How to be motivated? How to find the right motivation despite the daily difficulties and obstacles?
It will have happened to you at least once that you have tried to achieve your goal, either out of willingness to test yourself or simply to feel more satisfied and happy in your life.
And you may have even happened to leave with the right motivation and a great desire to do. But at some point, either because of the small everyday problems or more pressing business, you will have found yourself too busy o too little motivated, or you will have met some too big obstacles to continue your journey towards what you set out to do.
Oh I know, it's not a good feeling when this happens. Yours esteem is the first to suffer. You feel like you are unable to accomplish something beautiful in your life and it all negatively affects yours as well mood.
But there is nothing wrong with that. Any failure teaches us something, and to be successful means to have tried many times and failed as many times. I have also been there, I have reasoned a lot, deepening this topic through various readings and books. Over time, I managed to identify three fundamental points to work on in order to have and keep one motivation of steel, despite the hard obstacles encountered along the way.
I decided to call them the three golden rules of motivation and I'll tell you about it right below in this article.
How to be motivated: the 3 golden rules
The key to being motivated and staying motivated all along the path to success is to destroy the 3 causes of lack of motivation. These are:
- Lack of goals
- Lack of solid planning
- Lack of self-confidence
What I have just listed are the three main causes that make you give up and cause a low motivation to reach your goals. I'll tell you how to work around each of these points right below. But before we even begin, I invite you to complete this test to see what your current level of motivation is!
1. Set goals
The first rule of motivation in life is to set goals. This is essential to give you a sense of direction, an awareness if you want of reason so you wake up every morning and decide what to do with your life.
The goals you choose have meaning deep, they come directly from your purpose in life, what you want to ultimately accomplish, why you want to be remembered.
So, when setting your goals, start with why. What is your dream? What is that thing that if done will make you feel happy and fulfilled in life?
Each of us has our why, and if you haven't found it yet I suggest you consult this article, it will surely help you to clarify how to find your way.
The goals you will set should not be smoky or far-fetched, but precise and concrete. In particular, we are talking about SMART objectives, where smart is an English acronym that indicates:
- Specific (specific)
- Measurable (measurable)
- Attainable (reachable)
- Relevant (relevant)
- Time based (time based)
Just an example in this regard: it makes no sense to set the goal "I want to lose weight". A well-formulated SMART goal will be as follows: “I want to lose 5 kg of weight in one month starting today”.
You will notice how everything is more precise both in terms of target and in terms of timing with which to achieve the goal. Remember that more specific you will be in formulating a goal, the more likely you are to achieve it.
2. Plan your activities
The second golden rule of how to be motivated is to plan your activities. This is a key point, which many fall into. Because it is easy to set goals, but it is not so easy to understand what needs to be done to achieve them.
Planning in this sense assumes fundamental importance: it means creating a action plan, which starts from a goal to be achieved and takes the form of a series of actions to be done every day.
Putting everything in writing allows you to take responsibility for your goals, because once you have identified everything you need to do to achieve them, only you will be responsible of your success or failure.
You will have no excuse, you will have to take responsibility for your actions and stop blaming external factors if things don't work out.
In particular, good planning uses two phases:
- planning stretegica
- planning tactics
In the first phase you will have to identify the best strategy to achieve your goal. At this stage there is still no mention of the details, but only of the various alternatives that you can pursue in order to reach your goal.
Regarding the goal of weight loss that I told you about before, the possible strategies that to achieve the goal could be:
- Playing sports
- Reduce calorie intake
- Use food supplements
- Combine the previous strategies
As you can see, even in such a trivial case, there are various alternatives. You will need to take into account various constraints, such as the time you have available or money. Playing sports takes time, using money supplements.
Choosing your own strategy in this sense is the step more difficult, the one in which many get stuck. Very often you set yourself a goal with the aim of achieving something that you have not had in life and therefore you will have to understand how to do in practice.
Once the strategy has been chosen, it is a question of implementing it: this is what is done in the second phase, the tactical one. This phase is essentially about organization issues, how you go about placing the various activities in your weekly calendar and how you manage the priority between them.
Good tactical planning makes use of many tips on how to optimize time management; this allows you to focus more on the activities that matter most to you in achieving your goals.
3. Work on yourself
The third factor to consider in completing this virtuous and motivating circle is you yourself. Managing the relationship with yourself is vital if you don't want to give up along the way, perhaps when the first difficulties arise.
In particular, you will have to work on two key points:
- Your skills
- Your mental attitude
Whenever you set a goal, you need to assess whether at that precise moment you have all the skills necessary to achieve it.
If the answer is no, you can decide whether or not to acquire these skills with dedicated activities, or to delegate some activities to other people. This second route is more appropriate when you need to do something that is very far from your field of application.
This is one aspect enormously underestimated. Very often I see guys who set themselves the goal of setting up their own business by working on the internet, but who actually don't have the faintest idea how to do it.
The more aware you are of the skills required to achieve a goal, the more likely you are to achieve it. And this is because sooner or later you will make sure to either acquire them or ask someone else for help when you need it.
No less important in your climb to success is yours mental attitude. Believing in your own possibilities is the foundation for any successful business.
To develop a winning mindset you have to work on the three pillars of success, also called the 3 P:
- Ppositiveness
- Possibility
- Proactivity
Having a positive attitude is the first step in projecting yourself towards your goals. This helps develop the Resilience, or the ability to resist and persist when obstacles and difficulties arise.
The second P is about possibility, that is, how much you believe you can achieve your goal. In this case, the discussion is centered on yours esteem, or rather on how much you believe in your means and your abilities.
Proactivity completes the set. It's about the ability to roll up your sleeves when needed and take action, doing what you planned to do on that particular day.
Well, these were the three golden rules of how to be motivated. Start applying the teachings I told you about in this article today and I'm sure you will find all the motivation you need to make your dreams come true!
