When you multitask, you are splitting your focus thin and your brain has to switch back-and-forth between tasks. For example, try to read a book and talk on the phone at the same time. Chances are, your brain can only focus on just one task. When you talk on the phone, you will have to put down your book.
When you read, you will stop talking on the phone. This is especially true when it comes to doing tasks that require thinking and uses your creativity. Multitasking, or to put it correctly, switching from task to task will consume a lot of your willpower and energy. You will feel tired quickly and you will lose your focus. This is why when there are too many things to do at the same time, you will feel overwhelmed and tend to procrastinate.
Basically, your goals, your tasks, your actions, and your dreams can be broken down into bite-size steps. And all you need to do is to break them down into actionable steps and then act on those small steps. Every success, every goal, every dream and everything that you want in life can be broken down into simple and actionable steps.
When you turn a big goal into small action steps that you can actually act upon, things will become easy. You want to be effective here, so identify those steps that will give you the most result and do them first. The reason is simple, they have lost the meaning behind the work, the task or their goals.
A lot of people follow the crowd and set goals such as owning an expensive car, but that is not what they truly want deep inside. And when they set a goal to own an expensive car too, they will find it difficult to get motivated because the goal of owning an expensive car did not serve their inner purpose. You can see this phenomenon clearly after a few weeks or months down the road. When people first started out, they feel motivated and they have the energy to take massive action.
However, things started to change after a few weeks or months. If this is what is happening to you, probably, you have lost the meaning behind your goals for what you want to achieve. Extraordinary people did not do it for the physical materials or shiny objects.
Instead, they do it because they want to serve their inner purpose. Shiny objects such as money, fast cars, big houses, yacht, etc, are just the byproducts from your hard work. Therefore, if you find it hard to get motivated, most likely you will have to revisit your purpose. The solution to this has to come from within you. Only you will know why you want to live your dreams. Only you can tell what is the reason behind achieving what you want.
Some people are doing it for the passion. Some people are doing it because they wanted to serve others. Some people are doing it because they want to make their parents and family proud. Some people are doing it because they believe that they can make the world a better place and it has to start from them. So why are you doing what you do? Why do you want to achieve your goals and live your dreams?
In this exercise, you get a partner to ask you the why question 7 times. It simply means that you will have to drill down 7 levels deep to discover your true purpose. This exercise is especially powerful when you do it with a partner and do it seriously. You will discover and come up with an answer that is buried deep within you. When you become too comfortable, it becomes difficult to get motivated.
Your habit plays an important role here. Imagine if you have been lazy for the past 20 years, and all of a sudden, you need to change your environment and work harder than before. It will be extremely difficult for you to get motivated to change. You have been conditioned to stay that way for years and now you have to change, and it will be extremely difficult to do.
You have to grow and expand from time to time. When things become too comfortable, you will become afraid to change. This is exactly what is happening to most people out there. They are getting used to their daily routine and when something happened and they needed to change to a new approach, they complain and they blame. Please understand that change is inevitable and there is nothing you can do to stop change. Think about it, 20 years ago, you were reading information like this from books.
Now, you are reading it from your computer or mobile phone. The new guys will come in and get the promotion instead of you. Your competitor will take away your market and you will be out of business.
Businesses that did not innovate and improve will eventually go out of business. The same goes for you. You need to learn to challenge yourself, do something fresh and learn new things to stay motivated all the time. In order to get yourself motivated, you must learn to challenge and stretch yourself.
Get away from your comfort zone. It is time to stretch yourself and make your life fun. This is why when you read the biography of successful people, most of the time, you will discover that they are being motivated by desperation. When you are in a dire situation, or when you have no other option, you will eventually find a way and do it. Sharing your goals or what you will do with the public is one of the most powerful ways to increase your commitment to what you say you will do.
When you announce to the people around you that you are going to do something, you are putting yourself on the line. Once you have done that, your commitment level will increase because you will feel stress as others may check on your progress.
You can just share them with people who will support you. Get an accountability partner so that your partner will check your progress from time to time. So that their coaches can remind them, keep them on track, push them, and make sure they improve and achieve their targets….
When there are all work and no fun, you will never feel motivated to do it. Successful people turn their work into their passion, and this is why they are able to feel the excitement and have all the motivation to work. However, when your work is fun and when it is something that you love doing, you will have all the energy to do it. Going to the gym alone can be boring, so make it fun by inviting a friend to go with you.
Doing your household chore can be boring; you can play your favorite songs while doing it. You just need to be creative and find the fun while doing it. You can find a partner or a group of friends and do the work together, so it will be more fun. This goes on to explain why most successful people like Richard Branson, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh of Zappos, and many others started with a group of friends.
When you are doing it together, it is more fun and you will be more motivated for the work. But when you are doing it alone, who knows if you will stay committed and get the work done, because you are the only one that is accountable for your own success. There are no others there to monitor your progress.
For example, when you are disappointed or when you are frustrated, it is tough for you to stay motivated and focused on your goals.
When you are in a lousy state or mood, to get out of it, you have to break the pattern. There are two ways how you can do this. First, you can change your physiology.
You change the way you breathe, the way you walk, talk or sit and your facial expression. When we are feeling sad, our body posture will be in a certain position. And to get out of the sad emotion, all we need to do is to change our physiology.
Try to look up at the ceiling and then make a big silly grin on your face. And then think about negative things that make you sad. When you feel sad, your facial expression has to change. The sleepiness state will be gone. And you will see what I mean. When you listen to sad songs and keep thinking about sad things in your head, how would you feel then? Obviously, you will feel sad. What if you listen to happy and uplifting music and then you keep thinking about moments that make you happy?
Why is this so? Whatever you choose to focus on, you will get it. Where the focus goes, energy flows. If you think about the sweet moments you have with your lover, you will feel loved. Conversely, if you think about how bad your boss has been treating you, you will feel a totally different way. So choose to focus and think positively all the time. Think about things that make you feel successful. What previous achievements you have accomplished?
What do you feel great about in life right now? When they just wanted to build up their momentum, someone knocks on the door or their phone rings. They get distracted and they will have to rebuild their momentum all over again.
Disconnect from the internet or turn off the wifi. When you are reading and doing research, try to lock yourself in the room so that nobody can distract you. According to this article published by Time , we now have an attention span lower than the goldfish.
We tend to lose our focus just after eight seconds while goldfish is able to focus at about nine seconds. With the advancement of technology and we can easily connect to each other through social media and our phones these days, distractions are everywhere. When you want to start your work, your colleague will look for you. When you want to write an article, you receive notification from one of the Apps on your phone.
You get distracted too often. This is one of the most powerful productivity techniques that everyone should learn and master. If there is one skill you need to learn to be productive, this is it. Within these 2 hours, you will do nothing else except cold calling. You will have to reject other people who come to you and reschedule other activities. Time blocking allows you to get the most important task done without distraction. It helps you get into the flow and more importantly, it increases your commitment towards the task that you promise yourself that you are going to do.
Is self doubt the culprit? Sure, a lack of time, inclination or energy can contribute, or it could be a mismanagement of priorities. Motivation is the spark that helps us get things accomplished.
Ultimately, our ability to inspire self motivation is often the difference between success and failure. If only it were that easy. Moreover, sometimes, thinking or worrying about staying motivated can become somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You can do this! In fact, anyone can tap into that motivational energy. It just might be a bit harder for some than others. Plus, some tasks may require more or less motivation—and need more effort to get motivated to take on. This can include anything from losing weight to being able to quit smoking to overcoming a tough challenge. Essentially, the key is finding a way to be motivated about getting motivated. Confusing, right? In the end, it comes down to desire, and then finding ways to get there.
In this guide, we explore research-based tips to finding, maintaining and even increasing motivation so that you can reach your goals. Bonus: discovering and implementing some of the solutions below can also help with mental health! If you feel unmotivated, instead of beating yourself up, being discouraged, or feeling sad, focus on the practical steps you can take to boost your inner drive. Learning ways to increase motivation is a long journey, but it starts with a simple step.
For example, if you assume that your will to cook a big weekly Sunday dinner will wane after a few weeks, it very well might. Conversely, research shows that if you have a more positive attitude and feel confident that you can achieve your goals, these beliefs increase your likelihood of success. In essence, a positive mindset begets positive actions, creating a positive re-affirming loop that feeds motivation.
So, make an effort to counter the neighsayer in your mind. Purposefully think more positively about your goal and your ability to get there. Ultimately, thinking you can be more motivated gets you one step closer to feeling more motivated.
Just like you need to turn up the flame to cook something on the stove quicker or bring water to a boil, you need to add an extra jolt of energy to tasks that require more motivation to accomplish. It can be about perspective too. After all, from a certain viewpoint, failed attempts are just another way of eventually making progress. Motivation can be divided into intrinsic or internal and extrinsic or external motivation. Understanding the difference can help you foster your own sources of inspiration.
Intrinsic motivation comes from inside you and provides its own satisfaction or drive simply by doing something. This type of motivation works for things that you truly want to do or feel very strongly about.
For example, someone who loves playing soccer may be intrinsically motivated to practice their skills. So, when you enjoy something or are very attached to a certain outcome, focus on those feelings to help inspire added motivation as needed.
With extrinsic motivation , you are using an outside source to incentivize yourself to put in the work you need to do. External motivators include rewards, praise, deadlines, punishments. Brainstorm external motivators that might work for you. Then, try them out to gauge their effectiveness. It can be helpful to look at motivation the way researchers do. Researchers at the University of Oregon, for example, evaluate motivation relative to the skill and effort required to do something.
Easy tasks that use skills you already have require limited motivation. Projects that use new or challenging skills but minimal effort will need different levels of motivation than projects that are hard to do and require complex skills. Personal desires and inclinations and access to support and resources play important roles, too. You can put this knowledge to use by breaking down any roadblocks to motivation a task may have. Ask yourself, what is holding me back from doing this or putting in my all?
Is the actual work required difficult? Do I know how to do it? Do I really want to accomplish this? Do I have the necessary support or resources time, money, knowledge, guidance, confidence , etc. What about my support network? Once you answer these questions, brainstorm possible solutions to any issues that come to light.
The key is to know that even if you want something, it can be a struggle to muster the required motivation. Essentially, you need to accept that the payoff of achieving a goal takes hard work. Motivation requires that you put in effort both to sustain the motivation and for the actual work needed to finish a task.
So, keep your expectations in check and align your effort with the complexity of your project and the amount of natural motivation you have. Really, just take that first step. Just like when building a morning routine , sometimes the key is to force a certain degree of success, like you would by putting your alarm clock out of reach from your bed, mandating you to literally get up to stop the noise.
We all know we can spend hours thinking about and debating with ourselves about the best times and ways to start something. Then, we start to feel bad about our inaction and may ruminate on that for a good while more.
Instead, simply get up and get going. This may sound overly simplistic. But just try it. Shift your brain from analysis mode to action mode.
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