Motivation

Welcome back to our Success in a Year Program, and now we're talking month 2.  You're already in month 2, and month 2's topic is on the concept of motivation; a very fragile topic in a lot of our lives.

Think about this.  Success really has everything to do with one's motivation.  It's really the most important thing anyone can do.

If you can find out what really motivates you, what gets you to take action despite circumstances and events going on in your life, despite how negative you might feel at the moment, how do you actually react and respond to what's going on and get yourself to propel forward, to take action on the things you want to be doing, especially now that we've defined these goals and we've started working on these goals.

How do you stay motivated to keep evolving your goals and really crystallize and build that vision, bring that vision into life that we've talked about in month one?

Achieving your goals and dreams is obviously more than just dreading, and I'm sure you already see plenty of people in your world, in your life, who are very good at dreaming.  They talk about all these different things they want to create and lots of things they want to do, and they've been having that same discussion now for years and years and yet the results they're producing in their life are very much the same they've been doing the past 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

They love the dreaming part; they don't like the doing part.  That's where we're going to be setting ourselves apart from the pack here.

It takes commitment.  It takes hard work and consistent hard work, and in order to be consistent you must understand how to motivate yourself and everybody's different.

Let's start thinking about truly, inside of us, what makes us come to life?  What really motivates us?

For you yourself, knowing what motivates you is going to be your key to success, so we really want to get you to think about this.

Think about the situations in your life where you've had a high level of energy, a high level of drive and you were extremely productive.  Start brainstorming in your mind different scenarios and times when that's happened.

Then fast forward in your mind and think about other times where you really seemed to be at a low.  You couldn't get anything done, you were procrastinating things, maybe you were just sitting on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and really not getting anything productive done at all, and in fact you got into a negative cycle where because you hadn't achieved anything productive yesterday and then same pattern continued today and often we can fall into a rut like this for weeks or months.

Now, if you've ever gone through that and you've had the dichotomy or the contrast of being extremely motivated in one scenario and extremely de-motivated in another scenario, start studying that.

Start thinking about what your mindset was like, what was happening in your world at the time and how can you protect yourself from moving back into that lower state of motivation moving forward.

Action Steps

In order to do that, this month we're going to be assigning specific action steps that will really help you get in touch with your own personal motivators.  Things that you can do on an ongoing basis that will really get that drive going and make you feel alive really on a daily or even hourly basis.

The more you can do this, the more you can raise your energy, feel a high level of motivation every single day, every single hour, even down to the minute when it comes down to it, the more successful you're going to be.

We're going to start with something very practical but not always used by everybody, and that is the act of practicing daily visualization of all of your dreams.

This might seem kind of airy-fairy, it might make you seem like a dreamer, but think about this for a minute.  The very first thing we did in month number one was we had you picture an ideal vision for your life, the ideal way you'd like to see yourself in 10 years.

We allowed ourselves to really get in touch with that, because most people don't even allow themselves to think about that.

You came up with a bunch of ideas that were obviously naturally important to you at a gut level, in your heart, in your spirit, whatever you want to call it. 

And so these things naturally draw you forward.

The more you think about having already created these things, when you visualize yourself in possession of all these amazing things that you want to do, places you want to go, people you want to meet, things you want to create in your life, organizations you want to help, I don't care what it is, the more you start visualizing that and getting emotionally involved in it, the better you feel.

It doesn't matter how negative you felt five minutes ago.  Now, as you go into this visualization, you're literally shifting your vibration, so to speak.  You're shifting your energy.

Sometimes that's all it takes to change your motivation.

From there, we're going to start looking at external forces and specifically other people.  One of the best ways to get motivated is to look to other people who are already living inspirational lives or who have lived inspirational lives.  They may no longer be living, but they left an incredible mark on the world.

You can start finding people who inspire and motivate you and start making a list of them.

Write down people who give you inspiration in the area of courage, maybe give you inspiration in the area of philanthropy or public speaking or just energy, high levels of energy.  People that you see that were able to accomplish so much more in a year than the average person could do in a decade.

Write down all these different people and start studying their traits and their characteristics and the achievements they had in their lives, and it will immediately begin to help raise your standards.

You'll start feeling a shift in your motivation just naturally by doing this.

Next, you want to actually take some time to enjoy the things that motivate you.  If you're motivated by getting a project done so that you can have some free time in the evening to spend with your kids, then get that work done and then absolutely enjoy that time.

Close your laptop.  Close your work, whatever it may be, and thoroughly relish the reward you received by achieving this task or completing this action.

If you're going to give yourself the reward of going to the movies once you've completed something, then go to the movie and enjoy it and take your spouse with you and really forget about everything and enjoy that moment.

These are the motivators that we can use to continually propel ourselves forward.

Finally, make a commitment to yourself to always do and to continually do motivational learning and exercises.

You could just have a list of books that you're going to read on an ongoing basis.  Maybe every morning you wake up and you read 20 minutes of a great biography on a different person who inspires you. 

Or maybe you go to YouTube and start searching for motivational videos, inspirational videos, and you watch 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes of different perspectives on the world.  Watch videos about people who are making amazing things happen with huge situations and problems in their lives.

I've seen videos of people who have lost multiple limbs, yet they still are able to accomplish so much and they found ways to drive internal strength forward and create things that some of us would just be astonished by. 

And you see these people and you're just blown away by what they've been able to do, and then it turns around and helps you do some introspection on yourself and you realize, "Man, I really need to get going here, because there's other people who are really making it happen and I need to raise my standards to that level."

If you do this on an ongoing basis, then this month will be amazing, your motivation levels will be instantly raised and ultimately forever raised because you're going to be conditioning new patterns of motivation into your brain and ultimately into your physiology.

So enjoy month 2, and we'll see you next month.