How to Get and Stay Motivated!

You likely know of people who have been doing the same thing for years and seem to not have any problem staying stagnet. Whether it be in their marriage, job, or personal endeavors, they seem to be getting along just fine without progressing towards anything "better." 

On the other hand, I’m sure you also know of individuals who focus on the positive, goals setting and are constantly pushing themselves to greater heights. Be it promotions at work, building a family, celebrating marriage milestones, traveling more, or going to school again, these individuals seem to constantly progress towards something that improves or enhances their life.

So what’s the difference between these two types of individuals?

What you feel capable of doing comes down to one thing: motivation. It’s the force, or lack of, that keeps driving you forward to overcome challenges and obstacles to achieve your goals.

Without motivation, you’ll give up after a few failed attempts, or even on the first tough challenge that comes your way. Or you’ll just remain where you are: unhappy yet not doing anything to progress ahead.

Whether you realize it or not, motivation is a huge force in your life, and it needs to be harnessed in order to excel and actually enjoy whatever it is that you’re doing on a daily basis. If you find yourself thinking, “I need motivation,” there are specific steps you can take.

Unfortunately, many overgeneralize the word motivation. We think of being either motivated or unmotivated as a simple “yes” or “no” state of being.

But motivation is not a switch. Motivation is a flow.

The Motivation Flow

To feel motivated, you need to dive beyond the surface. Just reading a motivational quote, being encouraged by your friends or mentor, or writing out a short to-do list won’t help you build sustainable motivation in the long run.

You can think of the motivation that we want to achieve like the Sun (self-sustaining and long-lasting), which supplies a constant influx of energy to all life on Earth. Just like the Sun, your “motivation engine” has different layers, starting from the core and spreading out to the surface. The surface is what you see, but the real process is driven from the core (your internal motivation); and that’s the most important part.

If you can create a self-sustaining motivation engine, you’ll be able to find more meaning in your life and enjoy every minute of what you’re doing, which will make your roles and responsibilities less of a chore.

Let me help you understand this motivation flow better by breaking down the motivation engine into 3 parts:

1. Core – Purpose
2. Support – Enablers
3. Surface – Acknowledgement

The Outer Layer: Surface

The outermost layer, also known as Acknowledgement, encompasses any type of external recognition that might give you motivation. It may come in the form of respect or recognition, such as compliments and praise.

Or it could be emotional support through encouragement, feedback, and constructive criticism. It could also be affiliation, where you have mutual companions or buddies sharing the same goal or burden with you.

One recent study pointed out that “rewards had a positive impact on work motivation but no significant relationship existed between reward and job satisfaction”^[1].

Therefore, it’s important to recognize that rewards will motivate you, but they won’t necessarily make you happier in an undesirable situation.

This is generally what you see on the surface when you look at other people. You see the external acknowledgement, respect, and recognition they’re getting.

The Middle Layer: Support

In essence, the second layer of the motivation engine (also known as Enablers) is what supports your goals. They can magnify the motivation core you have, or speed up the momentum that you build. Basically, they create favorable circumstances for things to go smoothly.

If you want to know how to find motivation, positive enablers are key. This could include friends and family, a coach or any support network you’ve created in life.

The Innermost Layer: Core

But what’s most important, and the true driving force behind your motivation flow, is the innermost core, your Purpose. Your purpose is what differentiates the motivated from the unmotivated, the achievers from the underachievers, the happy from the unhappy.

Your motivational core is your Purpose, and it is sustained by two things: having meaning, and forward movement. With these two as a foundation, you’ll have a power source that will feed you motivational energy indefinitely.

Sustaining Your Core Motivation — Your Purpose

Having meaning is simple. If you want to learn how to find motivation, just ask yourself a question: Why?

Why are you pursuing a certain goal? If the reason is vague or unclear, then your motivational energy will be the same. While motivation provides you energy to do something, that energy needs to be focused somewhere. So without meaning, there is no direction for your energy to focus.

Yet, having a meaningful objective doesn’t mean you have to change the world or have a huge impact on society. The secret to meaningful work is simple: it should contribute value to something or someone that matters to you.

One study suggested creativity as one possible path to meaning, saying: “Many of the core concepts in work on the meaning of life, such as the needs for coherence, significance, and purpose or the desire for symbolic immortality, can be reached through creative activity”^[2].

Next up is gaining forward movement. In short, this means to just keep moving. Like a snowball, motivation from having progress creates momentum. So to keep this up, you have to keep moving.

The good news is, your progress doesn’t have to be huge for you to recognize it. Small amounts of progress can be just as motivating, as long as they keep coming. Like driving a car, you may be really impatient if you’re at a complete halt. But, it lessens if you’re moving forward, even if you’re moving slowly.

Creating a simple progress indicator, like checklists or milestones, is a great way to visualize your small (and big) wins. They trigger your brain to recognize and acknowledge them, giving you small boosts of motivational energy.

This is why video games are so addictive! They’re full of progress indicators everywhere. Even though the progress is completely virtual, they’re still able to trigger the motivation centers in your brain.

How to Get Motivated Daily

1. Find out What Drives You Today

Why not take some time today and do a quick reflection of where you’re at now? Take one aspect of your life that you’d like to progress further in.

For example, it may be your current job. Start with your why. Write down your reasons for why you’re in the job that you’re in.

Then, think about your Motivation Core: your Purpose. Write down what it is within your job that gives you meaning, and what are some things that will help push you forward in life.

Once you have those points, it’s time to do a comparison. Does your current job help you make progress towards that purpose that you’ve written?

If it does, you’re on the right track. If it doesn’t, or if you’ve realized your life isn’t going where you want it to, don’t panic. There’re tools that can help you get through this.

Do your best to not focus on the negative. Review your goals and aim yourself in a positive direction, even if it means that you start small.

2. Change Your Approach and Don’t Give up

When something doesn’t feel right, it’s always a good time to take a moment and look for a different approach if you want to learn how to get motivation.

You may be doing everything correctly and efficiently, but such an approach isn’t necessarily the most motivating one. Quite often, you can find a number of obvious tweaks to your current approach that will both change your experience and open up new possibilities.

That’s why saying “one way or another” is so common—if you really want to accomplish your goal, there is always a way; and most likely, there’s more than one way.

If a certain approach doesn’t work for you, find another one, and keep trying until you find the one that will both keep you motivated and get you the desired results.

3. Recognize Your Progress

Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most big or long-term goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress.

We track our progress automatically with most activities, but to stay motivated, you need to recognize your progress, not merely track it. Tracking is merely taking note of having reached a certain stage in your process. Recognizing is taking time to look at the bigger picture and realize where exactly you are and how much more you have left to do.

For example, if you’re going to read a book, always start by going through the contents table. Getting familiar with chapter titles and memorizing their total number will make it easier for you to recognize your progress as you read. Confirming how many pages your book has before starting it is also a good idea.

Somehow, it is human nature to always want things to happen in short term or even at once. Even though we split complex tasks into simpler actions, we don’t quite feel the satisfaction until everything is done and the task is fully complete.

For many scenarios though, the task is so vast that such an approach will drain all the motivation out of you long before you have a chance to reach your goal. That’s why it is important to always take small steps and recognize the positive progress made. This is how to keep yourself motivated in the long-term.

4. Reward Yourself

Feeling down about doing something? Dread the idea of working on a particular task? Hate the whole idea of working?

Right from the beginning, agree on some deliverables that will justify yourself getting rewarded. As soon as you get one of the agreed results, take time to reward yourself in some way. This creates external motivators to help you feel motivated in the long run.

For some tasks, just taking a break and relaxing for a few minutes will do. For others, you may want to get a fresh cup of coffee and even treat yourself to dessert.

For even bigger and more demanding tasks, reward yourself by doing something even more enjoyable, like going to see a movie, taking a trip to some place nice, or even buying yourself something.

The more you reward yourself for making progress, the more motivated you will feel about reaching new milestones.

Final Thoughts on Staying Motivated

Happiness doesn’t need to be a vague term or illusion that you’re constantly chasing after with no end in sight. By finding your true motivation, you’ll be one step closer to realizing your happiness and finding meaning in everything you do.

You may have tried many solutions to help you stay motivated and found that none of them really have any impact. That’s because a permanent change requires a holistic approach. It requires more than just focusing on one area of your life or changing just one part of your routine or actions.

You want to make a fundamental change, but it feels like big, unknown territory that you can’t afford to venture into at this point in your life.

The truth is, taking your life to the next stage doesn’t have to be this complicated. So, if you’d like to take the first step to achieving your life purpose, the time to learn how to find motivation is now!  

Achieve your full potential! Book a complimentary coaching session to get the support you need at Business and Life Management Coaching.

Source: LifeHacks 

There is wisdom in knowing what you don’t know!

  There’s an important kind of wisdom in knowing what you don’t know.

Too often we fall into the delusion of thinking we know a lot more than we really do, commonly known as “illusory superiority.”

This can often make us stubborn in our beliefs and unwilling to accept new information. Ultimately, it stagnates our growth and inhibits development.

Recognizing what you don’t know actually puts you in a unique place of power. It can improve your choices in life and career, because it’s an honest view of your knowledge and capabilities, as well as your ignorance and limitations.

When you know that you don’t know something, there are a range of things you can do to improve the situation:

·       Knowing what you don’t know teaches you what areas you need to seek more information in.

·       Knowing what you don’t know gives you the opportunity to refer to someone else who can help you.

·       Knowing what you don’t know allows you to step back before making a hasty decision.

Understanding the limitations of your knowledge puts you at an advantage from people who overestimate their knowledge or aren’t aware of their own ignorance. This isn’t a negative thing, this is about being honest with yourself which means acknowledging both your strengths and your weaknesses.

To know more about what you don’t know, always be willing to test your beliefs and assumptions, however certain you may be that they are true.

It’s important to challenge your beliefs to see if they are backed by some amount of evidence, logic, and/or personal experience.

We can begin challenging our beliefs by asking ourselves questions, such as:

    “What caused me to form this belief? Where did I learn this?”

    “What kind of evidence would help support this belief as true?”

    “What kind of evidence would help support this belief as false?”

    “Are there alternative beliefs that may be just as valid, if not more?”

    “What’s one thing I don’t know that would be really useful in this situation?”

    “Does this belief conflict with any other beliefs I hold?”

Questions like these will give you some idea on the limitations of your beliefs and knowing what you know vs. what you don’t know.

If you are willing to keep an open mind about your beliefs and the possibility that you don’t have all the facts, you will be much better off than if you were to just take everything you believe as complete truth.

There is wisdom in knowing what you don’t know. Approach your beliefs with honesty and humility, and that will provide you with the flexibility you need to begin building a life of genuine happiness.

Achieve Your Full Potential! Book a complimentary session at Business and Life Management Coaching to get the tools and support you need to excel in your professional and personal life.

Having Presence and Charisma are Vital in Management!

What makes people interesting? Those with presence seem to create a halo effect around them.  There’s a sense of passion, confidence, enthusiasm, authenticity, captivation, and comfortableness about them.   So we say, “They have a presence.”

Try these habits that make both introverts and extroverts interesting:

1. Ditch the dominant demeanor. We were taught to shake with a firm hand and stand tall. But overdone nonverbal confidence makes the engagement all about you –which counter intuitively, makes you uninteresting.  Avoid the power poses.  Put aside the posture of self-importance or status and display approachable body language. 
   
2. Make the encounter about them. Practice the art of getting them to talk about themselves. Use your curiosity, politeness, and social graces. Ask how they did it, or what they learned about it, or what advice they would share. When you respect another person’s opinion, you are respecting the other person.
3. Be real. Allow yourself to be impressed. Compliment in a genuine manner. When you hear of an accomplishment, acknowledge it, inquire further and show interest. Engage more. People are temporarily impressed with the artificial, but sincerely like the authentic.
4. Give more than you get. Don’t underestimate the value of asking for nothing. People know when you are playing the networking card.  The hard charging, always-on-kind-of-person creates a desire to look for the exit routes. If you need something, give something first. The most interesting people focus on what they can do for you.
5. Make a great “last” impression. Instead of ending with, “nice to meet you” shake hands and say, “I really enjoyed talking with you.” Make eye contact with a genuine smile. Self-promotion takes very little self-awareness. Being interesting and having a sense of presence is built on being self-aware, not self-absorbed.

Effective managers and supervisors have this sense of presence.  When having a one-on-one work on these 5 habits.  Let your direct report tell you what’s going well. Find out where they are challenged and ask them where they need your support. Help them become productive and spend time showing interest in their progress.

Charisma and presence are vital in management and it all starts with your habits and how you present yourself to others.

A great read called "The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism" by Olivia Fox Cabane will further explore these skills.

Achieve your full potential! Expand your knowledge and enlighten your mind with tools to help you excel in life. Complimentary Coaching Session at: http://www.denisedema.com/

Why building rapport is so important to all professional relationships.

If you want to create superior relationships with your clients you must learn how to: Establish Rapport; Often confused with being liked, rapport has little to do with being liked but everything to do with connecting with your client on a level where you understand your client on both an intellectual and emotional level. The dictionary defines rapport as a “harmonious mutual understanding,” a meeting of the minds. Rapport may encourage the client to like you, but by no means is it necessary and certainly at times, rapport is present even while being liked is absent. Building rapport demands you focus your attention on your prospect or client, instead of what you want to get out of the session, what you’re going to say next, or how you’re going to get the signature on the contract. I’ve found that basic actions are the most effective at building rapport. Really listening to the client, hearing what they say instead of what I want them to say, making sure that I understand what they really mean, responding to the question they asked instead of the question I wanted them to ask, and answering their questions openly and honestly. In addition, asking questions that not only allow them to fully state their wants, needs, goals, and opinions, but that encourage them to do so.  Building rapport is about communication. Real skill comes in learning to verbally communicate, learning to listen while encouraging open dialogue and discussion. Learning to accept different points of view and learning how to give guidance and direction in a manner that supports the client will move them in the right direction rather than creating a chasm between yourself and your client.  Establish Trust; Trust, even more than rapport is critical for successful long-term client relationships. The dictionary defines trust as “a firm reliance on the integrity, ability, or character or a person or thing.” “Trust implies depth and assurance of feeling that is often based on inconclusive evidence.” Trust is difficult to establish and easy to lose. Trust for most people isn’t built on words alone but on a combination of words and actions. For most clients, trust isn’t established during a single meeting or even over a few meetings. Trust is earned by having one’s actions match their words. Building trust, just like building rapport, is an activity. It doesn’t just happen, it’s created by actively doing the things that build trust. Being honest in words and deeds, by being timely in doing exactly what you say you’re going to do and by putting your client’s good ahead of yours. If you really want to create strong, lasting relationships with your clients that will be the foundation of your business, that will generate strong client referrals for you, and that will produce business year after year, invest time and effort in learning the secrets of building rapport and trust. Don’t worry about being liked, being cute, or being their pal. Concentrate on being their trusted advisor, the one who really understands their wants and needs and who they know unselfishly pursues the best possible solution for them. That’s the secret to great client relationships.  My coaching and consulting business has been built solely on referrals for thirty years now through building rapport, establishing trust and providing result driven strategies within each engagement. I am viewed as a strategic business advisor who is truly invested in my clients long term success. When you master developing professional relationships you find that clients repeatedly seek you out instead of the other way around, and your business will continue to grow through those established relationships. Remember, "The key to longevity in business is having clients who create clients."  Achieve your full potential and book a complimentary session today at Business and Life Management Coaching

Are you highly sensitive or an Empath?

Are you impacted by the feelings of those around you? Do people describe you as empathetic? Perhaps you have always had the ability to feel the emotions and physical symptoms of others as if they were your own. If this rings true in your life, you may be an “empath.”

Only a small percentage of the population experience this type of sensitivity, having the ability to feel and absorb the emotions surrounding them. They likely view the world through their emotions and intuition rather than putting too much logic behind their decision making. While this characteristic can be a source of personal strength, it is also important to know how to manage common challenges of being an empath.

What is an Empath?

While there is significant research behind the feeling of empathy, there are very few studies focused primarily on empaths. What is known is that empaths likely have hyper-responsive mirror neurons — the group of brain cells responsible for triggering feelings like compassion — according to research findings. This makes it possible for someone to feel especially sensitive to electromagnetic fields generated by a person’s brain and heart and intuit the emotions felt by those around them. If there is an excited crowd or a group of people in mourning, the energy can be felt deep within an empath’s body.

For those who are more introverted empaths, they may be more sensitive to the brain chemical responsible for feeling pleasure — dopamine. In instances where too much stimulation occurs, an empath can feel overwhelmed. Over time, empaths can become programmed to avoid external stimulation or need very little of it to feel happy. Whether or not a person is introverted, some common side effects of hyper-sensitivity can include exhaustion, overload, depression, and anxiety. Often, when these feelings arise, it’s helpful to have some space to retreat to at home or a favorite outdoor spot you can recharge in.

When overwhelmed with stressful emotions, empaths can experience anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and fatigue and may even show physical symptoms such as an increased heart rate and headache. This is because they internalize the feelings and pain of others without the ability to distinguish it from their own. To help manage these overwhelming moments, it is important for empaths to identify their own thoughts and feelings, as much as possible, and separating them from those of others.

Signs You Are an Empath

1. You are introverted. Often, empaths become overwhelmed when in large groups of people. Rather than feeling positively impacted by those around you, you likely choose to be more introverted and prefer one-to-one and small-group interactions.

2. You are easily impacted by images and movies. Perhaps tears come quickly and easily when you watch a movie, or you may experience the emotion behind the subject of a photograph. In these instances, moments on screen and in print have a big effect on how you feel.

3. You are afraid of getting lost in relationships. Empaths likely have a history of getting completely absorbed by new relationships and are fearful of not having the right kind of boundaries in place. You might feel completely swallowed up and blur the lines between your feelings and those of the person you are in a relationship with.

4. You absorb other people’s emotions. Being in tune with what other people are experiencing, both good and bad, is a sign you are an empath. You may feel ambient emotions around you as if they were your own and become exhausted emotionally and even physically.

5. You are highly intuitive. Are you led by your own gut feelings about people? Empaths often listen to their inner thoughts when it comes to judging people, helping to spot positive relationships that help them feel their best.

Using Your Emotions as a Strength. For the nearly 15 to 20 percent of the population who are classified as “highly sensitive,” they feel more deeply and intensely than those around them. Their brains are processing information and reflecting on it in a powerful, nuanced way. While this behavior can be seen as being too sensitive, caring, or too attentive, these abilities can also be perceived as desirable — being exceptionally perceptive, intuitive, and hyper-observant. The trick is to find a way to manage and channel those (sometimes) uncomfortable emotions.

To guard against unpleasant or overwhelming emotions, empaths can employee different types of strategies to make daily experiences more palatable. Taking a methodological approach to time management, and setting firm boundaries with people who drain your energy, becomes invaluable. Additionally, knowing when meditation and stillness is needed can be an important way to regroup. The key is to find ways to take care of yourself and strategically respond to heightened feelings as they arise.

While more research is needed when it comes to understanding the science behind empaths and the reason why some people absorb feelings more readily than others, there are still ways to identify whether or not you experience empath-like tendencies. By understanding the signs and triggers for empaths, it is easier to leverage these abilities as strengths, while better managing any negative impacts. In any instance, it is important to understand your emotional needs and communicate them to those around you.  Source: Jessica DuBois-Maahs