It’s pretty easy to be motivated when your goal is exciting. But what about those other, more challenging (or less inspiring) goals like staying fit, eating well, or doing daily chores? Author Tom Johnson gives you five tips to help you when your motivation loses momentum. This is from the website playingtolose.com and reproduced here in full for your convenience.
Five Motivational Tips To Light A Fire Under Your Ass
I’ve spent quite a bit of time bandying back and forth about the various concepts and implications behind motivation. What motivation is, what causes it, what influences it, etc. And I think that that’s important knowledge to have, because it’s easier to set a plan in motion when you understand why each step is necessary.
But a lot of my readers have been asking me for more specific guidelines. Some folks want me to skip past the why’s, the what’s, and the wherefore’s, and start laying down some hard-and-fast motivational tactics. So I’ve whipped up a handful of small motivational hacks, just to whet your appetites for greater things to come…:). Here we go to maximize your motivation.
Tip #5: Become your own Frankenstein!
Let’s face it. One of the main purposes of motivation is to serve as a catalyst for personal change. There’s something about yourself that you want to modify. But you don’t know how to go about it, and you don’t know how to get started. The first step is to start re-constructing yourself. If you’re not happy living within the framework of your personality now…if you’re too negative or too lazy or you don’t feel like you’re good enough…then you need to deconstruct the person you were, and fashion something altogether new from the pieces. A new frame of being that you will use to become an unstoppable juggernaut of confidence and determination!
It starts with creating a vision of your ideal self…the person that you want to be more than anyone else. Construct this vision as intricately as you can. After all, this is going to be your own invincible creation. And then, once you have lovingly constructed this new self…begin living into it. Imagine pouring your old self into this new mold…and growing to fill it with every passing day. With careful attention to detail, and a little jolt of motivational lightning, you’ll soon find yourself becoming the confidence monster that you’ve always dreamt of being.
Tip #4: Fake it until you make it!
For a lot of us, it’s hard to find the inspiration and the motivation to become better, stronger human beings. We convince ourselves that we’re not capable of doing the things that we really want to do. We tell ourselves to “be realistic.” And that’s perfectly natural. But we have to understand that, most of the time, realism is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of pessimism. The people with the most consistent track records of success don’t think in terms of what is. They think in terms of what could be.
If it’s difficult for you to imagine the potential within yourself, maybe you need to start lying to yourself a little bit. Tell yourself stories about your future. It doesn’t matter how fantastical or absurd the stories are, as long as they get your blood racing with excitement. Because if you don’t have a concrete vision of your greatest self, how do you ever expect to live into it?
Tip #3: Step into the arena!
As human beings, we are historically proven to thrive on adversity. Challenge has always been our greatest catalyst for growth. It is the impetus that has kept mankind asking life’s great questions and pursuing the grandest of goals throughout history. There is no person on the face of the planet that ever grew in body, mind, or spirit without adversity.
But modern society has babied us. Progress has given way to convenience, and convenience has allowed us to get everything we need without ever having to leave our comfort zones. As modern humans, we will actually go out of our way to avoid difficulties and conflict. But if we live our lives without ever facing challenge – without ever seeking out adversity – how can we ever expect to grow as people? Every so often, it becomes necessary to step into the arena of life, face our symbolic enemies, and strive against them as best we can. Challenge and difficulty should never be things to fear, because it is only through encountering these things that we can achieve our true potential.
Tip #2: Hurry up and sit there!
Set aside the time and space to sit in silence at least once every day. I’m not saying that you need to go so far as to meditate, although that’s my preferred method. But I am saying that every once in a while, we need to isolate ourselves and spend some time alone with our thoughts. Every day, we have to deal with the a multitude of other people…other ideas…other influences. And it becomes difficult to cultivate our thoughts and allow them to grow. Because our original thoughts are being drowned out by a sea of influential voices.
So what I’m suggesting is simple. Turn the TV off. Turn the computer off. Put the book down. And just sit awhile in silence. Because it is only then…when all of the outside voices have been silenced…that our ideas can truly make themselves heard and known.
Tip #1: ‘Downtown’ is not a place and ‘someday’ is not a time!
A lot of us have a bad tendency to set goals using phrases like, “I’m going to get fit.” or “I’m going to read more.” Well, there’s some bad news on that front. Phrases like “getting fit” and “reading more” aren’t real goals. They’re vague ideas that can’t be implemented because you have no idea what the destination point is. Let’s say you decide to take a cab somewhere…when the cabbie asks you where you want to go, do you just say,”Downtown”?
No. Because ‘downtown’ is not a place. It’s a vague conceptual area that is impossible to reach. You might actually have better luck if you asked the driver to take you to Hogwarts or Narnia.
It’s the same thing with ‘someday’. If you’re going to say ‘someday’, you might as well say ‘never,’ because ‘someday’ is not a time. And it gives you way far too much leeway to get lazy and start procrastinating.
If you’re going to set goals, you have to make them specific and quantifiable. Otherwise, your brain will never be able to map out the best way to reach them.
