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Self Motivation Tips

These five self motivation tips can help to keep you moving towards your goals and desires. Use these tips to get you started and maintain your motivation over the long term.

Focus on What You Want, Not What You Don't Want

The first of these self motivation tips is to focus specifically on the positive outcome you are trying to achieve, rather than focusing on what you are trying to avoid.

For example, you might try to get motivated to make additional money. Why specifically are you working towards this? It's more effective to focus on the positive outcomes like gaining more freedom, being debt free, or building up a nest egg than to focus on things like not wanting to sink further into debt, worrying about not being able to pay your bills, or not wanting to hear from the collection agencies, etc.

Visualize the positive outcome you are trying to reach with the understanding that once you get there the things you are trying avoid will be taken care of. Keep your attention focused on the positive outcome you are trying to reach.

Take One Step at a Time

There is an old proverb that speaks to this idea: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Your self motivation can get deflated if you feel overwhelmed with the work required to accomplish a goal or task. There is a time for goal planning where you look at the big picture and get an idea of what it will take to accomplish something, but when you are trying to get motivated to get started on it, focus on a single step that you can immediately take.

Divert your full attention to accomplishing that single step, then move onto the next step with the same single purpose of completing it. Before you know it, you will have reached your final goal.

Use Rewards to Boost Motivation

One of the most powerful of these self motivation tips is using rewards to boost and maintain motivation. Initially, motivation can be difficult to maintain. Using rewards can help to boost your motivation and reinforce your positive action. This works by giving yourself a reward once you get started or accomplish a milestone.

Set the reward and the conditions ahead of time, and be very clear in your intentions that the reward is specifically tied to your completion- you don't get it unless you reach your goal, milestone. The reward does not have to be anything major, just something that you see as a positive benefit.

This reinforcement will cause you to associate the positive benefit of the reward with taking action towards your goals.

Prepare Ahead of Time

Even in following these self motivation tips and strategies, motivation will ebb and flow. To maximize your ability to get a specific task or goal done, get prepared ahead of time with the components or equipment that will be required so when you are feeling especially motivated, you have everything you need to get started and finish the task. Not being prepared with the right elements to do a task can sap your motivation to work on it, especially if it would take a lot of time and effort just to get things ready. Prepare ahead of time so when you motivation is high, you can take immediate action.

Don't Give Up

We all experience varying levels of self motivation. You may have days where summoning motivation to do just the most basic tasks seems overwhelming, but don't let it discourage your motivation efforts.

Motivation is strengthened with use, so keep working at it, even if it is just for simple and basic things. See resistance as a way to exercise your motivation.

Giving up means you lose out on the benefit of the resistance. If you keep pushing until you break through, you motivation will be easier to maintain when you move on to the next goal.

Use these self motivation tips to help you create good habits and keep you moving towards your goals.


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