Five ways to Pump up Your Motivation Without Bribes or Threats
In my upcoming book, “You Can Do Better Today: Reboot Your Brain to Save Time and Earn More,” I share lots of proven ways to:
- improve your focus
- identify your roadblocks
- implement the habits to bounce back faster from change and setbacks.
In this “always-on” work culture, it can be tough to keep focused on what truly matters to you at work and at home. Thus, we experience a deadline, crisis, meeting, or screaming problem that needs our attention.
Stay Connected
Even when you’re out of the office you still check messages and stay connected. You find yourself making tough sacrifices. Time with friends, loved ones & mentors, exercise, healthy eating, sleep, or fun activities that you enjoy.
You tell yourself that it’s going to change once you get the client, promotion. Or when you make that next hire. But you know it won’t. This is your life. This is the business culture. There’s nothing you can do to change it. Is there?
How is Your Hard Work…Working out for You?
That’s right, hard work will only get you so far without developing your abilities and insights. There’s a great book on this topic, “What got you here, won’t get you there” by award-winning executive coach and consultant Marshall Goldsmith.
The book provides specifics on how to get out of the motivation and habits that made you successful. Unfortunately, they also will completely derail you as you move up.
The ability to adapt is a valuable skill in the new economy. Change is the only guarantee in our 21st-century business world. Whoever can adapt fast wins. How are you equipping yourself for the changes ahead?
Draw from the latest research and proven productivity habits here as you move at the speed of your business.
Five ways to Pump up Your Motivation Without Bribes or Threats
1. Dream of the World You Want to Live In – Dream big and imagine what it is that would make you happy at work and at home. Be as creative or as practical as you want. Don’t be afraid to write down your detailed vision for your achievement and keep it somewhere you can reflect on it.
The motivation you get from working towards your vision is powerful because you feel emotionally drawn to making it a reality.
2. Chart Your Dreams – Once you have an exciting goal or Big Dream, you have to measure progress. When you create a Vision Board, Checklist, or Chart to help keep you focused on your Big Dream and your goals to help you reach it. What you focus on grows.
3. Learn new skills – One of the greatest human discoveries in the last few decades was brain plasticity – the fact that the human brain can grow new cells and connections at any age of life.
This fact gives you a tremendous opportunity to improve your memory and learn new hard skills for jobs that may not yet exist in AI or the Internet of things. Or learning new soft skills for successfully interacting with others is critical to succeeding in the rapidly changing world.
4. Fight Your Fears by Showing Gratitude – According to Greater Good Magazine, gratitude makes people happier, healthier, and more empathic; it may even help us live longer (1). In working one-on-one with clients,
I find that it’s important to remember that you aren’t pretending to be happy or holding in negative feelings. Gratitude allows you to appreciate your gifts according to your values and mood in the present moment. Start a practice of stating three things/people/situations that you’re grateful to have in your life each morning or journal each night.
5. Find a way to Teach or Help Others –Humans need to physically interact and help other humans to get the most of life. University of California Riverside researchers
Howard Friedman and Leslie Mann wrote in their 2011 book “The Longevity Project, that the clearest health benefit of social relationships comes from being involved with and helping others. The groups you associate with often determine the type of person you become – healthy or unhealthy.
Most people have success goals but don’t focus on who they need to become in order to achieve them.
Goals must be aligned with values for your work. This results in having meaning, and purpose. Additionally, it energizes you to evolve yourself and your business.
Focus not just on tasks to be done, but also on who you need to connect with and what you may need to get better at or let go of.