STAYING MOTIVATED

It is hardly a secret that the key to successfully accomplishing one goal after another is staying motivated. There are, of course, tasks which you may not like at all, yet you find motivation to complete even them because you recognize how each particular task serves a greater goal. How exactly do some of us manage to stay motivated most of the time? Here are just a few ideas you can try: 1) Find the Good Reasons: Anything you do, no matter how simple, has a number of good reasons behind it. Not all the tasks have the good reasons to do them seen at first sight, but if you take just a few moments to analyze them, you will easily spot something good. We also have many tasks which don’t need any reasoning at all - we’ve been doing them for so long that they feel natural. But if you’re ever stuck with some task you hate and there seems to be no motivation to complete it whatsoever, here’s what you need to do: find your good reasons. They may not be obvious, but stay at it until you see some, as this will bring your motivation back and will help you finish the task. 2) Make it Fun: When it comes to motivation, attitude is everything. Different people may have completely opposite feelings towards the same task: some will hate it, others will love it. Why do you think this happens? It’s simple: some of us find ways to make any task interesting and fun to do! Depending on how you look at it, you can have fun doing just about anything! Just look for ways of having fun, and you’ll find them! 3) Take different approach: When something doesn’t feel right, it’s always a good time to take a moment and look at the whole task looking for a different approach. You may be doing everything correctly and most efficiently, but such an approach isn’t necessarily the most motivating one. Quite often you can find a number of obvious tweaks to your current approach which will both change your experience and open up new possibilities. That’s why saying “one way or another” is so common: if you really want to accomplish your goal, there is always a way. And most likely, there’s more than one way. If a certain approach doesn’t work for you, find another one, and keep trying until you find the one which will both keep you motivated and get you the desired results! 4) Recognize Your Progress: Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress. We track our progress automatically with most activities. But to stay motivated, you need to recognize your progress, not merely track it. Somehow, it is in a human nature to always want things to happen at once. Even though we split complex tasks into simpler actions, we don’t quite feel the satisfaction until all is done and the task is fully complete. For many scenarios though, the task is so vast that such an approach will drain all the motivation out of you long before you have a chance to reach your goal. That’s why it is important to always take small steps and recognize the positive different and progress made. 5) Reward Yourself: This is a trick everyone likes: rewarding yourself is always pleasant. I’m happy to confirm that this is also one of the easiest and at the same time most powerful ways to stay motivated! Feeling down about doing something? Dread the idea of working on some task? You’re not alone in that, I’m telling you! Right from the beginning, agree on some deliverables which will justify yourself getting rewarded. As soon as you get one of the agreed results, take time to reward yourself in some way.Your progress may not seem to others like anything worth celebrating - but take time and do it anyway! It is your task and your reward, so any ways to stay motivated are good. The more you reward yourself for the honestly made progress, the more motivated you will feel about reaching new milestones thus finally accomplishing your goal!