How to stay motivated
By Cheryl Speak, Striding Out Business Coach
What drives you? Have you ever asked yourself that question? In other words, how do you stay motivated? One of the first things you can do to understand how to create long lasting motivation is to identify the things that are personally important to you. What brings you happiness? When do you feel free, successful or driven?
It may be a want to travel the world, being mortgage free, achieving professional success, continuing your personal or academic development, creating a legacy or simply being able to spend time with your family. Everyone has their own personal reasons for pursuing those wants and aspirations to stay motivated. Knowing what you want in itself gives a reason to do things!
Quite simply doing more of the things you like and less of those you dislike can bring with it great motivation. In reality, when you really like what you're doing, you'll be more passionate, committed and more willing to do it. Motivation will come from wanting to do it rather than feeling forced to do it.
Personal challenge is another way to create motivation. Life becomes more exciting, you have a reason to wake up every morning. For entrepreneurs creating new businesses / ideas / ways of working is a way of creating personal challenge. Pushing yourself beyond your everyday boundaries and trying new things no matter how small will create a momentum of achievement.
We live in an era where we try to juggle our personal lives and our careers and multi-tasking is a virtue. That's why we need some time saving techniques in our lives so that we can maximize our time and make use of it productively.
Work on a project or task for a specific amount of time. Rather than trying to squeeze things in and finish one whole project or task, try to work on one at a time for only a small period e.g. 15 or 20 minutes. It will help you to focus your attention and stop you finding distracters (those times when you should be working on a project but you put it off in favour of tidying your desk or clearing files off your computer).
In 15-20 minutes of focussed time you could possibly complete as much work as you normally would in over an hour.
Meeting management can be critical to managing your time, ask yourself things such as, do I really have to be in this meeting? What would happen if I was not there? What decisions are being made at this meeting? Can someone else go for me? Can this be conducted by any other means, over the phone, video conferencing? Understanding the purpose and outcome of meetings before you begin can avoid wasted time going off subject or discussing matters which are not relevant.
If you need some assistance to rekindle your motivation maybe one of our business coaches can help. Give us a call or drop us an email to discuss your situation at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
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