This post was reprinted with permission from Motivation Mojo
Being a motivated person to strive for excellence and enjoy the buffet of life is a choice. Often times, motivation only lasts for a minute, an hour or a day. Rarely you will find someone who keeps that motivation or drive for weeks, months or years. How to make sure you remain motivated in life though, is an entirely different situation.
Sustaining that ignition to keep fueling your own fire isn’t as easy as throwing logs into a fireplace. Since you’re working with the mind here, those logs are emotions and ambitions, and the smoke should be your severed thoughts of doubt going out the chimney.
There are many ways people try to keep themselves motivated and reminded of the task to accomplish. A personal favorite would be the rubber band around the arm. Unfortunately, you can only snap at yourself so many times before it starts hurting or you forget that the band is even there.
When you try to stay motivated, you have to think of the long term plan. There’s a lot to face in life, and new things will always splash over your plate. To keep motivated, you have to be able to wash your plate off in order to serve what you want to.
Look through all the plans you have and see which one needs to be done first. This could mean giving the house a new coating of paint, making a dog house or play pen. Long term plans such as going on vacation can wait for another time. Material matters affecting the present are what you should focus more on.
Keep in mind, anything that is long term, you can prepare for now while you’re working on something else, but not as a top priority. Only when things in future terms become the present do they get the benefit of being prioritized.
To make this simpler, smaller tasks should be done first, so they’re out of the way. Register yourself for language classes or into a gym. These small commitments can be done first so that they are out of the way.
The most relatable of examples would be losing weight. Once in everyone’s life, people have thought on working on their physical bodily appearance. Prioritizing this means any other long term projects will have to be for later since this requires your full attention.
Just 20 minutes is what you need to start yourself off…
Just 20 minutes is what you need to start yourself off. Nobody can start working out like a weight-lifting champion. Still, if you have other concerns on your mind, you may slip and forget working out as a priority.
Once you get the workouts rooted into your schedule you can try applying any other long term plans into your day. Other things such as equipment and a change in diet are things you do before you even start working out. Prioritize buying the essential equipment you need and swapping carbs and empty calories for healthy ripe fruits and all natural homemade shakes.
When motivation is paired with planning, it becomes a sure-fire formula for winning.
Continuing with the example of losing weight, the next step would be to plan out your steps to exploit your agenda. Planning out your steps may mean by a day-to-day basis, or you could make a weekly plan. The first thing to do is to find empty spaces inside your routine.
Make room for your daily fitness activity so that you can make routine with your workouts. In other cases besides this one, figure out how much time your activity would take and find that much consecutive time in your schedule.
After you’ve found the time for all of these things, start with baby steps. Do the simplest version of what you want to do in order to introduce yourself to your new hobby. For workouts, it would be the simplest cardio workout to get the feeling of what you’re getting yourself into.
try adding more time and challenge to your daily session…
Next, while you get the hang of your new hobby/activity, try adding more time and challenge to your daily session, making it more interesting. Keep at it until you finally have it rooted into your daily routine.
Other objectives like making plans take time and planning too. First comes the research and then the action to prepare for the plan. The same strategy would apply for planning, say a vacation. The only difference here would be rather than making it more challenging, you get closer to your goal day by day until you finally reach the goal.
Planning for something other than a hobby means that you aren’t going to pursue it once it’s achieved, so there’s no need to keep holding onto it. Instead, what you would want to do is get it done as soon as possible so that it doesn’t linger where you don’t need it. Keep this in mind when you differentiate between possible hobbies and simple one-time plans. When you’ve got your plans laid out, everything else naturally falls in line.
Once you’ve got the blueprint on how you’re going to pursue this hobby or plan, it comes down to your own initiative to keep yourself going. Making a plan is much easier than sticking to the plan for some people, which is why this is the hardest part.
Remove yourself from any other activity until you have gotten a hold of this first one. If you try working out and suddenly decide you’re going to practice ice skating, that’s going to take away from your dedication to losing weight. You got distracted and now going back means returning to square one, which can discourage people quite easily.
Focus only on what you need to do…
No side dedications. Focus only on what you need to do. Making a plan for the holidays means you stick to those plans and work on them beforehand, not in the vacations. Pre-plan and finish the planning as soon as you can so that there’s no procrastination and last minute changes.
It’s hard, dedicating to something and making it a habit. You may think of giving up sometime along the road but there’s always time to get back up and try again. Life has a meaning, and it never hurts to keep yourself going to find it in the end.
Knowing that you’ve achieved something great and constantly rewarding yourself for all the small wins, habit comes naturally. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself automatically taking yourself to the gym or lifting weights at home because it’s become a natural routine that empowers you.
By then, you’ll know that you’ve achieved what you wanted and you can move to something new if that’s what you want.
There are no exceptions for this one. Everyone deserves to feel accomplished, even if all you did was stop a bad habits or start a better one. Everyone accomplishes things on their own levels. Each level is a new step for self-development and who has the right to overlook that?
When you achieve your goals, celebrate. Gaining that ideal you wanted means a lot. Rewarding yourself makes you feel good about yourself, and that strengthens your morale. This means that you increase confidence and by extension, more motivation to achieve.
These are all stepping stones to increasing your motivation and self-respect. The more aware you become of what you can do makes you feel and behave like a better person. Take your achievements modestly and don’t let pride consume the best of your accomplishments.
Anything can be rewarded. If you stopped smoking, then you deserve to announce it, make yourself and others proud. If you learn a new language, travel to enunciate your new skills. No one deserves to feel prouder than you. You need to realize that you’re capable of exceeding the limits drawn by your own hand or the hand of others.
This post was reprinted with permission from Motivation Mojo
