What is Motivation?
- Image by Simon Clayson via Flickr
Before we can motivate ourselves, we need to know what motivation is.
Motivation is about making a choice
How many times have you heard or said, I don’t feel motivated, believing motivation had something to do with the way someone felt. If I feel like running, I’m motivated to exercise. If I don’t feel like running, I’m not motivated.
It doesn’t work that way. If it did, we would all be level on the accomplishment scale because there are always things people don’t feel like doing.
Successful people make choices. Successful people know every action involves a choice; you chose to visit the gym or you choose to sit and watch television. If you want good results, you make good choices.
You stay motivated by deciding what choices you need to make to achieve the outcomes you expect.
Motivation is about action
You’ve made a choice, now what’s the next step
How are you going to get from where you are today to where you would like to be in 12 months? Break that down to the “next action” (to use David Allen’s term) needed to move you a step closer to your end result. The expected result might require one step or 12 steps. You have to know what those steps are and take them.
We take actions to achieve results.
Motivation is about goals
What’s going on in your life today? The life you’re living today is a result of choices you made yesterday. If today’s results are what you want them to be, it’s because you made good choices yesterday.
What results do you want tomorrow or next week or next month or next year? If you want to make good choices and take the correct actions, you need to set goals to achieve; short and long term.
Clear goals drive you to do the things that need doing.
Motivation is not about feelings
Do you have children? Have you ever crawled out of a warm bed in the middle of the night to take care of a sick child? A good parent doesn’t stay in bed thinking, the kid can suffer, because I don’t feel like getting out of bed. Something more important than your comfort and feelings drive you to care for a child. That drive is motivation. Whether it’s 20 pounds you need to lose, a presentation that has to be made or a skill you need to learn, overcoming “I don’t feel like doing it” is being motivated.
You’ve probably figured out by now that there is not really 4 separate parts to defining motivation. The key to motivation is, making a choice to take action to achieve a goal whether you feel like it or not.
Once we understand what motivation is, we begin a journey to achievement.
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I have no argument with the need to be personally committed to your goal in th way you describe. But what role do you think other people play in helping to motivate?
I think it’s a pretty important component in introducing a competitive element to your goal.