Self Help Motivation

One of the reasons why people procrastinate is their lack of motivation.  If you find yourself stuck in a rut and hardly motivated, it’s time to re-think your goals.  What is your original main goal?  What are the steps that you need in order to achieve it?

Here’s a blog post by Stephanie Staples on how to sustain your motivation:

Motivate me Now! 7 tips to help you Sustain the Motivation…

Ok, Ok, I am NOT a motivational speaker, after all I cannot motivate you unless you want to be motivated. I cannot inspire you if you are not ready to be inspired. BUT if you ARE ready, the real trick is to be able to sustain the …

To cap off the week, here are some inspirational quotes for powerful self-help motivation:

From http://www.getentrepreneurial.com

“Enthusiasm is excitement with inspiration, motivation, and a pinch of creativity.” – Bo Bennett

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” -  Les Brown

“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect. There will always be challenges, obstacles and less than perfect conditions. So what. Get started now. With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.” – Mark Victor Hansen

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” – Winston Churchill

“Reach high, for stars lie hidden in your soul. Dream deep, for every dream precedes the goal.” – Jim Rohn

Self-Help Motivation That Really Helps

Are you feeling stressed out when you go about your day to day activities? How many of those self help CDs, books, or programs you’ve purchased are sitting on your bookshelf while you’re dealing with your daily reality? If any of this sounds familiar, you probably can relate to sometimes not wanting to get out of bed or being able to find the energy to do what there is to do, days that you can’t imagine going to work or nights that you just can’t get to sleep because there’s a cycle of worry spinning in your head. What is there to do about all this?  That’s where this effective self help motivation strategy comes in.

Free yourself from the Cycle

Motivation is the first step to breaking yourself free from any cycle. What reason or drive would you have to move forward without some motivation? If this makes sense to you, the next step would be to understand the two kinds of motivation.

The first kind of motivation is extrinsic motivation, which means it is gotten from outside of us. The clearest example of extrinsic motivation is money; other less tangible examples are intimidation and being punishment.

To explain this here’s an analogy, at a sporting event, the crowd can cheer for a team, which can motivate them to do well. Awards, metals, and trophies that a team gets for winning their game are also extrinsic motivators. Looking at it more generally, any form of competition is an external motivator because it encourages the individual or team to win, not to take pleasure in the internal rewards of the activity itself.

Now on the other hand, intrinsic motivation can be had by discovering the inherent rewards in the job or activity itself–the joy of the game or the experience of something you deeply appreciate. We believe that the only way to be motivated long term is to find your intrinsic motivation.

Discover your Internal Motivators

The next time you notice yourself losing motivation because stress and worry is wearing you down, STOP–look inside–identify at least one thing that’s missing for you in the situation. This will be something that is deeply important to you– something you value. Every value that we hold dear desperately wants to be experienced. So once you discover the value that’s missing for you in a situation it will motivate you to be in action finding ways to experience it.

As an example, say that your significant other has been letting you know about all the ways they are dissatisfied with you. You’re so sick of hearing about this and you even begin to worry that they may be considering leaving your relationship. You began to notice that you’re starting to lose motivation to make your relationship better, so what do you do? You STOP and ask yourself, “what’s missing for me in this situation?” You may discover that caring and consideration are missing for you, or you might notice that connection or having a sense of togetherness is lacking. Great! Now that you’ve discovered what’s missing the next step is to find ways to experience it.

Can you see how moving towards connection and consideration would be motivating, how finding ways to experience a sense of togetherness would have you moving in the direction of what you want in life.

The key to any successful self help motivation tool is its ability to lead you inside before you move outside towards what you want to achieve. Whether it’s improving your relationships, enhancing your work circumstances, or just finding out how to better handle your day to day stress and worry, finding a useful intrinsic motivation plan is guaranteed to help.

If you are ready for other self-help motivation tips, personal growth tools and strategies sign up for our free inspirational weekly action tips at: http://www.newageselfhelp.com

This is a great article to read if you find yourself stuck in rut, and hardly motivated.  Annaly Curzon shares tips on how to  overcome your self-limiting beliefs by focusing on what you want.  Enjoy!

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How to Overcome a Lack of Motivation in Your Life
Annaly Curzon

It happens to us all. One day we’re motivated and the next day we’re in the dumps having ourselves a pity party. Staying motivated is not easy. If it were, everybody would do it. But, it can be done. You believe it can be done and that’s why you’re reading this right now – good for you!

You may have felt good about a certain job or project when it began. You were filled with enthusiasm and motivation. Then you hit a few speed bumps and unexpected failures and your motivation waned. You may have fallen into depression and decided to give up. All of those positive thoughts turned into negative ones.

We’ve all experienced these emotions that can cause us to give up prematurely. All that upsurge of energy when we started a new project inevitably ends as dreams become reality and we lose our confidence.

You must turn these negative emotions around and the best way to do that is to understand them, analyze them and what caused them. We lose our motivation as we lose our focus, our confidence and our direction. If you can learn to control these three emotions you can control your life.

Focus on what you really want. Be specific and be positive. We generally think in terms of what we don’t have rather than focus on what we want. Don’t focus on your fears but what you can do to overcome them. Don’t focus on being poor but on a plan to create wealth.

To do this make a plan to get there one step at a time. You don’t become the president of a company until you’ve come up from the ranks. Focus on your plan to achieve your objectives and your goals. Be realistic on your goals. Goals that are unreachable can lead to depression. But even small goals that are achieved lead to increased motivation.

Boost your confidence by taking stock on what you already have and not what you lack. You’ll probably discover you’re more successful than you think. We waste our mind power being jealous of others instead of working on achieving our own aspirations. Don’t take your strengths for granted and count your failures one by one. Count your blessings one by one and whatever your mind thinks it can accomplish.

Without direction there is no motivation. You must create a day-to-day strategy. Make a to-do list and do it. Mark off each item once it’s accomplished and do not mark it off until it’s done.

You’ll eventually get tired of looking at it on your list and do it. By making a list or outline of what needs to be done, you’ll find ways to do it and you’ll believe that you truly deserve success. Don’t waste time by worrying about the future. Start today by doing something to change your future for the better. Today’s actions can create a better future.

Don’t be surprised or depressed about a loss of motivation. Look at it as an opportunity to step back and analyze what you’re doing wrong and what you’re doing right. Discover your faults and correct them. When you re-evaluate your plans and goals from a fresh perspective, you’ll feel a new surge of enthusiasm and motivation.

©2009-present, Annaly Curzon. The author is a psychology student interested in personal development and self-help. She maintains the personal development web site Working On Me.

Article Source: How to Overcome a Lack of Motivation in Your Life

This is a fabulous two-part video that explains the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. This video focuses on a business application of this distinction. But it can be easily translated into everyday life because true self help motivation is always intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated.

Dan Pink – The science of motivation part 1

“The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive to do things because they matter” Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.

Dan Pink – The science of motivation part 2

“The secret to high performance isn’t rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive to do things because they matter” Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don’t: Traditional rewards aren’t always as effective as we think.