goal, it is working towards you.
- One size fits all thinking. Something that works for someone, might not work for someone else. You must find what works for you through trial and error.
Creating Habits To Maintain Being Motivated
The biggest killer of motivation is wasting too much time and energy on other things. Things that are the noise around the activities that will get you to your goal. Scheduling your activities specifically avoids this.
If you don’t have a set time to workout each day you will wake up hoping you find the motivation to exercise. If you don’t schedule a time to make your sales calls, your attention will be elsewhere and you’ll keep making excuses not to do them.
Setting a schedule puts your decision-making on autopilot by giving your habits and activities a time and place to live. It makes it more likely that you will follow through regardless of your motivation levels. The schedule means you don’t have to wait for motivation or inspiration to strike, you just have to have the discipline to complete each action you schedule.
Schedules can also evolve into rituals. Twyla Tharp, one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of modern times, discussed her morning ritual as follows:
“I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the gym, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the cab. The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual.”
This simple act of doing it the same way each morning habitualises it. Makes it easy to do and repeatable, reducing the chance you will skip it or do it differently.
How Do Rituals Work To Stay Motivated?
The key to any good ritual is that it removes the need to make a decision. The biggest stopper to starting any new behaviour is deciding how to get started. A ritual provides a mindless way to initiate your behaviour. Making starting your habits easier which ensures you follow through on a more consistent basis.
Some examples of rituals are:
- Using the same warm up routine in the gym will enable you to exercise more consistently.
- Create a five-minute morning meditation ritual to start each day stress free.
- Following a power down routine before bed will allow you to sleep better.
James Clear gives three simple steps to build better rituals and make motivation a habit:
- Make the start of your ritual or routine as easy as possible so you can’t say no to it. You shouldn’t need any motivation to do the first action. It can as simple as setting out your yoga mat the night before.
- Ensure your routine gets you moving towards the end goal. Once started, your routine should transition into more and more physical movement. This doesn’t just mean exercise, it is anything that moves you towards your goal, be it exercising or writing.
- Follow the same routine and pattern every single time. This creates an automatic series of events that you always perform before a certain task. It makes them automatic and sets up your goal achieving activity to succeed.
Eventually your routine becomes so tied to your performance, you don’t need to know how to find motivation. You just need to start your routine to trigger your habit, even if you are not motivated to do it.
How To Stay Motivated For The Long-Run
The Goldilocks Rule dictates that there is a “just manageable” line you must walk in any activity. It can’t be too easy, you’ll get bored. Or too hard, you’ll get demotivated. Each activity must have just the right amount of challenge to maintain your focus and investment. Victory is not guaranteed, but it is possible.
Humans love challenges. But only if they are in this optimal zone of difficulty. We want nothing more than to master a skill just beyond our current horizon. If you feel unmotivated to work on a task it is often because it is too boring or too difficult. You need to pull your tasks to the border of your abilities where you feel challenged but capable.
When we reach this border and walk that line, it is sometimes referred to as flow. Being ‘in the zone’. Flow is the mental state you experience when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains that one of the keys to reaching this flow state is that:
“you get immediate feedback about how you are doing at each step.”
This means that the activities you are doing must give immediate feedback on the progress you are making.
However, there will always be days when your motivation to perform a task will dip at some point.
What to Do When Motivation Fades
Try these tips for when your motivation fails regardless of your habits and routines.
- Think of your mind as a suggestion engine. Every thought is a suggestion instead of an order. For every negative thought (I’m tired, I should give up, etc), you can suggest a new positive one. I will feel good when the work is done. I have the ability to finish the task even when I don’t want to. These are not orders. They are merely options alongside the negative ones.
- Remember that discomfort is temporary. In relation to a whole day, any habit you perform will be over quickly. The exercise routine will finish. The report will be written. Maintain perspective, life is good, and discomfort is temporary. Let this temporary moment strengthen you.
- You will never regret good work once it is done. So often we want to have easy work, that is worth doing, that is helpful and respected. But we do not want to struggle through it. We want flat stomachs, but don’t want to grind through another workout. We want the final result without the mistakes and discomfort. But have you ever felt bad after completing worthy work? The simple act of showing up and having the discipline to do the work is a victory worth celebrating.
- This is life! It is a constant balance between giving into the ease of distraction or overcoming the discomfort of discipline. Life is the result of a hundred thousand daily battles and tiny decisions to either carry on or give up. Spend each moment in a way that will make you proud.
How Will This Help With Your New Year Resolutions?
We set resolutions because we spend some time at this time of year reflecting on the year just gone and evaluating where we want to be this time next year. We set resolutions to get to that ideal situation. But we rarely change our paradigm or self-image to that person from the get-go. I discuss the relevance of this in this previous post.
Being motivated is a key ingredient to changing your self-image. If you don’t want to change internally then you won’t. Your goal requires you to become someone else. If you were that person already then you wouldn’t need to set this goal, you’d have achieved it already. But to be someone else you must go through the process of updating your self-image. And as that can be a very hard thing to do, you need motivation, in the form of what you want to become or what you want to have, to keep doing the actions to get there.
What Do You Think?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this from you and hope this information helps you manage your daily activities more efficiently! Remember, no-one can manage time. We simply manage activities.
If this resonates with you and you want to discuss it further, then get in touch today. Either here or through any of my social medias or schedule a call to discuss it with me directly.
I love hearing from my readers and finding more ways to help them individually! I look forward to hearing from you and hope this information helps you understand the need to find your motivation and continue to be motivated!
Have a great rest of your day!
Jaiye
