MOTIVATE YOURSELF TO SUCCESS
“Motivation supplies you with the courage to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you can achieve more than you have. It drives you to be better than you ever have before, propelling you to great heights of success.”
In my last two articles, I described the first and second essential steps to success – know your goal and know your plan. In other words, know what you want to achieve and know how you plan to achieve it.
The Next Step: Motivation
The next critical step is to know why you want this particular goal. The “why” provides the “oomph,” the fuel, the motivation and the desire to achieve your goals. History is filled with people who had great goals and great plans but never achieved anything of consequence. They lacked the desire to make it happen. Motivation or desire provides you with a sense of purpose and direction for achieving your goal. It gives you a powerful mission to strive toward at all costs. Desire provides you with the fortitude to tackle any obstacle in your path, while others will try to avoid challenges. It also provides you with an intuitiveness, or sixth sense, of what needs to be done to conquer your goal. Innovative thinking and creative solutions are fostered by intense motivation and desire.
Motivation supplies you with the courage to look at yourself in the mirror and realize that you can achieve more than you have. It drives you to be better than you ever have before, propelling you to great heights of success. Without motivation, your goals will never be more than wishes. You cannot put action into your plans unless you have motivation from desire pushing you to act. Desire is defined as an overwhelming demand for change. You must look within yourself and decide that you are not satisfied with the status quo and that you are willing to sacrifice to make a change. To a champion, desire is a habit. It is what separates the truly successful person from the average person. Motivation is a guarantee against apathy. If you have intense burning desire, you will strive for excellence in any endeavor. You will not be satisfied with mere mediocrity. Being the best will be the only way to satiate the desire. Motivation is developed by having an extremely clear and vivid picture of what it will be like when you achieve your goal. When you know how it will look, feel, sound, smell and taste, you will begin to build the desire you need.
Desire, or motivation, is simply a reason to act. The key to building your motivation is to have a valid, clear and meaningful reason to change the way you presently act. To do this, start by listing all of the benefits or rewards you expect to reap when you accomplish your goal. List as many as possible, the more the better. Motivation is similar to a balance scale. On one side of the scale are all the reasons to just continue to act the way you always have – comfort, security, familiarity, acceptance, fear, etc. To change, to act in a new way, you must have more or stronger reasons on the opposite side of the scale. You must “outweigh” your reasons not to change with your reasons to change. By contrasting where you are now with where you want to be, you will create an overwhelming inner demand for change.
Next, focus intensely on these reasons to change. Use every available minute to imagine how it will feel when you reach your goal. Everybody has reasons to change, to become motivated. Most people, however, choose to focus on their reasons not to change. There is great truth to the adage, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re right.”
Everyone must choose their own path. Make your choice to be self-motivated!