How To Motivate Yourself Everyday: Vision of A 4times Olympian.
The opening ceremony for the Tokyo Olympics were to take place today. They’ve been postponed a year which while the correct decision isn’t easy on the athletes for a number of reasons. They marked one year to go already and now they have to do it again. How will they maintain focus and motivation for another year?
Every day we are running around so busy with a list of things to do. This isn’t always efficient, especially if we are doing tasks that are important. We need to be smarter with our decisions and what we choose to do. As a hurdler, instead of viewing the hurdles as an obstacle, I looked at them as a means to unleash my potential and I’ve taken this thinking into my post-athletics career.
The Secret To Sustained Motivation
I want to introduce you to a very simple awareness exercise to allow you to stay motivated on a daily basis. I learned it from mentors and experts who have supported me in the past. Such a question has now become popular since Simon Sinek used the framework starts with why, or Gary Vaynerchuk talking about happiness has “the currency” or the trade of energy in emotional intelligence.
On my field of sport, the words we use are:
What are you running for?
In other words, what gives you so much joy in life?
To ask ourselves these simple questions help us to stay balanced and sustain the motivation of a champion.
From the time we are born, we experience emotions such as joy and happiness. Because they are so deeply rooted in our subconscious, we can easily think of instances of them.
The emotion of joy is the root of many of our passions. It is the state where we are the most efficient in our life and career.
As an Olympian, what brought me so much joy has always remained the same — being surrounded by people from different countries, languages, and cultures!
I was an immigrant and grew up in a neighborhood with children who were also immigrants from Brazil, Syria, the Middle East, Asia, India, Africa, Portugal, Great Britain, etc…
Going to the Olympics, I remember looking forward to this unique gathering of people united by their passion for sports regardless of gender, social backgrounds, and culture. I loved the feeling of belonging in a united and diverse group of people where we were all so different but for the common love of sports. That’s the beauty of sports!
I was not chasing a medal for the sake of it. I knew I was capable of winning a medal and I would train for it with the best experts in the world. But that was not my end goal.I became skilled at doing what it takes to run fast but I was not aware that winning wasn’t a core value for me.
A Lesson we could be applying to our life
Unfortunately, at the time I did not understand that what motivated me was staying in a positive state of flow and that is why I became so passionate about sports and made it my dream career. The big lesson about Motivation and reaching peak performance I have learned is that when we don’t listen to our innermost thoughts we may not get the best out of ourself especially in the work environment where our values are what defines us the most.
To answer this question I started a weekly webinar( In French )within the framework of the Masterclass “Prospection & Motivation” — it is especially interesting for those who want to accelerate their business and keep up “Having a Champion’s Mind”.
