Self Motivation

Motivation is defined as an internal or external driving force which influences the thoughts, feelings and emotions of an organism and prompts the organism to act in manners which it believes will benefit it.

Staying highly motivated is a constant struggle all of us face everyday. Our intrinsic drives are constantly beaten by negative thoughts, negative feelings and anxiety related to the future, our jobs and our tasks at hand. Most of us face these “negative mind talks”. Highly successful people are those who have the ability to “suppress” the negative thoughts and keep moving forward. Many people think that this is a simple solution. It sounds simple but it is not simple.

To be successful we need to understand our lack of motivation. Our thoughts are driven by our emotions i.e. our feelings. If we can nurture our positive feelings we will be able to become more positive. This can be done by neutralizing the negative thoughts and focussing of the positive ones. This will enable us to focus on the tasks at hand. Completing tasks is a positive reinforcer. Getting tasks done will motivate us further. The jest of this paragraph is that we can pull ourselves out of a depression by achieving success by doing tasks.

Most of us lose our drive and motivation because we lack the confidence, the focus or the direction. Doing tasks gives us the confidence, helps us focus and gives us a direction to move forward.

Boosting our Self Confidence

The major reason reduced motivation is the lack of confidence. This usually happens to ordinary individuals like me and you because we are focussing on what we are not able to do or what has not been done instead of what we can do and what we can achieve. This negative thinking starts a negative downward cycle and it continues to spiral downward. The negative thoughts on negatives like past failure, bad actions and personal weakness must be broken. The negative thought make us look for excuses for our failures etc. I feel I have said enough about the downward spiral.

To be successful we need to turn things round. The only way to get out of this negative thinking pattern (low level of motivation) is to focus on the positives we have achieved. We need to be able to set aside time and energy to focus on all the positives in one’s lives. Most of us have more positives than negatives. We will do well to make a list of all our strengths, our successes, our achievements and our current advantages over our “rivals” By doing this activity conscientiously we will feel competent and we will realize how competent and successful we already are. This will motivate us and rejuvenate our confidence. It will get us motivated (charge up) to build on our successful track record.