I want to share with you today some tips on how to get yourselves re-motivated. Whether you are someone who has been enjoying the government’s furloughed scheme, whether you are someone who has had the luxury of working from home in your pyjamas, or whether you have something that you want to start doing or need to get done and you need that extra kick up the backside, that is, what I’m going to do for you today.
When it comes to tapping into that feeling of motivation what is most important, is that you have a very clear reason ‘why’. When we think about what it is, that drives people to do the things, that they do, in their lives, they’re either going to be someone who is motivated by the reason ‘why’ they should do something or they are motivated by ‘what it is’ that they’re actually going to be doing, the ‘how it is’ that they can actually go on and do it or doing some exploring and figuring out how to do things in a completely different way to what the normal logical person would do. Within that quadrant of those four different types of people, (why, what, how and ‘what if?’) the area that most people fall into that has the highest percentage of people is the ‘why’ context meaning that you need to know why you are doing something in order to get motivated enough to be able to do it.
I would suggest that those reasons ‘why you do the thing that it is that you want to be able to do’ is going to have both positive and negative connotations associated with it. The reason why I think you need both is that I am NOT just a zen-like self-development guru who is going to tell you that everything needs to be based around moving towards the positives. If that worked then, you know, we don’t be driven by a carrot rather than a stick but the reality is a good number of people are more motivated by what it is that they should be avoided rather than what it is that they’re moving towards.
Let me give you a little bit of extra framing around what it is that I am saying here. First of all, in this need to know ‘why’ in regards to what you’re doing. You need to get the balance right between “I’m doing it for all of these good reasons and all of the positive things that are going to come out of it” – we want bags of that stuff! However, for some people, there’s also going to be a little bit of ‘oomph’ that comes from “I’m also doing it because I don’t want this to happen, I don’t want these bad things to happen.” For example, let’s imagine that you’ve been furloughed for a considerable period of time and you’re completely out of whack with the world of work and having to get up at a decent hour in the morning and you’ve got made redundant that is going to be the circumstances for quite a few people these days and now you’ve not only got to get motivated to go to work but maybe you’ve got to get motivated to go to a new workplace or to find a job in the first place.
People who are in that kind of situation, here is what some of the ‘why’s could look like – it could be “this will be good for me because I’m going to earn money and I’m going to have a better routine. I’ve got to be more sociable again. It could also be for getting away from having late nights and actually spending the day feeling a bit fuzzy because I didn’t get enough sleep and feeling like I’ve wasted a day although I haven’t been very productive”. Those would be your kind of things that you want to get away from that’s your stick stuff.
Therefore, we’ve got to get that balance right and that might mean tapping into your own motivation source to find that balance, specifically for you. As an individual, between what it is that you are moving towards and what it is you want to be moving away from; I wouldn’t say wholly base it around away from stuff. You could probably base it around all of the good stuff that you want to move towards but I would avoid making it wholly around what you want to get away from; let me explain why!
On the shelf behind me as I write, there is my teddy bear who is called Bailey. If Bailey Bear is not the thing I want, as in, he represents the late nights, bad routines and wasted days, all of those things as I am writing this article, I have turned to Bailey bear and have made this clear to him. I was literally turned around focused on him, pointing at him. When I’m physically looking in the direction of Bailey bear, what I’m not doing is looking in the direction of where it is I want to go instead. So what can start to happen is you end up getting more of what you focus on and I end up seeing more examples of what I don’t want than what it is that I do.
This is why I would say to motivate yourself, get the balance right and have this kind of pushing you from the background to move forward and have your eyes set on where it is you want to go towards so that you don’t fall potentially into that trap of just kind of getting tangled up in the thing that you want to avoid. We need to know why and we’ve got to find our own personal drivers.
By Gemma Bailey,
