Habit is either the best of servants
or the worst of masters.
Nathaniel Emmons
Motivation is the single most important key to attaining any and all of your goals. If you cannot get excited about your goals, then achieving them can become hard work, drudgery and quickly abandoned. No one really wants to spend their days doing chores. Here are a couple of tips to help motivate you to succeed:
Reward yourself
If you have ever worked with children, you know that bribes work. Most of us grew up in homes with our parents and teachers saying things like, “Eat your vegetables and you can have more mashed potatoes,” or “Get an A on your work and you will get a gold sticker,” or “Clean your room and we can go to the park.”
As adults, people tend to drop this habit. You just do the work because you are supposed to, or maybe you don’t do the work as well as you could because there is no joy in it. Why not add the fun back in? Reward yourself. Notice that I didn’t say bribe. Reward yourself for your success. For example, if your goal is to stop eating after 6pm at night, then buy yourself your favorite coffee the next morning.
Use your friends
Friends can make goal-setting and achievement fun! Sticking with the ‘snacks after 6’ example from above, whenever you feel tempted to snack, why not call or text a friend. Share with them what’s going on and you can both laugh about it. That is one of many things that make friends valuable.
In exchange for helping to distract you from snacking, you could take your friend out for coffee in the morning. Friends can also join you in your goal. For instance, if you are looking to add some exercise to your routine, you can join a gym with some of your friends, or just meet up together each morning for a brisk walk. Now you are both working at getting healthier, and on the days when you really don’t feel like walking, knowing that someone else is waiting and counting on you will help get you out of bed and stay focused.
Journal
Record your successes. Journaling is a great tool to keep track of how you are feeling. It can also be very motivating looking through your journal at past successes. By sitting down and writing about your successes, when you are facing a difficult day, and you will, you can open up your journal and read your success entries. Remembering what it felt like to succeed will help you keep motivated during some of the tougher days.
Keep positive
A positive mindset and attitude are great motivators. When you are feeling positive and have a brighter outlook, it feels as though almost anything is possible. A good way to stay up, and motivated, is to take the time to write down a few solutions that you can use when you aren’t feeling so positive. This happens to everyone. Every living person has bad moments and bad days.
Being pro-active and planning for those tough times, and knowing how you can turn your frame of mind around, is a very useful tool to have in your arsenal. So what makes you happy? Puppies? Sunshine? Music? Jokes? None of these work for you? Go to the next step…
Attitude of gratitude
What in this life do you have to be grateful for?Making a point to remember what is good and right in your life tends to help put things into better perspective. When you are dealing with a particularly difficult time, and working out sounds less fun than cleaning the toilets, or all you can think of is that a burger and fries from the local drive-through will solve all of your problems, then it is time to get out a pen and paper.
Write down 5-10 things you are grateful for? This should help snap you out of your funk quickly. Once you remember what is good and right in your world, the gym will not sound or feel so bad. And that takeout food will no longer feel like a life preserver.
Photo Credit: MR MARK BEK via Compfight cc
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