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How To Find Motivation? The Key To Making Your New Year’s Resolution Happen

Okay, so you’re rethinking your life right now? The New Year has come and gone, and you have done some deep soul searching . You want to make a change, and YOU KNOW it’s gonna improve your life, but you just can’t find the motivation to start.

Maybe you even started, but find it hard to stay motivated to keep going. If you’ve read my previous article about changing habits, you know that we usually don’t make changes that are good for us, because it is usually somewhat challenging to do –er rather uncomfortable.

If it was easy, we’d all be doing it.

So we look and look for different ways to motivate ourselves. But nothing we seem to do is enough motivation to keep us going. We always seem to fall back into our old habits. Well, if you’d like to take a look at my extended version of how to change a habit, click here. It’s a course that helps you understand what you need to do in order to make a change in your life, and make it stick.

One of the secrets that is key, to all of the hardest changes in life, is that motivation is not mandatory. So many people give up on making a change because they lack motivation. AND let’s note; desire is different from motivation. You can desire to change all you want... to make something happen. Motivation, however, takes action. Without action, it’s very difficult to stay motivated. I know it sounds backwards, but listen...

The secret that everyone doesn’t know is: motivation will not always be there. For the majority of people, motivation actually comes from SEEING a desired outcome in the near future.

Let's look closer. If you are offered $10,000 to complete something, you will likely be more enthusiastic about doing it. You start to think about all the things you can do with that $10,000. Now if the same job is offered and you get $10 for it. Even if you do this job, and it increases your chances of getting a bonus at the end of the year, for $10,000, you might be a little more motivated. However, without an immediate result to keep you going, it might be hard for you to enthusiastically do this $10 job, over and over again. However, if you were continuously asked to do this job for $10,000 and were paid, immediately, you would probably sacrifice what you need to, temporarily, to make that job happen. Might I add, you will also likely make it happen with little complaint, little struggle, and a stress threshold that is worth the outcome.

For the same $10, though, you will probably groan and complain, every time you have to do it. You probably wouldn’t necessarily put your best effort into the task. You also might not prioritize the task, because the reward isn’t a high enough pay off, to inconvenience the other rewarding things in your life.

Well the same thing applies to making changes. If you don’t have an immediate reward to help you do the thing that makes you uncomfortable, you are going to go back to do what IS comfortable. So, this is where you have to help yourself out. Create opportunities to see an immediate reward. Some people have learned delayed gratification. They can go through a long period of suffering, with the finish line in mind, and they just force themselves to do what they need to do, and understand that the payoff will come eventually.

Well, I’m not one of those people…and neither is probably 88% of America (I just made that statistic up, but I'm probably close, haha). So, for the rest of us, we have got to come up with smaller rewards that will force us to do the challenging tasks in front of us, in order to get to the bigger goal, a little further down the line.

Smaller rewards might look like this: that cheat meal at the end of the week; that massage at the end of the month; that mini vacation on the weekend, a trip to the mountains, a break from the kids, a puppy, winning a bet in a small pot of money, and the list goes on…

Hanging on to hope for something you want, for just a little while longer, makes it so much easier for us to stick through a challenge. Think of it like this: if you never had studying habits before, but you all of a sudden had to study for a really big test, that could fail you, if you don’t pass, you are going to have to study. The problem is, you have never developed an effective way to study before. You don’t know how much to study, how long to study, and aren’t even sure if all your effort will pay off. While you’re studying, your most powerful thought will be to go back to your old habits. Watch tv after school, party with friends, so you don’t have to think about how stressful this test is, and then hope that whatever effort you do put in, will be enough to pass the test. If push comes to shove, you might even find a way to cheat to avoid the discipline that comes along (or might I say boringness) that comes along with studying every night. But if your mom tells you that she’s going to get you that new IPhone you’ve been wanting, if you pass the test, your motivation to endure this discipline, becomes much more valuable, right?

Here’s another example…You want to lose 100 lbs, but your personal trainer says it’s really only possible with your exercise ability to lose about 10 lbs in a month. That means it will take you about 10 months to lose weight. You’ve got to develop a new habit to get to the gym, and start eating new things. This change in your life seems a bit extreme, and to hold on for a 10 whole months, seems so far down the line, to think willing yourself to eat right and exercise will work for the entire 10 months, from sheer will power.

It usually doesn’t work that way.

Personal trainers, CEOs, therapists, life coaches, doctors, celebrities, and all people who accomplish great things that take time, have to break down their goals into small sections with rewards just like this.

It’s okay not to be motivated to start. Sometimes motivation must be manifested by an immediate reward. Sometimes when you start seeing immediate results, that is enough motivation to keep you pushing until the next milestone, and the next, until you get to your goal. However, realize that motivation frequently comes AFTER you take action. It’s that one day when you get out of the bed and go to the gym, despite lacking motivation, that counts. Then another, and you see at the end of the week, that you lost a few pounds. Next thing you know, next week, you might not even need the alarm to get up. Maybe you will, but your workouts will feel so much more worth it. The cheat meal you are working toward might feel so much more valuable after all of the hard work you’ve done.

So that’s it, folks. The key is to MANIFEST YOUR OWN MOTIVATION.

Stop looking for ideas on top of ideas to make you feel motivated. Like NIKE says, Just Do It. Motivation will follow. If you need additional help, or think you have a bit of a situation, you can always message me. I’d love to help you figure out what you need to do, to get where you want to go.

Happy Goaling!

Chan at the [BOG].

P.S. I’m running a special for the New Year’s that will get you a free life coaching session! Because I want to see you guys kill it this year, as you work toward your 2018 goals, I want you to sign up for a free session, and share! Hope to see you there!

#motivation #lifecoach #lifechange #changinghabits