As a human being, we feel 🤩 when we do what we love and vice versa, we feel 😩 when we do things that are not our preference. By saying that, knowing how to be self-motivated can help us to be happier and more productive at work. I believe we all want to be happy and successful :)
Being a “rational” emotional designer, I have been researching about self-motivation and below are 7 ways that completely worked for me in my daily/professional life to keep me on track of my goals conquering journey.
1. Find the roots of your happiness when you do your favorite things
Try to figure out your roots of happiness by asking 3 times, the question Why (in most of the cases).
For instance:
- Why do I love the UX/UI design? Because I love research and visualizing my ideas into a tangible design so that I can see and feel, as well as show to other people
- Why do I love visualization exercises? Because I like to be creative, I love the feeling of creating something or inventing something. Or in short, I love the design
- Why do I love design? Because I am happy when I can create solutions that I can think of for a specific problem (Design is all about creating solutions, what is opposite to Art — More about emotional expression), then I can help other people by my design
At the end of the exercise, I found out the activities that make me happy:
- Create solutions for problems
- Be creative thinking
- Visualize ideas
Then I try to find/apply those activities into my other assignments, for instances:
- As a BA, I try to listen and understand what are the business problems/stakeholder problems and be proactive to propose creative solutions that can help my clients as much as possible
- As a PC (Project Coordinator), I try to visualize the numbers in my reports to stakeholders by using charts or graphs, visualize the project timeline or highlight the status of tracks with traffic light colors instead of just using numbers and text
When you know what are the roots of your happiness, you will understand it’s not important what you do, but WHY you do it!
2. Look at things differently (Positively)
Try to look at everything positively so you will feel happier every day. Life consists of good luck and bad luck.
When good things happen: Be happy and also do reflect to see why it happened. If it’s the result of your hard work, do compliment and reward yourself. Remind yourself to keep doing and working hard to continuously receive good things in the future.
When things happen not accordingly to your expectation: find the internal root causes from yourself (by asking Why questions, again), and try to do differently next time so that it’s not happening again. Or find a mitigation plan so things don’t become worse.
For instance, your flight got delayed: You might be late for your meetings, but it’s an unexpected thing, you can inform your partners about that, reschedule the meeting, then you have more time to prepare at the airport, perhaps you can even find some more fun/creative ideas for the meeting that can be a game-changer. Next time try to add more margin between travel time and meeting time, (even a day if it’s an important meeting) so that if it gets delayed, it won’t impact your plan.
3. Find The Goal of your career or The One that you want to become
Sometimes it’s not easy to know who do you want to become in the future, or what role would you like to play in the next 20 years of your life. So let’s think about 3–5 years milestone, Who do you want to become in 3–5 years? (Or even shorter, next year)
When you can find your goals, try to define what will help you to achieve them.
For instance: You want to become an entrepreneur in the next 3 years.
So what will you need to reach that dream?
- Connections, you need a wide network to develop your future business and drive it through difficult periods, increase sales or find some better deals to reduce costs.
- Project Management skill, so you have the experience to manage the budget, risk, resources, or other plenty of things when you open a business.
- Several other things…
Then try to question yourself if what you are doing provides you the resources to help you reach your goal in the future. If you are doing what you don’t like but it brings benefits for your future, you will feel motivated to do it.
On the other hand, if it’s not beneficial at all for your future goal, better just find another opportunity than stick with it, life is short!
4. Create a record-history
As human being, we feel motivated when we see the improvements.
Usually learning a new language or doing workout (gym) require lots of self-motivation because you don’t see your improvements immediately but it’s a long journey.
For these kinds of activities, try to make a record-history day by day to track the improvements and take a look back every bi-weekly or a month.
If you do Gym, track your BMI (Body Mass Index), track the weights you lift every workout day, etc. since you will not recognize your body’s change every week, doing this let you know that you are improving and provide you the accurate data to set the sufficient goals to reach.
5. Set your own goals/KPI and achievements/rewards
Human-being, again, we are motivated when we get compliments, awards, achievements or when we reach a critical milestone.
If you are/used to be a gamer, you will recognize most of the games what keep users play for a long time usually have a challenging and interesting set of quests, it gives the users the feeling of achieving and conquering, and whenever you reach a new level, you are manipulated to conquer the harder ones.
Apply that to our real-life, try to set your own “reach-able” challenging goals and objectives related to your assignment, for instance: Getting CBAP as a Business Analyst, getting PMP as a Project Manager, being promoted after 6 months, a year, etc. I believe that will motivate you a lot. However, be careful don’t try to pick unrealistic goals, like getting a full MBA in 8 months, you are going to be demotivated a lot more and accidentally set too much pressure for your life.
6. Surround yourself with the right people
“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”.
It will be extremely difficult to be motivated if people around you are always sad, bored and talk negatively, day by day.
We all have our connection circle in life. Do review your circle to see who bring the positive things to your life and who don’t. Spend more time with positive/motivated people will help you to be impacted positively by their mindset and way of thinking.
7. Bonus: Try to not be demotivated
We are human, and we are impacted by the happening of bad things. Keep in mind, a bad day doesn’t mean a bad life, sometimes you lose your motivation because of some unexpected things happened. Be patient, be calm and stay positive, think long-term and keep moving forward. Enjoy what you do instead of struggle against it. It’s your choice to be a Champion.
Take away:
- Find the roots of your happiness
- Look at everything differently (positively)
- Find the One you want to become
- Create a history of records
- Set your own goals/KPI and achievements/rewards
- Surround yourself with the right people
- Bonus: Try to not be demotivated
If you know other ways to be self-motivated that worked for you, don’t be hesitate to comment under the article :) Mahalo!
