Motivation is something that is 100% within your control. And learning to control and boost it is one of the most important mental habits you can learn.
My key principles of Motivation
- Know your outcome and set it with courage.
- Act (NOW)
- Use your senses to guide you – what do you see, feel, hear, think in wisdom…
- Be flexible in your behaviour and kind in your response.
- Believe from a place that has a physiology and psychology of Focus, Belief and Energy.
- Pay attention to what you want, no distractions.
- Create the desire and add value.
- UMM – unconscious mind motivates.
Let me explain the last step – Our unconscious mind Breathes for you, Blinks for you, Beats your heart, to name a few without any motivation. Imagine if you aligned with your unconscious mind to effortlessly do what you want for a better outcome for you.
Fear or Creativity or both leads to your motivation but together they can be aligned and then you will move forward. There will always be fear but it is the crippling fear that holds us back.
Fear has many guises and can be dressed up as a safety mechanism in – ‘I can’t’, ‘I won’t’, ‘I shouldn’t’.
To truly be motivated you can drop out of your thinking, get in touch with your feelings and move away from what holds you back and towards what compels you.
The next series of blog posts are going to cover my 15 Steps towards Motivation. Today, we will tackle Steps 1 and 2:
- Pick one thing to focus on
- Discover your big WHY
- Is your outcome specific enough?
- What’s the cost of not achieving your outcome?
- What’s the benefit of achieving your outcome?
- Learn how to pick an outcome you can control
- Work out whether your goal is achievable upfront
- Make a decision and commit to it
- Break your big goal into digestible chunks
- Make your environment work FOR you – not AGAINST you
- Hang out with the right people
- Set tomorrow’s action plan tonight
- Focus on the 20% of activities that will give you 80% results
- Learn to say NO to the wrong things
- Act as if you’ve already achieved your outcome, and reality will catch up with you
STEP ONE: Write down everything you want – then pick ONE THING to focus on
Why only one thing? – Can you juggle? If I handed you 2-3 tennis balls to juggle, how would you do? How about 6-10 balls? Would you struggle? I reckon you could probably juggle one tennis ball with your eyes closed. But as soon as another tennis ball enters the equation your focus, energy and efforts are now split. Add a third – and now each ball is only getting a third of your resources.
Modern day living means we each probably have hundreds of things we want to accomplish across multiple areas of our lives both personal and professional. But if you try to focus on too many at once, your chances of success will decline.
Instead, pick just one (tennis ball) goal. Focus all of your resources on achieving it. When you feel that you have achieved that goal, then you can move on to the next. Dealing with one thing at time will help you progress much faster.
Progress creates Momentum
|
Momentum builds Motivation.
Task: Write down everything you want – then pick ONE THING to focus on. Remember, just the one tennis ball so we don’t lose focus. Take your time with this list
STEP 2: Discover your big WHY
Motivation doesn’t live in WHAT you’re doing – it lives in WHY you’re doing it. How do you uncover your own big why? Ask yourself why a desired outcome is important to you. What will it truly give you? You’ll probably have a couple of answers locked and loaded, ready to be written down. But most people stop there. Go a few steps further. Write down your answers and ask once more – what’s important to you about having (whatever the answers were you wrote down)?
Here’s where it gets really interesting. Whatever you write down, ask the question again about the new answers. Keep repeating the process until you keep getting the same answer or until the answer becomes emotional. The answer at this point is your highest intention, your highest ‘motive’ for achieving the outcome. If you go through the process and what you find isn’t compelling, that’s probably a sign that the task isn’t actually worth doing. In which case, congratulations – you just eliminated a distraction from your life.
Task: download and complete the 5 WHY’s
Find yourself a place where you can go that has minimal distractions so your attention can be focused as much as possible on the current task in hand.
Don’t forget to check back here next week as we continue our journey towards Motivation
