Where Motivation Comes From
You can’t achieve the goals you set for yourself unless you consistently take action. And you can’t consistently take action unless you’re strongly motivated. And you can’t become strongly motivated until …
Until … until you expect to succeed in advance.
The common thread in motivated people
When you look at people who consistently achieve the goals they set for themselves – these are the people who take consistent action regardless of the odds or obstacles that stand in their way – you’ll see that they all have this in common. They’ve committed in their mind that they are going to succeed, even if it’s a longer road, or a tougher fight than they signed up for. When it comes to motivation, expectation is everything.
Expectation is so important to your motivation because essentially, it’s the deciding factor in whether you feel like it’s “worth it” to take action. Think about it this way: If you were told that you could earn $100,000 dollars simply by exercising 30 minutes a day, every day for a month, how motivated would you be to do it for 30 days straight?
You’d be phenomenally motivated. Unless you were so well off that $100,000 was meaningless to you, you would guarantee that nothing stood in the way of you and 30 minutes of exercise evey day. The certainty of that exercise transforming into cash would drive you to take action, no matter what.
How motivation levels change
Now, what if I told you that the rules had changed … and that now, if you exercised 30 minutes a day for a month, you could still win $100,000, but you now had to flip a coin to see to see if you’d win it? Would you still feel as motivated? Most likely not. Even though your chances of winning the cash are still 50 percent, you’re now only 50% sure that all that exercise would be “worth it.” There’s a level of doubt that seeps into your mind, and you can feel the difference between the level of motivation you have now and the level that you had just a moment ago, when your chances of winning were 100%.
Now let’s take it a step further. Suppose that to be eligible to win the $100,000 you still had to exercise 30 minutes a day for 30 days, but now the test was for you and ten other people to pick a number between 1 and 10 out of a hat, and to see if it matched the number I was thinking of. How’s your motivation level now that you’ve moved from a 100% chance of winning to a 10% chance?
With such drastically reduced odds, you have to ask the question, “Is it worth doing so much exercise simply for a ‘chance’ to win?” Your answer will essentially hinge on how you feel about your possibility of winning. If you say to yourself, “Chances are, I won’t win,” then you’re very unlikely to follow through.
But what if you looked at it with a stronger sense of expectation? What if you said to yourself, “Somebody’s going to win this, and it might as well be me.” Or, “I’m not going to miss out on my chance to win.” If you strongly believed statements like these, your ability to take action would shoot through the roof.
Here’s how this applies to your life
If you’re struggling with getting the motivation to do something, you’re struggling with an expectation issue – on some level, you either don’t believe it will work out, or you believe that the process of taking action itself is likely to yield some unpleasant side effects, like having to deal with uncomfortable issues.
Let’s just focus on the first part for the moment. When you don’t believe your chance of success is very high, you’re simply not going to see much value in pushing forward and taking action. You’ve got to strongly believe that your chances of succeeding are high – and not just within your time frame. That’s the kind of feeling that will make taking action seem “worth it,” even when there are a lot of things working to sap your motivation.
This is the heart of every major success story. There are people you know of (or at least read about) who have achieved amazing things, not because they were extra talented, but because they made the image of victory concrete in their minds. They decided in advance that they would never stop believing that they could achieve their goals, no matter what difficulties lay ahead of them.
They didn’t care if the time frame ended up being longer than they had hoped. They didn’t care if the road was rougher than they would have liked. They just decided up front that they would find the way to succeed, no matter what, no matter how long it took.
What you can do right now to increase your motivation
In an upcoming article series we’re going to dive into the specific things you can do to make your motivation bulletproof – to make it easy to have full confidence that the goals you set not only can be achieved, but will be achieved. For now, though, you need to listen to the conversations you’re having in your head about your goals and pay close attention to anything you’re saying to yourself that’s sapping your confidence in your eventual success.
When you come to one of those moments, when you realize you’re not feeling too confident you’ll be able to achieve one of your goals, step back immediately and ask yourself, “What would I have to focus on to feel 100% sure that I would eventually get this goal, no matter what?” This is your “food for thought.” Kick this question around in your mind while you’re waiting for the articles in this Motivation series and warm your brain up to the idea of achieving more than you think you can. Work on this starting today. You’ll thank yourself for it.
For additional insight, read the following article:
Comments