How to Motivate Yourself

Motivation is one of the core qualities required for success in many areas. Without motivation, you are likely to not do anything towards your goals, which will guarantee failure, regardless of what other qualities and skills you have. As such, motivation is the first thing that should be developed.

A lot of people think of motivation as the excited speaker or sports coach that yells at you to get you to do something. Although having someone yelling at you can create temporary motivation, it’s not motivation itself. This program on motivation won’t yell at you, nor will it require that you yell at yourself, although you certainly may if you want to.

In order to develop natural motivation, there are several components that need to be in place. There are a few pre-existing conditions that are required any time you want to generate motivation to pursue a goal. These conditions are: adequate rest, proper balance in diet, adequate physical exercise, and plenty of oxygen. These conditions will prepare your body, which will provide a healthy environment for your mind.

Once your body is prepared, motivation can be created in your mind. Here again, there are several factors involved in the process. You must choose to focus on the process. Whether you are able to maintain that focus at this point or not is not relevant. Whatever degree of focus that you are able to devote to the process will be sufficient, as it will grow in time and with use.

With this focus, you will repeat many different statements to yourself, imagining these statements as being reality. In the beginning, you will notice a difference between the statements and what you’ve experienced up until this time. As you continue with the process, your inner mind will begin to accept the statements as being true for you, and you may even begin remembering times in the past when these statements did seem to be true. Eventually, you will only remember the experiences that support the new statements of belief, and they will be as true for you then as your current beliefs are now. The time required to reach this point is different for every individual and depends on many pre-existing beliefs and conditions. But as one step at a time will take you across the continent, one statement at a time will change your beliefs.

The first set of statements that you will ‘program’ into your inner mind deal with your belief in yourself. Without belief in yourself, you will not be motivated to try anything. And the more difficult the task ahead of you, the stronger your belief in yourself needs to be. A lot of people seem to feel that they are worthless, or not capable of anything, and this shows a very weak belief in themselves. Other people feel that they can do anything and nothing can stop them. This indicates a very strong self belief. The majority of the world fits between these two extremes. Wherever you sit on this scale of self belief, the process I am outlining will move you higher along the scale. The type of statements that fall into this category sound like “I am valuable. I can do anything I want to do. I have a natural tendency to do the right thing at the right time. I do what I need to do when I need to do it.”

The next set of beliefs that you will program into your inner mind will refer to your belief in the activity that you want to feel motivated to perform. These beliefs will focus primarily on the results you belief will come from performing the activity. For instance, if you want to motivate yourself to get more physical exercise, then these statements of belief will be about the benefits of exercise – good health, more energy, greater attractiveness, longer life, greater stamina, and that kind of thing. If you are wanting to motivate yourself to become more outgoing in social situations, your statements will focus on winning more friends, finding more opportunities, having fun, gaining respect, gaining authority, and other such benefits. The more benefits you believe are waiting for you in performing the activity you are considering, the more motivated you will be.

The third set of statements connects the first two sets and work to create an expectation of success. Belief in success comes from believing that you can achieve the expected results of an activity. These ‘bridge’ statements are important in order to amplify the effect of the first two sets of statements. The simplest statement, which can be used in all situations, is “I can do it. I will succeed.” Straight from the old story of “The Little Engine That Could”, you could also use the phrase “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”

Statements affirming your expectation of enjoying the process of your chosen activity are the next set to focus on. These statements will propel your inner nature towards the activity, rather than away from it, which can happen if you believe that the activity will be painful or uncomfortable. We all have a natural motivation to do what is pleasurable, and to avoid what is uncomfortable. In with this set of statements, you can include statements that affirm the pain of not doing what you are setting out to do. These statements will sound like “I’m really going to enjoy this. I always feel good doing this. This is fun! I always get a charge out of _____________(describe activity).”

Between these four sets of statements, you will be developing a tremendous motivation for the particular activity you are working with. Each one of them will help, but the combination of all of them is simply unstoppable! However, one more set of statements (with 4 divisions within the set) will take your motivation even further.

This last set of statements will fan the flames of your desires. Desire is sometimes seen as another word for motivation, and in truth there are many similarities. This set of statements will have you affirming your desire for 4 things; improvement in general, excellence in yourself and in everything you do, the goal you are wanting to attain, and the activity that will get you to the goal. These statements will be phrased as “I want ________. I enjoy ___________. _____________ makes me happy. I am _____________ (insert a label applied to those who are what you want to be, or do what you want to do).

Now, to actually use this process, you need to create a list of statements that fill the above categories. Write down as many statements as you can possibly think of that fit the definitions given. The more statements the better. Don’t worry at first about the order of statements, just get them down on paper (or typed into your computer if that works better for you). Try to come up with at least 20 statements for each category, or about 100 statements in total.

Once you have your list down, you can proceed in two ways. You can either read the list of statements over and over again, or record them and listen to them over and over again. Trying to memorize the statements either way works wonderfully! The advantage of reading the statements is that you are seeing the words at the same time you are hearing your voice. The advantage of recording the statements and listening to them is that you can review them more often in more situations (such as driving or performing a physical activity).

Something else you can do to make this process more fun and more effective is to sing the statements. Song has a tendency to bypass our outer conscious mind and take the messages directly to our inner minds. If there is a particular category of statements that you feel you need to work with more, you can condense the overall message into a little sing-song chant and sing it over and over again while you are working on other things. When other people are around and you don’t want them to hear your chant, you can sing it internally without using your voice and you’ll get most of the same benefit.

And the most powerful thing you can do when working with your motivational statements is to imagine what life will be like when you are totally motivated to do the right thing at the right time. By imaging yourself being the type of person you want to be, you are programming your inner mind to a much deeper level than any words can go. Words, pictures, feelings, and a complete sensory experience available only in your imagination together can create an extremely powerful environment for mental programming. And by using this to program the motivation you want, you will be able to create change quickly.