3 Quick and Easy Ways to Get Motivated
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As Zig Ziglar warned us, motivation fades. This means we need a daily boost in order to get motivated.
Whether it’s household chores, losing that last 10 (or 50?) pounds, or tackling that next project at work, we need motivation. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.
The power of inertia keeps you going. Test it out the next time you hit the breaks in your car.
Inertia can work for you, because once you get going, you’ll tend to keep going. The challenging part is to get things started (and re-started), and that’s where motivation comes in.
Below are 3 ways to get your momentum going, get inspired, and out of a rut.
Choose your mantra — Choose a mantra, then use it daily to wipe away the negative and make room for good things to happen. In the traditional sense, a mantra is a sound or series of sounds that are repeated over and over again during meditation. But, they can be much more than that.
Guy Kawasaki says that instead of long mission statements, we should use mantras to tell the world what we’re all about. Short and to the point, mantras can evoke a sense of power, and put us in a state of calm strength whenever we need it.
If well chosen, mantras can also act as guiding principles for behavior. For example, Google’s “do no harm” philosophy is a mantra.
Mantras should be only a few words long at most. You can use them for meditation sessions as well as a sort of battle cry when you need strength. You can choose any mantra you like, and you can choose several of them for use in various situations.
Do something physical — Tony Robbins teaches us that when we feel a certain way, we reflect that in our bodies. Try being depressed for a moment. What happens? Your shoulders slump, your eyes immediately head toward the ground, and your head faces down. Can you feel that? As goes the mind, so goes the body.
Now, try using your body to prevent a depressed feeling from overtaking you. Stand up tall showing off your best posture. Smile. Lift your arms and put them straight out at your sides to form a cross with your body. Tilt your head back and stare up at the ceiling. Lift one foot off the floor and hum out loud.
Now, hold that position and try to be depressed. It takes a lot of effort to be depressed while in that pose. Now, ask yourself what you can do physically every day to get yourself into a resourceful mental state. Maybe it’s a silly pose like this one. Maybe it’s yoga or pilates that gets you going. No matter what it is, do something physical every day and get motivated.
Travel through time — This exercise is an amazing eye opener and will get you motivated as fast as anything I know. Hindsight is 20/20. We all have choices. In each moment, we choose what we do. I hear people say that they have no choice. This is not true. You always have a choice. You can kill yourself if you want. You’ll find a way if that’s what you really want to do.
Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking we had no choice in the decisions we made in the past. Even though we regret some of these choices, we believe that we once again won’t be able to choose if faced with similar situations in the future.
So now, pretend that you’re in your own future. Think about what it’s like in your future. It’s moments like this when we see what we really want. Now, look back at the present moment that you’re in right now. What would you have done differently?
What can you do differently right now to make your ideal future a reality? Say it to yourself out loud. Write down your plan. Go do it now.
These are just a few of the ways that you can bend your reality just a bit and get motivated. There’s no limit to the ways that you can gain control of your future if you’ll just apply a few simple principles.
