How to stay motivated

How to Stay Motivated

This article was co-authored by Camber Hill. Camber Hill is a numerologist, author, speaker, and the owner of Camber Hill Coaching based in Long Beach, California. For over 37 years, Camber has coached entrepreneurs, creatives, business executives, and professional sports figures. He has also inspired creatives in the entertainment industry such as professional directors, writers, actors, and top radio personalities. Camber’s unique use of numerology allows him to understand the under-current which drives his clients to create long-term solutions and measurable results. His work has been featured in the History Channel’s «The Human Calculator,» The Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life Magazine, and California radio programs. He is also a member of The International Coaching Federations and is a board member of the ICF Orange County’s Board of Directors. Additionally, Camber is distinguished as a certified business owner by the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.

There are 10 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page.

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Personal motivation is key to maintaining almost all aspects of life. If we’re not motivated, we’re more likely to squander our time and neglect our personal and professional goals. Even the most determined people can lose steam sometimes. Keep reading for some sure-fire tips for getting back on track.

19 Highly Effective Ways to Stay Motivated

Everyone is motivated by different things. Understanding what motivates you can make the difference between success and failure.

In today’s competitive work environment, our greatest untapped resource may be our own motivation.

But what happens when you can’t find your motivation or you can’t stay motivated long enough to finish a project or even keep up with daily tasks? You need find your motivation—but where?

You find it within, because all all motivation is self-motivation.

What drives us to stay motivated is as individual as who we are, so you need to tailor a motivational that will resonate with you. T more you know and understand yourself, the more effective your efforts will be.

Here are 19 simple strategies you can try:

1. Understand your why. Sometimes it’s not so much the what or the how that matters, but your why—the purpose behind what you’re doing. Being clear about what you’re working for can give you the stimulus to stay on course.

2. Define your goal. Defined goals put your ideas into action mode. It’s the vital step between planning and doing.

3. Create a clear vision. If you want to succeed, you must create a clear compelling vision, something that you can relate to and resonate with. If it doesn’t speak to your heart, it won’t motivate you to stay on target. Create the highest grandest vision possible, because you can achieve only what you see.

4. Produce a plan. Once you have a goal in place, a plan is will take your vision and break down the steps you need to get it done. A goal without a plan, as we know, is just a dream.

5. Look for the bigger picture. When you have to stay motivated, think of the bigger picture. How does this relate not only to yourself but to others? How will it contribute to something important? Where will this make a difference? To accomplish more, think bigger.

6. Keep it positive. Positive thoughts lead to positive actions, and self-affirming statements will help you to achieve your best. Take control of how you think, how you feel, how you act. Positivity will help you make the choices that lead to accomplishment.

7. Approach tasks in new ways. Sometimes just getting started might be the problem. A different approach might give you a new perspective and more energy.

8. Break goals into manageable tasks. One important key to your success will be your ability to break down your goals into shorter-term and smaller single tasks. Keep things manageable.

9. Get organized. Make sure your workplace is uncluttered so your mind can be organized. A calm environment gives you a better chance of being more efficient and productive.

10. Tackle procrastination head on. Don’t make excuses or waste time rationalizing why you haven’t already started. Instead, try to uncover the real reason for the delay and get to work immediately. The best way to begin something is just to begin.

11. Seize the power of deadlines. Setting a time limit for an activity will enable you to assemble your resources and materials toward accomplishing things you might not otherwise get done.

12. Stop multitasking. Don’t divide your attention but give your full and undivided self to the task at hand. When you do, your chances for success go way up.

13. Starve your distractions. Do what you need to do to stop being distracted by people, tasks, or electronics. Devise strategies to help you start and complete tasks without any distractions or interruptions.

14. Stay in the zone. Your best and most productive work is usually done when you’re in the zone. Ask yourself how to create the perfect environment for you to do your best work and keep at it until you’re done.

15. Choose success. Choose to be successful, then stick to your choice and see it through to a conclusion. By creating a mental picture of yourself successfully completing a job, you can increase your chances of success.

16. Keep it fun. If you seriously want to stay motivated, find a way to make it fun. Fun is not the enemy but a great motivator.

17. Harness the power of optimism. Belief that you can accomplish something is essential to your ability to do it. Optimism is the foundation of progress.

18. Reward yourself. Learn what it takes to get yourself to complete dreaded tasks and set up a system of rewards for completion.

19. Visualize yourself succeeding. Visualization is a powerful technique that can help you to focus, stay motivated and achieve your goals. By creating a mental picture of yourself successfully completing a job, even the worsts tasks can feel like part of achieving something big.

Remember, motivation starts within. Find it, keep it and make it work for you.

11 Ways To Stay Motivated & Achieve Your Goals

Achieving our goals is seldom easy. It’s why knowing how to stay motivated is so incredibly important when it comes to getting what we want in the long term. And in a world with more distractions than ever before — from non-stop web access to constant texting — it can be all the harder to stay focused and productive and not just give in to what’s easier in the moment.

I’ve often struggled with motivation, whether it’s been related to my career, my health, or just getting better at a hobby I enjoy. And while it’s not always the biggest deal (it’s not really all that vital that I learn to play my favorite song on the ukulele by my birthday), sometimes it really worries me. I don’t want to be filled with regret at some point down the line because I didn’t follow through on something I really wanted, and I also don’t want to feel like I failed at achieving the things that are important to me, all because I couldn’t figure out how to stay motivated.

Because this is a topic that matters to me, I delved into some pretty serious online research, as well as checked in with an expert, to find the absolute best ways to stay motivated in life. If you’re looking for ways to help yourself achieve your goals, here are 11 tips that should help.

1. Don’t Assume Money Will Motivate You

In an interview with Bustle over email, motivational trainer (plus business and life coach) Karen Strunks says, «Many people think money alone will be enough to motivate them, and whilst that may do so initially, it’s very hard to sustain financial motivation if the work you are doing actually drags. If you do that type of work for long enough you will find that no amount of money is worth swapping parts of your life in activities that aren’t aligned with who you are and what truly is your passion and mission in life.» So first things first, be true to yourself when it comes to setting goals!

2. Make Sure They’re Your Goals

And on that note, Strunks also says that, «One of the biggest challenges in staying motivated and sticking to our goals is in making sure that the goals we have set our ones we really want to attain.» She went on to note, «Sometimes we set goals based on what we think we ‘should’ do. Or we base them on what other people say.» Make sure you’re going after something that you want and that makes you happy — it can make all the difference.

3. Visualize The Results

According to a piece featured on Forbes about staying motivated, it’s important to visualize the end result and what it will feel like when you’ve achieved your end goal. This means visualizing the sweat on your back, the feeling of relief, the utter excitement — this is what will fuel you on days when you don’t feel like working.

4. Break The Goal Down Into Smaller Pieces

The same Forbes compilation piece recommended breaking your goals down into smaller, more task-oriented goals — and set target deadline for those tasks. For example. if your goal is «re-organize my entire closet,» start by saying, «First I’m going to tackle the shoes, then the belts, then the winter coats in the back,» etc. This method can make even the biggest task feel more manageable.

5. Tap Into Other People’s Energy

In a piece for Inc, small business advisor Marla Tabaka stressed the importance of surrounding yourself with positive thinkers who emanate positive energy. «Do you have people in your life who can engage in stimulating conversation about business or the other things that you’re passionate about? As human beings we give and receive energy and inspiration. Make sure you are receiving as much, or more, than you are handing out,» Tabaka wrote.

6. Get Organized

Tabaka also recommended taking time to sit down and organize your thoughts. «When I’m working on a big project, nothing zaps my energy more than an over-stimulated, cluttered mind,» she wrote. So instead, sit down and move the process from your head to an actual organized list, or talk out what you’re thinking with a trusted friend (or both). Then schedule specific times to complete each task. This is key to getting what you want.

7. Keep The Big Picture In Mind

One of my favorite YouTube personalities, Tessa Violet, stressed the importance of keeping your «top tier» goal in mind at all times, even when doing the less pleasant, more menial tasks related to it. That way, she said, «If you’re having a week where you feel like [you’re’] not motivated to do the work, you remember, ‘My goal isn’t about finishing the work. My goal is about something bigger.'»

8. Don’t Worry About What You Can’t Control

In a piece for The Huffington Post, life coach Stacia Pierce said to «take control of what you can, and don’t worry about what you can’t.» So if you often find yourself paralyzed with the «what ifs» (as in, «What if I write this and no one reads it,» «What if I don’t get accepted into the program,» etc, etc) let it go and just focus on turning out quality work.

9. Seek Out Positive Information

Pierce also recommended reading or listening to positive information every single day. «If you fill your mind with uplifting and inspiring information, it will keep you motivated. Go to the bookstore or library today and find at least one book on a positive topic that will give you a boost. You need constant reminders telling you that you are capable of achievement,» she wrote.

10. Remind Yourself Why You Set The Goal

In a piece for Tiny Buddha, integrated channeler Maria Moraca said that when things feel overwhelming, just take a few moments to sit back and remind yourself why you chose your path in the first place. Was it to help people? Was it because you knew your end goal would lead to long term happiness, even if it was short term work? This can always help you find clarity in the worst moments.

11. Be Consistent

And finally, Strunks also stressed the importance of being consistent with your work, writing, «take consistent action every single day.» This means that even if you’re totally not in the mood, do one small proactive thing that will move you towards your ultimate goal — even if it’s just a tweet.

Staying motivated is absolutely within your reach — it’s often just about keeping your end goal in mind and breaking down the larger end result into manageable smaller steps. Remember — you can do it!

How to Stay Motivated and Enthusiastic – 9 Tips

How often do you hear people saying, “I need motivation”? How often do you say these words yourself? Probably many times.

Often, after the initial enthusiasm and motivation, when starting something new, there is a drop of the desire and interest. What can you do to stay motivated and not lose the zest, enthusiasm and energy?

How to have motivation and stop complaining and saying, “I need motivation”?

You Need Motivation for Everything You Do

The motivation to act, do things, study, pursue a goal or attain success in any area of life, often, emerges through outside triggers and external motivators.

The desire and the motivation might arise after watching an inspiring movie, reading a book, or talking with someone who has achieved success.

However, unless the desire and ambition are very strong, the motivation that arises is often short lived.

A single, one-time motivational trigger is usually not enough. Certain events or situations might arouse motivation and ambition, but some time later, everything returns to normal, and you forget about them.

Success requires constant motivation, not just a one-time trigger.

To achieve anything, you need to learn to stay motivated. You should supply yourself with constant triggers, so you can continue despite obstacles.

Every achievement and every attainment requires a constant flow of motivation.

When you follow a certain activity for some time, it often turns into a habit, and you can go on and on with it, as if on auto-pilot. Yet, knowing how to stay motivated would make the journey to achievement easier, faster and more enjoyable.

You should never lose your patience and give up.

Everything worthwhile requires time, work and effort. You need your motivation alive and kicking for days, weeks, months or even more, depending on your goal.

The question is, how to produce a constant flow of motivation that will carry you through obstacles, laziness, procrastination, fears and negative thinking? How to stay motivated not for just a day or a week, but long enough to achieve a goal?

Below, you will find a few helpful suggestions.

How to Stay Motivated and Enthusiastic

If you often hear yourself saying, “I need motivation”, or “how to stay motivated even when facing delays, frustration and disappointment?”, here are a few tips to help.

Here is how to have motivation:

Ways to increase motivation levels.

Focusing on the task at hand, even if you feel lack of enthusiasm, would increase the motivation in the
long run.

Here is an affirmation to repeat when you wish to increase your drive and get encouraged:
“Whenever I need motivation and encouragement, I can easily awaken them and feel their energy within me.”

Check out these motivational books:

Manifest and Achieve Whatever You Want – Clear and easy to understand, step-by-step instructions for improving your life and creating success with the power of visualization.

Affirmations – Words with Power – Find out how you can reprogram your subconscious mind with affirmations, activate its powers, and start attracting happiness and success into your life!

Motivation Quotes

“Life takes on meaning when you become motivated, set goals and charge after them in an unstoppable manner.”
– Les Brown

“Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.”
– Norman Vincent Peale

“Press forward. Do not stop, do not linger in your journey, but strive for the mark set before you.”
– George Whitefield

“Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all.”
– Dale Carnegie

About the Author

My name is Remez Sasson. I am the author and creator of SuccessConsciousness.com, which I have been running since 2001. Join me on a fabulous journey to self improvement, happiness, success, positive lifestyle, conscious living and meditation, through my website, articles and books.

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10 Psychological Tricks to Stay Motivated and Stick with Your Goals

Today I want to show you 10 specific strategies from psychology that will help you stay motivated and follow through on your most challenging goals.

These are the same strategies I use every day in my clinical practice. Over the years, they’ve helped hundreds of clients boost their motivation to change and accomplish all kinds of goals from weight loss and assertiveness to starting a new business.

But these aren’t just internet self-help hacks. These are serious techniques based on well-established principles from psychology and behavioral science.

Okay, let’s get to it!

Contents

Feel free to jump straight to any technique that looks interesting or especially applicable to you and your life:

1. The Ulysses Pact

Named for the clever hero of the Trojan war, the Ulysses Pact is a technique for holding yourself accountable to stick with a goal even when it’s hard.

The key ingredient in a Ulysses Pact is that we make a choice in the present (when things are relatively easy) that binds us to perform an action in the future (when things are hard).

In short, the Ulysses Pact helps you maintain high motivation when things get tough by locking in a future behavior ahead of time.

For more on how a Ulysses Pact works and other examples of how to use it, read this: The Ulysses Pact: An Ancient Technique for Building Better Habits

2. Chunking

Chunking is a technique from cognitive psychology originally used to improve memory performance.

For most people, it might be pretty tough to remember a long string of random numbers like this: 5052950167

Chances are it’ll be easier to remember if you break it up into chunks: 505 – 295 – 0167

Luckily, the principle of chunking applies to much more than remembering number strings, or even memory in general. In fact, chunking—or breaking things down into smaller parts—is a fantastically effective strategy in just about any endeavor.

For example, suppose you have a big report to finish by the end of the week and you keep procrastinating on it. You imagine the 25+ pages of tedious corporate drivel you need to churn out by Sunday evening and you shudder at the mere thought of it, instinctively deciding to clean your bathroom rather than sit down to work on the report.

Psychologically, a big part of your procrastination here is how you look at the project. As it stands, you’re seeing it as one giant, overwhelming task. Instead, what if we broke it down into smaller chunks?

For example: If you have five days left to write the report, you might chunk it like this:

Chunking works to increase our motivation because by splitting things into smaller pieces, it increases our sense of self-efficacy, the belief that we can successfully accomplish a goal.

3. Artificial Positive Reinforcement

Positive reinforcement is a fundamental principle of human behavior that says a behavior is more likely to happen (and continue to happen) when it’s followed by something enjoyable or rewarding:

You get the idea. We all know the power of positive reinforcement in our lives.

But what we’re not as good at is building in positive reinforcement when it doesn’t occur naturally or by default. But the ability to build in positive reinforcement mechanisms to our own challenges and goals—a process I call artificial positive reinforcement—is a surprisingly simple skill we can all learn.

Suppose you decided that this is the year you finally read Moby Dick. You’ve told yourself since college that one day you’d finally read The Great American Novel, but so many times before you’ve cracked it open, made it a few pages or chapters past Call me Ishmael, only to lose interest and fail at your goal once again.

What if you artificially set up a system of reward and positive reinforcement for yourself?

I know, it seems silly to reward yourself for reading a book—I’m an adult not an elementary school student!—but if you want a proven, effective way to keep your motivation up, this will do the trick.

Here’s how you might do it:

Again, I know this one can seem silly and childish because we associate positive reinforcement with getting kids to do things, but it’s just as powerful a principle with adults as kids.

4. Visualization

For a long time, I was skeptical of the idea of using visualization as a technique for improving performance and motivation. It always seemed a little hokey and woo-woo to me, like something you’d read in a cheap self-help book or hear from a scammy motivational speaker.

But the truth is, visualization is a very straightforward practice that can powerfully boost motivation. And it has nothing to do with channeling cosmic energies, manifesting your inner purpose, or any other nonsense like that.

Instead, it works on a simple principle of motivation that says the more specific, concrete, and available our mental representation of a goal and its benefits are, the more we’ll feel motivated to achieve it.

For example, consider two scenarios for staying motivated to achieve a goal of losing weight:

Which scenario is going to provide more motivation to lose weight? Yeah, obviously Scenario B. The more detailed our image for the outcome and its benefits, the more motivational pull that outcome will have on us.

No matter what the specifics of our goal, if we make time to visualize and “paint the picture” in our minds of what it will look like to achieve our goal, we’ll have more sustained motivation to do the hard work required to get there.

I’ve found that the best practical way to add visualization into your routine or plan for change is to commit to a small journaling habit. Get yourself a small notebook and spend 5 minutes a few times a week writing about what it will really be like to achieve your goal and all the possible benefits that might go along with it.

5. Gentle Self-Talk

If your goals are good ones, you probably have more motivation than you realize. The trouble is, you may be wasting huge chunks of it. And one of the biggest culprits behind wasted motivation is our own self-talk.

Self-talk refers to our habits of talking to ourselves, both what we say to ourselves in our own head and how we say it.

If your habitual, automatic self-talk tends to be negative, harsh, and judgmental, it’s going to produce a lot of difficult emotion like guilt, anxiety, frustration, and sadness, all of which sap you of your natural motivation to reach your goals.

This means that one of the best, if counterintuitive, ways to stay motivated is to stop robbing yourself of motivation with overly negative self-talk. And instead, create a new habit of gentle self-talk.

Here are some examples:

Our own habitual negative self-talk is one of the most powerful obstacles to staying motivated and working through challenges to our goals.

If you can learn to notice and then re-shape your self-talk to be more constructive and gentle, you’ll be amazed at how much motivation you’ll already have.

6. The Seinfeld Strategy

The Seinfeld Strategy is a simple but powerful way to stay motivated, especially when it comes to first developing a new habit.

The strategy comes from some advice comedian Jerry Seinfeld gave someone once about how to stay motivated and consistent in your work.

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days, you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain,” he said again for emphasis.

So the strategy itself is simple:

The Seinfeld Strategy is an especially powerful way to stay motivated because it’s a Double Motivator. A double motivator is one that is motivating in two different ways simultaneously.

In this case, crossing off each successful day gives you a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction—positive reinforcement.

But avoiding the pain that comes from breaking your streak is also motivates you to keep going—negative reinforcement.

Finally, the fact that you’ve got a big calendar full of red Xs on your desk or where you work is a tangible reminder that you need to do your task. Memory enhancement always helps you stay motivated, too.

7. Social Support (the Right Way)

When it comes to building a new habit and staying motivated to follow through on a new goal or commitment, the idea of social support is pretty common. You’ll often hear the advice to get an “accountability buddy” or something similar.

While the idea of recruiting positive social support to stay motivated is a good idea in principle, most people make two big mistakes:

All that being said, if you want to recruit a friend or partner to help you stay motivated and make progress toward your goal, try these two approaches:

Recruiting a friend or partner to aid you in your goal can be a powerful source of motivation and encouragement. Just make sure you set things up right from the beginning.

8. Productive Procrastination

One of the most damaging factors in our ability to stay motivated to achieve our goals is procrastination.

On the one hand, in the moment, procrastinating can be detrimental because it causes us to miss a task or routine and/or make it far more inefficient than it needs to be. Just one more episode of The Office, then I’ll go to the gym.

But more significant in the long run, when we procrastinate we lose trust and confidence in ourselves. It’s as if we tell ourselves that we can’t be trusted with important projects and goals. Over time, this erodes our sense of self-efficacy, the belief that I’m the kind of person who is competent and accomplishes what I set out to do.

But, if we can find a better way to deal with procrastination and foster our self-confidence and self-efficacy, not only will it help us stay motivated, it will actually boost our overall levels of motivation.

I’ve found that the best way to deal effectively with procrastination is through a series of techniques I call Productive Procrastination.

The basic idea is that fighting against our tendency to procrastinate doesn’t work very well in the long run. And instead, it’s best to accept that it’s normal to want to procrastinate and figure out a way to work with this tendency.

For example: One way to look at procrastination differently is that it’s the result of our brain’s natural desire for novel and change. Instead of getting down on ourselves because we crave novelty, what if we embraced this?

Suppose you’re working on staying motivated to keep up your journaling habit every evening. But you find yourself regularly procrastinating on doing it. Instead of fighting this, build in a little enjoyable activity right before your journaling.

Chances are, if you give yourself permission to procrastinate in small ways on a regular basis and in a structured deliberate way, you’ll be less likely to end up procrastinating in major, chaotic ways.

9. The Distractions List

One of the biggest obstacles to our ability to stay motivated and make progress on our goals is distraction: the unexpected text from our spouse in the middle of a workout, the old friend we bump into at the coffee shop while we’re trying to get work done, etc.

But it’s not just external distractions that can derail our motivation and sidetrack us on our goals… Sometimes the most powerful and destructive distractions are internal: worry about how the big meeting will go tomorrow distracts us from our work today; daydreaming about how great it will be to look fit distracts us from going on that run; replaying a frustrating conversation from the day before in our heads makes it hard to be present in our actual conversations.

The Distractions List is a tiny tool you can use to manage internal distractions like these and keep your motivation high.

Here’s how it works:

Most of us don’t deal with internal distractions very well because our strategy is brute force ignoring. And while this can sometimes work temporarily, it usually leads to an even stronger surge of internal distractions.

The distractions list works so well because it helps you lean into your distractions. By briefly acknowledging them and having a plan to deal with them later, you can train yourself to becomes less reactive to them and better able to stay focused on your work.

10. The Bumpy Wagon Plan

I think there’s a lot of truth the saying Failing to plan is planning to fail. But I also think that Failing to plan to fail is just as dangerous.

In other words, it’s both naive and counterproductive to assume that you’ll never slip up or stumble in your journey toward your goals (if you never do, it probably means you should reexamine the goals you’re setting ).

So instead of getting blindsided and frustrated by slip-ups, we could save ourselves a lot of grief and stay motivated more effectively if we had a concrete plan for what to do should we slip up or stumble on the journey toward our goals.

Here are some examples of the types of specific action items you might include in your plan:

The details of your plan are less important, I think, than the simple fact of having one in the first place. And aside from making it more likely that you’ll recover better and faster from slip-ups, simply knowing that you have a plan may actually give you more confidence and motivation as you work toward your goals.

Which technique will you use to stay motivated?

Well, what do you think? Did any of these techniques stand out as especially useful for you?

I always love to hear feedback from my readers, so shoot me an email or send me a message on Twitter letting me know what you’d like to try first or what’s worked best for you!