7 Ways to be motivated towards your Goals
Setting goals and making plans is one thing and working hard till you achieve it is a whole different thing. I have seen this happened to people and to myself as well that at some point of time, I tend to doubt myself. Am I doing this the right way? Is it really worth going? With these questions in mind, we tend to lose the motivation of our goals and deviate from the path. Once we have these doubts in mind, we might stop doing the work and give up eventually. Now, it becomes a serious problem when one is leading life with this approach. Therefore, I want to share some of the techniques that I use to motivate myself so that I could keep going.
1. Positive Thoughts
It has been said that your thoughts determine your destiny. It is ultra-important to keep your thoughts in check. In a day, we think almost 70,000 thoughts. Out of these, if any thought is negative, it’s going to ruin your day. “Why do you ask”? Well, let’s take an example. When you are angry with a person because he / she did something stupid; all of sudden you have a litany of incidents where the same person wronged you. The chain reaction happens from one negative thought and you start to feel low. It may take a day, a week or so to recover and feel motivated again. Therefore, always guard the thoughts entering your mind and ban all the negative ones.
2. Conquer fear of failure
Fear of failure stops people from trying something meaningful. They are too afraid to lose so much so that they never try. This decreases their motivation which cost them great opportunities. The effective technique to conquer FOF is baby steps. When you have a task which requires huge efforts, then divide it into small tasks and complete them one by one. I remember a scene from my favourite Movie “Justice League” which proves my point nicely. In the room, Steppenwolf had held hostage to more than 50 peoples. The Batman gives The Flash a task to rescue all the people in the room. The Flash got overwhelmed by the situation and told Batman about his fear. He had never been in such life and death situations before. So, Batman being the leader told him to rescue at least one person. The moment The Flash rescued one person he felt like he could save all the other ones. He ended up bringing all the people outside thereby saving everyone. You can have other techniques to conquer FOF. The important thing is it must not come in your way of motivation and hence your goals.
Read also: How I stopped being lazy and overcame procrastination
3. Document Your Evolution
Each day we identify bad habits, bad traits, bad virtues, & bad plans and replace them with good habits, good traits, good virtues, & good plans. Well, how much we succeed that is a different story. But, we try to do so and during the process we evolve and go on to become a better version of ourselves. We are not the same person we were one your ago, right? What happens is when you look back in time, you see the changes but don’t see the process that you went through. This is the reason I find it critical to document all the hard work I put in evolving so that I could repeat it again and again and be motivated. You can do journaling to make the process easier. Find a way that would be easier for you to document your evolution.
4. Get rid of toxic peoples
We are surrounded by toxic peoples who always come in our way to become extraordinary. They could be your friends, family members, relatives, colleagues or bosses. The idea is not to let such people enter your head and demotivate you. Always keep them out of your creative work. Here is my list for identifying toxic persons.
i) They eat your energy and give you stress.
ii) They gulp your hard-earned money.
iii) They have always a job for you (favour) and they don’t return it.
iv) You are their dustbin of thoughts but they don’t have time to listen to your problems.
v) They never have any kind words for you when you do something good, but they are the first ones to criticize at your first mistake.
vi) They manipulate you.
vii) They belittle you on purpose.
viii) They can’t keep your secrets.
That is my list. However, you could have a different list. The idea here is to not let these people interfere with your creative work. Even if your father or mother demotivates you, don’t let them come in your way.
5. Prepare a proper tracking plan and celebrate your micro-wins
Whenever we feel low, we tend to go back in analysis mode. We analyse all our accomplishments and achievements of last 5 years, 10 years or maybe of entire lifetime. The problem that happens here is we end up counting 3–4 major events of our life where we did extraordinary work and then the thought of self-doubt occurs in our mind and demotivation hits us hard. Now, if you have a proper tracking plan established for all your work not only can you track your progress but you can identify your micro-wins or small wins. Let me give an example. I was sitting in my office and a sub-ordinate of mine came to me with a problem which I didn’t how to solve. The problem was that they were writing something which was to be submitted in half an hour or so. They needed to proofread it for the last time but the word file got corrupted. Now, I Googled about the problem and found some solutions in a YouTube video. FYI, there was an error in the xml of the Word file. Apparently, there are a lot files in the background of a single MS Word file. Anyways, I solved it and felt proud. People do things like that all the time but when the do analysis of their lifetime achievements they tend to miss these sorts of small wins. I always document these wins and whenever demotivation comes around, I hit it with these small wins and feel great again.
6. Have a Support System
Human Beings are Social Animals. That being said, it is important to have a support system of people who can listen to you, give you constructive criticism and help you get going. I have friends from my college and cousin brothers who are always there for me. The relationship must go both ways. You can’t expect someone to be your support system if you are not willing to spare your energy for them.
I was watching a new TV show called “Star Trek: Picard” and found a beautiful description for a friend which was for Mr. Data from Mr. Picard. I have listed it out.
i) A Friend believe in you.
ii) He believes in your potential.
iii) He celebrates your success.
iv) He counsels you when you feel short.
v) He helps you when you need help.
vi) And, if you don’t need help, he gets out of your way.
I love this list. Whoever has qualified from this list is always an integral part of my life. If you don’t have such people, it’s high time to find some and if you already are lucky enough then don’t let these people go. They are gem.
7. Prepare a Vision Board
Vision board is just like a noticeboard that you have seen in the offices or colleges. The only difference is, instead of circulars or notices you put your visions on the board. You can put a picture of outcome when you achieve the goal or the plans or why you started going for it in the first place. Some people like to put their visions in Journals and each time they go to record their day, they review their visions and reaffirm their motivation. You can also create a pdf of your visions and carry out all the time in your phone. I do this one but soon I am planning to get a proper board and put some great pictures of the end results of my goals. Well, the idea is to always to find yourself connected to your motivation. Having a vision board is a great way to attain that.
Final Thoughts
Being motivated all the time towards your goals is a full time job. I fight with demotivation every day. It’s a challenge for me and most of the time I win. Therefore, I have tried to record everything that I do in this article in the hope that other people could benefit from this. I would like to end this article with one good quote.
