How To Get And Stay Motivated
Category : Women Lifestyle, Women Personality
There are different kinds of motivation in the world. There is drill sergeant motivation. If you rely on someone screaming in your face, cajoling you get up and walk, it will work just fine – until the day you leave the army. This and all the other fear motivators – fear of punishment, of disease if you don’t exercise, of ridicule – tend to backfire over time. As soon as the threat is removed, you tend to slip – especially since you have built up resentment toward the fear motivator and want to rebel at some level.
Somewhat more effective than fear motivators are reward motivators: the carrot instead of the stick. These have their place; at the very least, you learn to associate the activity with the pleasant rewards. The trouble comes if we learn this lesson too well and grow up still looking to some external source for our motivation.
Not that motivation from within is perfect, either. You can be your own drill sergeant, or you can come up with all sorts of mental self-torture to force yourself into action. One common yet misguided piece of advice we receive is to use willpower to achieve our goals. Well, willpower is certainly an important quality, and there do seem to be a few people out there who can accomplish anything they want through willpower alone, but for the rest of us mere mortals, pure willpower eventually breaks down. If I don’t want to exercise but I set myself a goal of exercising every day because “That is what I am going to do,” there always comes a day when I can’t force myself out of bed, when the sheer effort involved is more than I can overcome.
What I need instead is a situation where achieving my goal – whether it’s exercise, quitting smoking, or anything else – does not require superhuman effort or a self-imposed pep talk. What I need is a situation where success is easy. I’m going to teach you how set up just such a situation, where the initial desire comes from within but your whole environment helps motivate you by reinforcing good behavior and limiting your access to bad choices.
We can solve many of these problems simply by setting up our environment for success, by making it excuse-proof. Most people fail to exercise not because they are lazy at heart but because they don’t have the time to drive to a fitness club, are intimidated by the exercises done there, or work too many hours and can’t figure out how to squeeze the exercise in. Once walking becomes a habit, you no longer have to force yourself to do it. Ditto for eating healthy, thinking positive thoughts, or any other behavior.
WomenDiary has wrote no-fail ten-step motivation series article program to achieve amazing and effortless results in anything you attempt. You can read the series on our Women Personality and Mental Health network website :
How to Get And Stay Motivated (Part 1)
How to Get And Stay Motivated (Part 2)
How to Get And Stay Motivated (Part 3)
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