Maintain Your Motivation and Strengthen Willpower – Motivation Boosters (Part 5)

There are two kinds of motivation.

First – Towards Motivation – when you are actively taking action toward a particular goal. It may be a reward, or it may be something you truly see as a benefit that will help your life.

Second – Away from motivation– Here you are doing it so that you want to be away from something. There is something you don’t want to happen, and you are taking action to help avoid that. This is ‘away from motivation’.

Any goal you want motivation with, you can have something as a reward – so it pulls you towards the goal, and have something that you want to avoid that pushes you away from not taking action. Both help hand-in-hand in your motivation.

You can plan anything (big or small) that you can give as a “towards motivation” and for a “away from motivation”. It need not be that fancy gadget (though you can).

Here is an example. I love reading – and thus love buying books. So, a good reward for me is to buy that “new” book from bookstore (or from Amazon kindle store). And away from motivation is – I say, if I don’t do this – I will miss reading that great book. Now I think if I do this task, instead of missing the book, I can buy that book! That gives me motivation. Another “away from motivation” is to offer to pay money to your friend if you miss doing it one day!

This is just an example to give you a picture how to do it. Implementing this towards and away from motivation can be specially helpful when you are creating a new ritual to your life. Once this is part of your daily ritual, you won’t need this anymore. That time you can use the same principle to motivate you on something else!

Here are some other motivational boosters:

Motivation booster 1:

Do one thing at a time, as if nothing else matters.

Our culture is of distraction and multi-tasking. We are always checking emails. Interruptions. That robs us of any productivity. We should learn to minimize and eliminate distractions. You cannot build your dream if you check your emails every 5 minutes.

We are becoming an obsessive “snacking” culture. Instead of eating a full healthy meal, we snack. We take a little of that, and a little of this and we are now snacking with our attention.

We are living in a universe of multi-tasking. We start doing too many things at once. Our focus gets fragmented and we start to fall. Multi-tasking is very inefficient.

You need to minimize multi-tasking to maximize productivity.

The importance of full engagement is most vivid in situations where the consequences of disengagement are profound. Imagine a doctor checking his emails during an operation, or a pilot chatting in his phone during flight takeoff! Sadly, this is how we go on in our everyday life.

Here is one rule to follow: At all times the focus must be on doing things properly. Every play. Every practice. Every meeting. Every situation. Every time – do one thing at a time, as if nothing else matters.

Motivation booster 2: Absolute Focus and Absolute Break.

Most professional athletes enjoy an off-season of two to five months a year. After competing under extraordinary pressure for several months, a long off-season gives athletes the critical time they need for rest and healing, renewal and growth.

By contrast, our “off season” likely amounts to a few weeks of vacation a year. Even then, you probably aren’t solely resting and recovering. More likely, you are spending at least some of your vacation time answering email, checking your voice mail and ruminating about your work. You deserve the best escorted tours to Costa Rica for all your hard work.

Most productive lives are characterized by the ability to fully engage in the challenge at hand, but also to disengage periodically and seek renewal. Instead, many of us live our lives as if we are running in an endless marathon, pushing ourselves far beyond healthy levels of exertion.

Think for a moment about the look of many long-distance runners: gaunt, sallow, slightly sunken and emotionally flat. Sprinters typically look powerful, bursting with energy and eager to push themselves to their limits. The explanation is simple. No matter how intense the demand they face, the finish line is clearly visible 100 or 200 meters down the track.

We, too, must learn to live our own lives as a series of sprints—fully engaging for periods of time, then fully disengaging and seeking renewal before jumping back into the fray to face whatever challenges confronts us.

To build capacity, we must systematically expose ourselves to intense work—followed by adequate recovery.

Motivation booster 3: Having a Goal buddy.

One great way to increase your motivation level is to have a goal buddy, so you both work together to achieve the same results. Want motivation to exercise? Simply have a partner you can workout with. Want to start a company? Find a co-founder. Having a goal partner, will give you immense motivation and energy to work on your goals.

Motivation booster 4: Focus on implementing and taking action, rather than non-stop learning.

We are now becoming more concerned with entertainment than with results. Even personality development study became a source of entertainment for us. We read great stuff, say they are wonderful and then we go back to our regular life. We need to realize, if we are to become more productive, is not to distract ourselves with more learning, rather, get disciplined enough to implement and take action on what we’ve learned to produce results.

Motivation booster 5: Modeling.

Modeling is a process where we find a person who has done what we want to achieve, and learn what they did to achieve it, and then – do it in our own life. The thing you want motivation on – might be something very easy to do for your friend or someone you know. Find them, ask them their recipe how they did, and adapt it to your own life.

Motivation booster 6: Have a life coach

I, myself, am a life coach and I also have efficient coaches in my life. A certified life coach like the ones at mastermylife pushes you beyond your comfort zone and goes deep into your values and beliefs. A coach adds value to your life by helping you take consistent dedicated action towards your goal. You can have a general life coach, or you can have more specialized coaches: Fitness coach, Speech Coach, Relationship coach, etc. Looking for female empowerment coach Bay Area contact My Anam Cara.

For me coaches vary from time-to-time. Sometimes, it might simply just be to know my belief system deeper. Sometimes it is to work on my fitness, or to improve my ping pong skills, or to learn about relaxation techniques. Or, improve my speaking skills working 1-1 with a speech coach. Any area you want, you can have specialized coaches to help you.

You would need a coach to understand your underlying beliefs system, and set the strategies to implement based on your life. Then, you can choose to decide a coach for further actions.

By coach, I mean someone from whom you get assistance in your life, or a mentor/friend who gives valuable advice to your life. The catch is – you should be held accountable to this person, and with whom you will meet (online/or in-person) to look at your goals, that you wanted motivation on and the progress you made with reaching these goals.

Article Series Summary

The Motivation and Strengthening Will Power Series.

Here is the 7 Steps for motivation:

1) The motivation you are looking for is already within you. You have already motivated yourself many times in your life. And you can do it again.

2) If your subconscious mind believes that getting something (goal) makes you lose something else, your life will revolve around avoiding doing things that will bring you towards the goal. Try to understand the beliefs and thought patterns you hold.

3) What we do is to either gain pleasure, or avoid pain. What you want motivation on should be strong in purpose – that you getting it will either give you massive pleasure or avoid massive pain.

4) Start focusing on the “results” you want in the area. Prepare a Result, Purpose, Massive Action Plan (RPM). To-do lists can overwhelm. Results empower.

5) Have a “Ritual” for Success and have it already scheduled in your calendar. Block this time for nothing than this allocated task. Do tasks in focused intervals. We need absolute focus time followed by absolute renewal time. This greatly improves our daily motivation and willpower.

6) Focus on motivation boosters, and have a goal buddy with you. Travel the journey together.

7) Find someone who has already done what you want, and learn how he/she did it, and adapt it to your own life.

Motivation Steps Condensed into 3 Steps:

1) Have a clear purpose for what you want motivation on 2) Find the right strategies to take action 3) Have optimism and empowering thoughts

And of course, du’a to Allah, and right intention for the action and goal you want motivation on.

Conclusion

Whao..We learned a lot about motivation and willpower in this series. I really enjoyed writing this article series, and I hope you found it beneficial to you. Best wishes on your success journey.

I end with this great quote: “If you really want something, you will find a way. Else, you will find excuse.” –Jim Rohn

Remember, when you fall off the wagon, get right back into it. If you miss doing what you intend to do, don’t worry. Just get back to it.

What action you will take in your life based on reading this article?

SuccessMuslim (www.successmuslim.com) is a personality development, success-coaching and mentoring website for Muslims. “Success, achieving our best, win duniya and akhira” is the theme of this site. SuccessMuslim is the first Islamic website to completely focus on personality development articles topics. And it is FREE.