Powerful Motivation Strategies
Build Your Own Motivating Expertise
This article on motivation sets out an initial process for training yourself to find powerful motivation strategies that will work for you, beginning with understanding what is behind your lack of motivation, suggesting a simple initial motivation exercise and providing tips to help you build your own motivating expertise. The principles apply equally well to many areas, including motivation at work, motivation in achieving life goals or motivation in giving up smoking or other problem habits.
Understanding Lack of Motivation
Lack of motivation can be caused by a number of things including:
- Boredom with the actions or actions that you want to motivate yourself to do
- Anxiety or lack of belief in your ability to achieve what you want
- Reluctance to give up the benefits for you of not doing the task that you want to motivated yourself.
As a first step in working out your motivation strategy, do the following exercise:
Motivation Exercise
Draw up a table and list on one side the advantages for you of doing what it is what you want and on the other side the disadvantages. Include emotional or psychological benefits and disadvantages as well as practical benefits and disadvantages. The reasons will vary for each individual so it is important that you are honest about what is significant for you. Thus for example if you are having difficulty motivating yourself at work, your table might look like the following:
Advantages of Concentrating Better At Work |
Disadvantages of Concentrating Better at Work |
- I get more done - I feel I have achieved something - My boss will not criticise me - I have more time to spend at home |
- I find it boring - My boss will take all the credit and I don't see why I should do him a favour - People will see me as a workaholic and I just want to appear relaxed. |
Creating Movitation Strategies
Once you have completed the Motivation Exercise for yourself, you need to do three things:
1. Ask yourself which side of the Motivation Table feels more powerful to you - if the Advantages feel more powerful that's good. If the Disadvantages feel more powerful then you are unlikely to achieve much progress until you can find a way of making the Advantages more powerful (or at least persuading yourself that they are more powerful). Either way try the following to create or improve your motivation:
2. Ask yourself how you can remind yourself of the Advantages and how you can build on them to make them even better. This might involve simple motivation strategies like:
- Writing out the Advantages and looking at them every morning - e.g. in your diary or on your computer or on a chart on your wall.
- Setting yourself achievable goals in relation to the task you want to do and then each time you achieve a goal reminding yourself of the actual benefits that accrued
- Rewarding yourself with a (healthy!) reward each time you achieve a significant goal so that the thought of the reward acts as a motivational incentive for you.
3. Ask yourself how you can deal with the potential disadvantages and create some simple strategies. In the example above the person might for example:
- Try and think of ways of making the tasks more interesting or at least less boring.
- Devise some self talk to stop them worrying about what their boss thinks - e.g. They might say to themself: 'I am doing this for me not for my boss - If my boss is so small minded as to take credit for it, I'm not going to let it bother me.'
- Remind themself that if they can work productively they will have more free time out of work to relax without worrying.
Motivation Tips
In addition to the above initial exercise, there are some simple tips to bear in mind which can be helpful in helping you to get motivated or stay motivated, such as:
- Set yourself realistic goals rather than a target which you are never going to achieve. It is better to achieve a goal of 20-30% of what you would ultimately like than to set an ambitious goal of 100% and achieve nothing.
- Recognise that making changes and powerful motivation is not simply a matter of willpower - for more information see my article on willpower. The article incorporates techniques from a powerful coaching model known as motivational interviewing.
- Allow yourself time in the week or day to do something relaxing - to take your mind off what is bothering you. To be healthy, your body and mind need to be given some chance to relax - that will enable you to focus more constructively on those times when you do need to concentrate or to motivate yourself.
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