To achieve your dreams and become the best version of yourself, you need to learn how to motivate yourself and stay motivated. Motivations refers to that drive which propels you to do everything you can to attain your goal.
This drive can come from various sources, such as how badly you want to attain a given goal, what you stand to gain once that goal is achieved, and conversely what you stand to lose if you don’t attain the goal, as well as your personal expectations.
If you have been struggling to stay motivated until your reach your goal, here are some strategies you can start implementing to turn the situation around.
Leverage Positive Self-Talk
The most important conversations in someone’s life happen within that person. What you say to yourself is pivotal because it can determine how much progress you make in life. For example, if you inner critic keeps telling you ‘you can’t do it’, this soon becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy because you subconscious mind picks up on that negative self-talk and gets to work making it a reality.
Be your own avid cheerleader and use positive affirmations to change negative self-talk into positive self-talk. You can also read motivational books to show you how other people have overcome adversity to win. This will instill you with a belief that you too can reach your goals if you put in the work. The resultant positive self-talk will boost your motivation.
Chunk Down Your Goals
Staying motivated to work towards the attainment of your goals requires you to build and sustain your momentum. One way to build and maintain momentum is to break down your goal into small bits that you can accomplish on a weekly or daily basis.
The small wins you register on your journey will give you a motivation boost that will keep you going until the final target is reached.
To chunk down your goal, start by identifying a SMART goal, such as losing 50 pounds in six months. Next, divide that target into two to know your weight loss target for the next 3 months. That would be 25 pounds.
Thereafter, again divide the 25 pounds by two to know how much weight you would need to lose in the next six weeks. Keep breaking the goal down until you reach the target for each week.
This weekly target gives you something attainable to work towards every week, and notching off those successes will help you build momentum and motivation to keep the big goal in your sights.
Build Supportive Habits
You can also stay motivated by developing supportive habits that make it easy for you to work towards your goals. For example, if your goal is to lose weight by a certain margin in a given number of months, you might want to build supportive habits in the different aspects of your life that play a role in your body weight.
These include your dietary habits, your sleep routine, your physical activity levels, and so on.
Making cooking healthy meals every evening part of your habits can support your weight loss journey in the same way that walking rather than driving to the mall can be beneficial to weight loss efforts.
For most people, about two months of consistent practice is all that is required to form a new habit. However, other people take longer. Do what it takes to develop those helpful habits so that the attainment of your goals becomes a near-certainty. The motivation you get will last!
Find or Create a Support Group
To keep motivated on the journey to achieving your goals, join or create a support group that will provide the added impetus to keep going even when you encounter obstacles. Mentors or a coach are crucial members of any support group that you can think of as you seek to stay motivated as you work to bring your goals and dreams to reality.
You can also join up with other people who are on the same journey that you are on so that you support each other and keep one another motivated. Whatever you do, don’t walk that journey alone because it is easy to hit a rough patch on the journey and drop out if there is no one to support you and help you regain your motivation.
By the way, sharing your journey publicly, such as on YouTube or Instagram, can also build a supportive community that will provide a dose of motivation that will keep you going. This is because the public declaration will create an innate desire in you not to disappoint those people or lose face by giving up too soon.
Celebrate Every Milestone or Win You Attain
You can also develop motivation by celebrating every win, however small, that you attain while you pursue your bigger goal. This celebration validates you and gives you the encouragement to keep going.
I know someone who set a goal to double their income from their online side hustle just before the pandemic hit. This person broke down their goal into weekly targets and each time they would hit that weekly target, they would go and buy themselves dinner at their favorite restaurant.
This celebration of any progress made builds belief in your ability to attain the set goals, and that supercharges your motivation.
Zig Ziglar is credited as saying that motivation is like taking a bath and that once you stop doing it you will begin to stink. We need to motivate ourselves daily in order to stay on course towards the attainment of our goals. Use the suggestions above to get your daily dose of motivation, and keep growing your ability to stay motivated as you tick off one goal after another.