3 Quick and Easy Ways to Get Motivated

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Written by Kurt Schmitt

Thursday, 21 August 2008

As Zig Ziglar warned us, motivation fades. This means we need a daily boost in order to get motivated.

by KurtSchmitt

As Zig Ziglar warned us, motivation fades. This means we need a daily boost in order to get motivated.

Whether it's a project at work, starting a new business, or something personal like losing weight, we all need to get motivated in order to complete the task. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.

If you're going in a particular direction, inertia will keep you going that way unless you apply force. See if your body keeps going when you pull up to a stop sign 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.

Select a mantra -- Using a mantra can have some advantages. You can use it every day to remove negative thoughts and clear the way for positive things. A mantra is traditionally a sound or series of sounds that are repeated over and over again during meditation sessions. But a mantra can become 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.

Mantras can also act as guiding principles for behavior and help with decision making. Google's "do no harm" philosophy is a mantra for how to do business.

You can use them for meditation as well as a way to find calm confidence and deep strength when needed. Mantras should be short. A few words is plenty. 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 your advantage. Stand up tall showing off your best posture. Put your head back and look up at the ceiling. Smile. Put your arms straight out at your sides. 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.

Jump to the future -- 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 eat that second helping of french fries, or you can have an apple. This exercise is an eye opener. Hindsight is 20/20. This will get you motivated as fast as anything I know.

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.

Try this out. Imagine your future. Think about what it's like in your future a few years from now. Now, look back at the present moment that you're in right now. Given the opportunity, what would you have done differently?

What can you do right now to make that future that you want become a reality? Spell it out and say it out loud. Next, make a plan to achieve it and write it down. What are you waiting for? Go do it.

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.

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Author Kurt Schmitt has created an online resource on inspirational sayings including motivational quotes

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