How do you stay motivated when you are in the middle of a long journey, but you just don’t want to keep going? The perfectionist inside of you doesn’t want to quit, but your mind starts to wonder what it might be like. If this is you, you need know how to stay motivated when it gets hard.
It is like being stuck between a rock and a hard place, being forced to choose between pushing forward in misery or damaging your self-worth by quitting. You have no way to win. As someone who has been there myself, I am giving you 7 ways to stay motivated, not only by enduring the moments you want to give up, but by avoiding them altogether.
You are going to learn about why it has gotten so hard for you at this point in your journey, the foundation of taking care of yourself, having a clearly defined why, recognizing your successes, and much more.
After learning about these 7 ways to ways to stay motivated you will be equipped to keep going even when it gets hard!
This post is all about How to Stay Motivated
Guaranteed Ways To Stay Motivated
1. Take Care of Yourself
Despite how strong you are, you cannot stay motivated towards your goals for a sustainable amount of time when you are running on empty. Pushing forward past your limits without acknowledging the strain on the rest of your life can lead to dangerous consequences ranging from minor to debilitating. These dangers not only make it more difficult to reach your goals, but can cause you to backtrack.
Minor Dangers
Fatigue, sadness, and weight gain hinder your ability to perform at your peak each day. Because minor dangers are fleeting and have a relatively small impact, they are hard to detect. You may not even see the need to remove these hinderances because of how minor they are, but it is important to know that these minor dangers have a cumulative effect over a longer period of time, and they can lead to more serious consequences.
Debilitating Consequences
Pushing past your limits can also have debilitating consequences like bankruptcy, depression, and hospitalization. These appear to come suddenly, but if we admit it, they often result from the many small choices we make. It is important to be aware of the minor danger signs that warn us to change direction before something more serious happens.
Avoiding the dangers of pushing past your limits requires attention to all areas of your life. It requires being intentional in everything you do not only with short-term effects in mind, but also the long-term impact. This will get you further in your goals, and it will help you enjoy the process more!
There are 5 areas of life that always need attention:
Mental Health
Physical Health
Relational Health
Financial Health
Spiritual Health
Taking care of yourself is not a distraction, unimportant, or optional. These items are meant to give energy and motivation, propelling you towards the next level of improvement.
If you have reached a point of burn-out, it is likely you have neglected one or all of these, and need to identify how to get back on track, leading us to the next point.
2. Balance Your Life To Stay Motivated
Give yourself permission to do less and focus on what is most important. You do not need to hold it all to be successful. In fact, the chances of you succeeding lessen the more you try to pile on.
When you have several things going on at once, you are more easily distracted and overwhelmed, and less likely to make substantial progress in any one thing, because your time and attention are divided in so many different areas.
Balancing your life means getting rid of time-takers and energy-drainers that do not serve you. This could be emotionally draining relationships, financial burdens, or ongoing obligations that you do not need to be a part of anymore.
You do this by first performing an evaluation of your whole life to identify what areas have gone sideways and developing a game plan to get it back on track. This requires time, an open mind, and deep digging. Something might be in your life for one reason, but by taking the time to fact check, you will identify how it actually came to be there. You will find you need far less in your life than you realize.
Check out this post on The 9 Disconcerting Signs of Unbalance in Your Life.
When you have committed to taking care of yourself and have removed all unnecessary distractions, read number 3!
3. Remember Your Why To Stay Motivated
Have you have ever stood up to get something, but half way through your journey, you forget why you got up? This leads you to resume your station only to run into the same road block that caused you to stand up in the first place.
Forgetting your why in silly instances like this makes us laugh, but what if the same applied to your long-term goals? What if half way through your journey, in the midst of the struggle, you forget your purpose?
Having a strong why is important, but there is no point in having one, if you do not remind yourself. Forgetfulness during hardship inevitably leads us to resume our old ways of living.
If you are fortunate, life will remind you of your goals from an outside source, whether it be a friend, circumstance, or your bank account. The problem is that if you keep forgetting, you will experience the “yo-yo” effect, a repeated cycle of inspiring new beginnings quickly followed by giving up.
Remembering your why allows you to reach into the pit of your being and keep going even when it gets hard. It gives you purpose & direction on those days when you want to revert to your old life.
How often does one need a reminder? Every day. It takes 5 minutes. If this does not seem appealing, you need a better why. A strong ‘why’ should light you up.
If you are curious on How To Create a Solid “Why”, look no further.
While remembering your why is a great way to stay motivated, it can make the tasks you need to do now seem far off, because all you are focused on is the big picture. Read number 4 to make your motivation even stronger!
4. Define & Recognize Short-Term Success To Stay Motivated
Working on a long-term goal can be discouraging & overwhelming. Goals that last a year are barely manageable, let alone goals that span up to three, five, or even ten years. Why?
Long-term goals require you to wait. They leave you unsatisfied until you have reached that one moment 10 years down the road. You are an incomplete person until that one moment. What if you could be a success one week in, or perhaps even a day in?
By breaking down your long-term goals into short-term successes, you are able to see improvement happening in front of your eyes.
While people usually measure their success numerically, challenge yourself to find the unmeasurable short-term successes. For example, you may feel different than the day before, or you may finish a task more confidently than before.
You will find recognizing these short-term successes add up to a more positive outlook on your goal and will boost your motivation to keep going.
Defining your short-Term successes and seeing the change is one part of the motivation puzzle. Celebrating & Integrating your wins is another.
5. Celebrate & Integrate Short-Term Success To Stay Motivated
If you recorded the internal thoughts that you have about yourself, you might be mortified. You would also hopefully be enlightened in your discovery of why motivation is a struggle.
Without awareness and intentional design of your thoughts as you grow towards lofty goals, you will likely feel the same way about yourself at the end of your goal as you did at the beginning.
Seeing success does not equate celebrating & integrating it.
Celebrating your wins involves the internal thoughts you tell yourself about your success. Take the daily opportunity to appreciate & honor the work that you have done so far to conquer your dreams. This takes place in your self-talk each day from when you wake up in the morning to the thoughts you have as you fall asleep.
Integrating Your Successes involves what you will do next with your success. If you succeeded in that one thing that one time, great! Do it again and again and again until you do not think about it anymore. Eventually you will have to find a new success to celebrate & integrate!
Celebrating & Integrating are paired together, because one supports the other. The more you celebrate, the more likely you are to remember to do it again. The more you integrate your short-term successes, the more often you will celebrate!
6. Reward Short-Term Success To Stay Motivated
If you have already defined, recognized, celebrated, and integrated your short-term successes, then the last thing you can do with short-term success is reward yourself.
When given within a short timeframe of the desired behavior, positive reinforcement allows the brain to associate an otherwise difficult behavior with something positive, guaranteeing motivation to practice the same behavior next time.
What types of positive reinforcement work best? To answer this, ask yourself what you identify as a treat and what you find true joy in. What do you rarely allow yourself to have, and what rewards are doable?
When deciding on the type of positive reinforcement, it is important to not reward yourself in a way that goes against your goals. For example, do not take yourself out to a 5-star restaurant when your goal is to save money.
The more consistently your reward yourself the more motivation you are guaranteed!
7. Visualize Long-Term Success To Stay Motivated
If you were to imagine your idealized life in a movie, and you were the main character, how would you look & feel day in and day out? What material things would you have? What would your relationships be like?
Answering these questions involves the senses and emotions, getting you to visualize your long-term success. When you invite yourself to live in your future reality, it turns lofty, intangible goals into something tangible. It is the appetizer to the real thing, making you long for the real deal. This is visualization.
Visualization allows your imagination to experience the reality you are aiming for in your goals.
You are guaranteed motivation as the thing you are striving towards becomes more of a reality.
Final Thoughts
Whether you are burnt out now, or you are at the starting point of a long-term goal, sticking to these methods will serve you as you seek to motivate yourself to new levels.
You will be able to identify why it has gotten so hard for you or how to avoid burnout in the first place by learning the foundations of taking care of yourself, having a clearly defined why, recognizing your successes, and more.
You are equipped to keep going and guarantee yourself motivation in any step of your journey.
7 Ways to Stay Motivated | Key Points
Taking care of yourself is not a distraction, unimportant, or optional. It is meant to give energy and motivation, propelling you towards the next level of improvement.
Be ruthless in what you will or will not allow into your life.
Forgetfulness during hardship inevitably leads us to resume our old ways of living.
By breaking down your long-term goals into short-term successes, you are able to see improvement happening in front of your eyes.
Without awareness of and intentionally designing your thoughts as your grow towards lofty goals, you will likely feel the same way about yourself at the end of your goal as you did at the beginning.
When given within a short timeframe of the desired behavior, positive reinforcement allows the brain to associate an otherwise difficult behavior with something positive.
Visualization allows your imagination gets to experience the reality that you are aiming for in your goals.
You are equipped to keep going and guarantee yourself motivation in any step of your journey.