What is motivation, and how do you increase it?
The term “motivation” is often used, but what does it actually mean to be motivated? How do successful athletes, managers and artists motivate themselves? Don`t you actually need motivation for everything you do during the day?
High motivation is an important factor when it comes to succeeding. “You have to be willing to give 100% to a task,” as Arnold Schwarzenegger explains his motivation. But how do you manage to give 100%?
There are many discussion about that, and opinions often differ. Certainly, to be highly motivated, you need to set an inspiring goal for yourself. But even people who set the same goal mostly achieve different results. Why can certain persons permanently motivate themselves to achieve big goals, to make a healthy lifestyle, a healthy diet or losing weight their new reality, while others can not?
From school to high working life, every person has a very individual motivation to lead certain projects to success. Despite these differences, many motivational coaches agree on a few points. You can find some of the most important points for a good motivation in the following section.
6 important points for a higher motivation
Meaningful goal
What you want to motivate yourself for, must make sense to you. It has to be a project for which you are ready to invest a lot of energy in the long run. You have not found such a destination yet? Listen to yourself. A meaningful goal is an emotional thing. You feel when you really want something. It has to inspire you. You have to be able to visualize it.
Focus
You have to make a decision which goal to follow and focus on the one big goal. If you have multiple goals at the same time, it means that you divide up your time and energy. Take one goal after the other, and stick to the current goal. This way you have a chance to reach the goal.
Long term goal
You need a long term vision to achieve great things. From there you break your goal down into smaller steps which you can measure. Reaching this smaller steps motivates even more, because it is a step to your big goal. That’s what the best athletes and managers do. If your goal is to become the best basketball player in the world, then there are several thousand practice unites and hours that you can plan and execute and measure your progress wih. This will lead you on the right track to your goal.
Track your progress
Being successful also means being fair and honest with yourself. You need to see if you are progressing or going backwards, if you are need to push more or less. Track your progress with an agenda or booklet and make sure that you note sub-goals to make the way to your goal measurable. Check them when done, that is a great feeling !
Discipline
You have to be ready to do a lot for your goal. Getting up earlier, staying longer and doing more than the others. Sometimes it can become hard if you want to perfect your skills or abilities, but that’s the only way to succeed.
The Big Price
Determine the reward you can get when you reach your goal. The bigger the target, the bigger the reward should be, because the way there will be exhausting. For athletes, trophies and cash prizes are an additional incentive, but they set always a personal reward that they enjoy when they succeed. How would you like to reward yourself?
