Five steps to motivate yourself

Do you find that starting a project is easy, but staying with it is difficult? Do you wonder why you can’t stay on track? The odds are the answer is that you can’t maintain your motivation. The initial excitement of a new project is enough to get you motivated and sustain you for a while, but once that initial excitement wears off, especially when something else exciting starts to pull you away, or when you hit a bump, suddenly … there is no motivation. Not enough to resist the pull of that other exciting thing, or certainly not enough to keep you going when the going gets a little rough.

So how do we maintain our motivation, so that we can stick with our plans through the rough times, and so we can ignore those oh so exciting distractions?

I would like to share with you five steps you can use to keep yourself motivated, so you can stay on track and complete your important goals.

Step One: Learn the model for self motivation.

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

At first glance it may appear complicated, but actually it is easy to understand. Just as important, it is a practical way of staying motivated, practical meaning it’s easy to put into practice. What the formula tells us is that if you increase any of the three factors of motivation, which are to the right of the equals sign, you automatically increase your motivation.

Step Two: Understand the three factors of motivation.

1. vision
2. successability
3. environment

Vision is your purpose, why you were put on this earth. Successability is your confidence in your competence. Environment is the place you do your work and the people and organizations that surround you.

Step Three: Have a powerful vision.

The more clear you are about why you are here, and the more worthwhile it is to you, the more motivated you will be. That’s the what the model tells us, the more powerful you make any of the factors, the greater will be your motivation.

Step Four: Increase your successability.

The more confident you are in your competence (your successability) the more motivated you will be. The two best ways of increasing that confidence in yourself are:

1. Clarity
2. Proper degree of risk

Clarity means knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, and figuring our exactly how you are going to achieve it. The proper degree of risk is a moderate degree of risk, not so great that the odds are you will fail, but not so low that even if you accomplish the task, it gives you no increased feelings of competence.

Step Five: Maximize both types of environment.

Maximize your physical environment by making the place you do your work enhance your productivity or make working in it more pleasant.

Ways to maximize your social environment include seeking out a mentor, joining professional groups, getting additional training from brick and mortar institutions or even from blogs such as this one.

Motivation makes the difference between merely having dreams and achieving your dreams. Do you have a special way you keep yourself motivated? Why not share it below?