Motivation is the key to empowering your life and helping you achieve your goals and desires. However, few people know how to tap into the full potential of motivation, and most only feel intense motivation for short periods of time or fail to act on their feelings. Learning how to develop lifelong motivation will greatly affect your quality of life and helps to keep you going through the hard times.
Identify What You Want and Why
The first step to developing lifelong motivation is to determine what you truly want and why you want it. You might want to be rich or simply want to find happiness in your life. Identifying what you really want takes time, this means taking time to reflect on yourself and spending time soul-searching. Once you find what you want, you must then find the reason behind this desire. Wanting something “just because” is not a strong enough foundation to build lifelong motivation; you must find your own reason as to why you want something.
Once you find what you want and why, it is a good idea to write it down. This helps you remember, and it also materializes your thoughts which psychologically makes them real and achievable.
Be Bold
No one who has lifelong motivation plays it “safe” or stays within their comfort zones all the time. Being bold means knowing that you will have to do things you may find unpleasant or scary. As you expose yourself to these scenarios more often, you will become more tolerant of being outside of your comfort zone, which will allow you to attempt greater things.
Develop a Plan to Get What You Want
One of the biggest factors to finding lifelong motivation is knowing how to achieve it. Once you develop a strategy or plan to achieve what you want, you can begin working towards your goal. A plan helps you visualize each step and this mental image motivates you to reach the end destination. As you complete each phase of your plan you will find yourself much more motivated and excited about the next upcoming challenges.
Take Action
All of this advice is useless if you don’t act upon it. Ideas and wishful thinking will spark short-term motivation, but if you don’t act upon these feelings then nothing will change and you will find yourself feeling unmotivated again. Once you find what you want and developed a plan to reach that goal, then immediately start taking action before you have a chance to second-guess yourself. All the thinking and planning should already be done, and all you have to do is start progressing towards your final goal.
Never Be Afraid of Failure
Fear of failure is the number one killer for motivation. Instead of fearing failure, you should learn to embrace it. Once you understand that failure can be a good thing, you’ll be able to accept the fact that you don’t have to be perfect at everything you do. Many people fall into the trap of waiting for the perfect time or opportunity to avoid failing, but this often leads to inaction. Learn from your failures and understand that every successful person had to fail many times before finding what works for them.
Learn How to Get Through a Rough Time
If you are able to stay positive and dig yourself out of a bad position then you’ll develop a “never give up” mentality, which is an essential ingredient in developing lifelong motivation. Learning to get through a rough time must be experienced first-hand, but once you emerge from your bad predicament, you will feel victorious, and you’ll be able to apply this winning mentality into everything you do. Going through a rough time teaches us that everything will be OK and how to manage ourselves when things are not going the way we want them to.
Evaluate and Reflect on Both Your Successes and Failures
To develop lifelong motivation, you must learn from both your successes and failures. This allows you to fast-track your success in the future and avoid making the same mistakes in future endeavors. Not only does this empower you because you know that you’ve learned something new, but it also reminds you that you did all of the steps above (and more) and you are able to change your course of life if you put your mind to it.
Motivation is an elusive feeling; it can come and go at a moment’s notice, but once you learn how to harness its power, you will greatly improve the quality of your life. For more motivation, here is an interesting speech by TED which talks about why people fail to achieve a great career and why we are afraid to try.
