In this guide we’ll show you 10 strategies to find motivation in all your projects.
There are many reasons why you may abandon a project, whether it is a business or a life goal, but the most common and dangerous one is lack of motivation. Sometimes when we have very ambitious or long-term projects, it is normal that we lose the motivation to go ahead with it and often end up abandoning it.
If you feel that this is your situation, today we present a guide to create habits that keep you motivated, so that in addition to working hard and constantly you can find that motivation that prevents you from giving up on your goals when you cannot clearly see the rewards of your effort.
1. Activation + Action + Reward
Sometimes it is not enough that you start changing actions or attitudes in your daily life to keep you motivated. Many times, we recognize our problems in the routine and start acting differently, this works well for a few days, but if you then stop and return to the activities that do not favor you, what you really need is to transform these actions into habits.
A habit is not achieved overnight, it is achieved by repeating an activity over and over again and that, in addition, is reinforced by a positive consequence. For psychologists, habit formation is a learning process that can be summarized in three steps: Activating stimulus, action and reward.
The activating stimulus is the incentive that promotes the initiation of a behavior. Nobody can give you better stimuli than yourself; only in your tastes, problems and needs find the interest to start with activities that benefit you. You can use a stimulus to reduce a clothing size, to start running, or travel to another country as an incentive to learn a new language.
The action is the activity itself that you want to turn into a habit, for example running, learning a new word in another language every day, eating healthier, etc.
The reward is an important part of reinforcing the habit-forming process; it should be a benefit you get after performing an action. Give yourself a reward after doing a good job.
This process is ideal to start with the actions that are going to become habits that you can find motivation with.
2. Build a routine
Starting with the necessary habits to find and maintain motivation is only the first step. Once you have decided to make changes you must make a routine, so it will be more difficult to give them up over time. It is best to start by writing down your current routine and identify all the actions and habits that do not allow you to maintain your motivation or that you think are affecting you, then write down the habits you want to implement. This way it is easier to organize a new routine more focused to motivate you and less to distract you.
3. Set micro goals
When we start a new project, it is common to start planning for the future and to segment the work to achieve it, but sometimes this planning is very ambitious and we set tasks with very important goals, which in reality will take us more time than we thought. For example, trying to earn your first 10,000 pesos in the first week with your online store.
Setting such ambitious goals, and above all, of long duration in a short period of time can quickly lead you to frustration, failing in several tasks because of this problem can make you lose motivation quickly and abandon the project for good.
The best thing to do is to set small goals, that you can accomplish in a short time so that you can see the result quickly. These small victories will make you feel that you are on the right track. In short, accomplishing the micro goals will give you motivation to continue with the project.
4. Keep track of your progress
Having a long-term project, and especially a very ambitious one, means an important investment of your time and the small or big failures you may have will surely overshadow the small triumphs you achieved along the way. To avoid this, it is best to keep a record of progress and small victories, in order to avoid losing motivation; returning to this list in bad times will help you see where you really are and what you can achieve.
5. Get inspired
Sometimes it is difficult to see the reasons why we started a project, especially when we have been working on it for a long time and we do not see much progress. If you feel that the goals you have set are not enough to move forward, it is time to seek inspiration to establish new goals. Something what helps a lot is to take the example of people who are dedicated to the same goals as you and have achieved success; you can consider having as goals some of their achievements, for example, family balance or their way of working.
6. Surround yourself with people who think positively
There is nothing more disheartening than hearing negative or unconstructive comments towards your project, because being constantly among those types of comments can only bring you down. It is best to surround yourself with people who really believe in your project or who believe in you; this does not mean that you surround yourself with “praisers” because this can also hurt you. What you need is people who can see your successes and virtues even when they do not seem so obvious to you.
7. Think positive
One of the main reasons that makes us lose motivation is obsessing with negative thoughts. In this case, it can be helpful to have a list with our victories or our progress; this will help us to put on a scale these negative thoughts and compare them with the positive.
Another way to help you keep negative thoughts away is to have positive talks with yourself, which will help you realize the good things that surround you and on which you can base yourself to change and forget those negative thoughts.
8. Have a counselor
When things are not working out the way you expected, the best thing to do is not to give the matter more thought or waste more time trying to solve something that you may not be able to solve yourself, because this can lead to frustration. If you find yourself in such a situation, the smartest thing to do is to ask for help from an expert or a mentor. Surely, they will be happy to work with you to help you solve the problems you are struggling with.
9. Don’t lose sight of your goals
It is very common when you have been working on a project for a long time, especially if you are working on small and fragmented tasks, that you lose sight of your main goal. Then a question arises that can quickly discourage you: why am I doing this?
To always find an answer to this question there are many strategies that basically try to keep your goal in a visible place. For example, you can write your goals in your agenda or write it on your desk, or you can even materialize it in an image that you can hang in your workplace or in your room.
10. Prepare your mind for the hard times
Sometimes we forget that not everything is going to go our way, that we will have small failures on our way to reach our goal. We have always been taught that everything must go right the first time, that to achieve success you must be more than perfect and that a single mistake means failure.
The truth is that, the best thing for your mental health is to forget about these prejudices because they will do nothing but discourage you when you make small mistakes.
You must prepare your mind for difficult moments, because the road to success is full of small failures from which you can learn a lot.
Reaching your goals takes time and along the way there will be ups and downs. We hope that with this guide you will be able to find and maintain motivation in those difficult moments.
Tell us, how do you motivate yourself?