One of the greatest and powerful tools of positive psychology is self-motivation. If you think you’re running low on motivation which is affecting your self-development negatively, you need self-motivation. If there’s someone who can motivate you to your core, it’s you. No one knows you, better than you. Completing a task with full zest, excitement and happiness is a state of self-motivated mind, however, if the feeling of obligation motivates you to do your job, you’re on the way towards being demotivated. In simpler words, self-motivation is the force that drives you to complete your task or job, to achieve goals putting all possible effort into self-development and personal fulfillment. The drive that makes you do things for extrinsic factors such as money, fame, power, success, it is called as extrinsic self-motivation, on the other hand, the drive that makes you complete your tasks for intrinsic factors such as self-development, self-confidence, self-efficacy, it is called as intrinsic self-motivation. Now, comparing both variants of self-motivation, intrinsic one is quite more effective and enduring.
Why you need self-motivation?
Self-motivation is the only sure shot way to make progress in your life in order to achieve goals. You need to work on your inner strength and confidence by self-motivating yourself to stay unaffected by external experiences and events. This exact feeling needs to be in your core to make you unstoppable for fulfilling and achieving your objectives. There are many reasons a person needs self-motivation such as working for a fulfilling career, following and working for your passion, acing your dream job interview, or fulfilling someone else’s dream or ambition, or even finishing your college projects and seminar presentations. Self-motivation is something that makes a person spiritually yet psychologically powerful in the long term.
Techniques to improve self-motivation
- Take charge of your life
Being able to understand the responsibilities you have or you need to carry out is very crucial point of self-motivation. If there are any underlying issues that are constantly bothering you and keep ignoring it for a long time, you might end up in blaming others for your failure. Hence, it is very important to take responsibility to deal with your issues and fix it at the end of the day. When you take charge of your life, you take charge of your success as well as failure. It not only avoids unnecessary turmoil, but also helps you learn from your outcomes.
- Find the reason
To improve self-motivation, one has to recognize the need of self-motivation, the importance of being self-motivated and how being motivated is going to affect him. Connecting your goals with purpose is an empowering way for being self-motivated. You want to finish a deadline for your office presentation, or a task that is very important to you, or even you want to start a new business, what ever the reason it is you have connect with it and understand the importance of it in your life.
- Simplify things
The more you complicate things, the more you become demotivated. Complicating things makes a person full of anxiety and confusion. If you want to achieve something, then you have to simplify things. For example, if you want to follow your passion but you have piles of office work that needs to be done, you need to make a balance between your job and your passion. You have to create a border and definite timeline schedule to deal with both without complicating things.
- Build your own empowering belief
There are many limitations that can demotivate us by replacing positive thoughts with negative ones. And these limitations are only put by ourselves. It is very important to understand the source of negative thoughts in order to create empowering beliefs to condition your mind and replace it with positive and strong beliefs about success, achievements, lessons and self-development for improving self-motivation.
- Reexamine your goals and targets
Make sure what are your goals and are they worthy to fight for or worthy of your hard work, dedication. All goals and objectives are not necessarily virtuous, some people might embrace evil goals or sinful objectives which originates from negative thoughts and emotions. You might get hurt and feel dejected to take revenge, which makes you set a corrupt goal that should be dropped right away. Using your greater abilities and skills, working on self-development to achieve wrongful goal can never help you stay self-motivated, rather you would lose every bit of it, ending up in depression, losing your self-esteem.
- Be sensible with time
Managing time with smart strategies under your belt is a necessary factor when you are working on your self-development. Self-motivation takes a whole lot of positive vibe and emotions for which time plays a crucial role. One has to stay ahead of time to acquire self-confidence, self-efficacy and positive belief. You can’t keep procrastinating all the time and expect to stay self-motivated when you know you’re running late every time and feeling ashamed of it at the same time.
- Culture optimism
Optimism is key tool for improving self-motivation. Positive thinking, attitude, behavior, beliefs lead you on the way towards optimism. Thinking and expecting always the brighter side of the story and your objective helps you stay focused and determined. When you believe you going to succeed in your job, despite of all failures and obstacles, at the end of the day you get to the success. It acts like a lightning rod, that consistently gives you the strength and hope to stay motivated and keep going.
- Get a plan with action
Now, you can’t just let all your thoughts and beliefs to do the job. Planning and execution are an important segment of being practically motivated to let you hang on to it. Create a massive and effective action plan by identifying purpose, benefits, drawbacks, flaws, loop holes and success rate, writing down the steps or getting it all documented works as an additional motivation when you face challenges along the way to reach your goal or objective.
- Be tricky with music
Music heals everything, creating positive vibe and emotions. Music fills your mind and body with positive energy that self-motivates you but music can be a distraction in itself. If the rhythm of the music and your functional brain waves are collaging perfectly while working on any task, you’re good to go for now, but the moment you feel tumbled, you need to stop it. Choose your music wisely, just music or instrumental to help you stay connected yet focused.
- Schedule outdoor and indoor timeline
When you’re working towards a goal or want to stay dedicated towards a job, your time consumption needs to be monitored. You have to keep an eye on what activities or other responsibilities are consuming your time. If you’re outdoors, you should not indulge in too much fun and unhealthy habits, or whatever that consumes your time and energy for no good. Even if you’re home, spend your time wisely so that you keep a right balance between your personal, social and private life.
- Eat and live healthy
Self-motivation is all about acquiring positive energy and thoughts. Positivity doesn’t come only from work, emotions, people and belief but also how you live your life. You need to be inspired from yourself, you have to be happy and content from within to help you understand that you’re enough for your self-development. Eating healthy, staying fit and healthy, counting your calories as well as your steps in a day helps you stay self-motivated.
- Avoid multitasking
Multitasking makes you feel like a pro, but all it does is feeding on your efficiency and energy. When you do several things simultaneously, you lose the quality of the task as well as your energy. Your brain and body work 10 times faster than its normal pace creating confusion, stress, anxiety, dissatisfaction and frustrated. And the final outcome that is void of perfection, quality and authenticity makes you feel discouraged. To stay from all these negative factors, one has to stop multitasking to achieve goal and to improve self-motivation.
- Envision your self-motivation
Even if you feel scared in the middle of the journey towards your goal achieving it, visualize being self-motivated. Imagine, how self-motivated, determined and confident you are and how wonderfully you’re achieving your goal with politeness and sensitively, how your motivation is working magically for you making you proud, happy and content. Bridging this gap of inaction to action can actually help you stay self-motivated and reach to the success point.
- Be more thankful
Feeling thankful for everything in your life is important in order to garner positive energy. Not able to letting things go, or comparing yourself to others, or holding grudge can never help you get over your negative emotions. Focusing on gratitude will change your perspective towards life, people and the world infusing you with ideas, determination, confidence and acceptance.
- Meditate to work on focus
Working for any goal needs confidence, patience and focus. Mostly people lose their patience and confidence even focus due to many reasons despite of trying several things towards positivity and motivation. To achieve all these, being spiritually active can actually help you to a greater extent. Meditation is a tool that indeed helps working on your positive psychology improving your strength to focus.
- Accept the change
Self-motivation works in multi dimension. There are lot of tools that help you stay self-motivated. When you focus on gratitude, you get connected to people and to the world that is ever changing. Change is life and to acquire positivity one has to accept the change.
- Invest time in relationships
Being self-motivated not only comes within you, but also from your other versions. Your roles in relationships that are most important to you such as being a father, or a brother, or a son or a husband. How you fulfill those challenges created by your roles, what are your perceptions towards those relations, how you feel and make other feel in those relationships plays a great role in your self-development to improve your self-motivation.
- Work on your emotional intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the gauge of someone’s ability to manage and recognize his emotions as well as others’. Working on emotional intelligence helps you understand your emotions, your state of mind when you’re with others, how you relate to them. When you learn to ace your emotional intelligence, you improve and meet certain standards, you get few steps closer towards your self-motivation.