What is your Motivation?

By on January 7, 2011

Motivation

There are times when people ask me about motivation and what drives me on to achieve the things I want to do. The thing is, I could tell you, but it would probably not resonate with you. Everyone is different and what motivates me won’t necessarily motivate you, even if our goals are similar. So you have to ask yourself…..”what are my goals?, what do I want to achieve? and how can I realise them?”

However, many people have dreams but few realise them and there are a variety of reasons and I find a lot of them are to do with fear.

Fear

Fear of failure, fear of losing friends, fear of success (after all success might be an unknown to you and mean the people you know and care about may resent the fact) and even fear of fear! Fear is a big driver on holding people back and even though this is about motivation, fear can stifle you dreams if you let it.

But wait, many people don’t realise than fear is just an emotion, a feeling, just as happiness is and sadness and anger. My point is is that fear cannot hurt you! in fact motivation is a big factor in overcoming your fear! the bigger the motivation the bigger the chance that despite feeling fear, you will do it anyway.

Motivation

Another reason for a lack of motivation is the result of your individual programming and who you associate with!  Surrounding yourself with the right people has a massive influence on success. If you want to do something and everyone around you is telling you that you can’t, what do you think you will want to do? On the flip side, if everyone around you is full of encouragement, where do you think that could lead??

Two Motivation Types?

The other point on motivation is that there are two types. Internal and external.

External motivation is provided by other people giving inspirational speeches or talks, or a training partner or coach encouraging you to push hard to achieve your desired results. This is great to give you a kick start, but I am sure you have experienced that once you finish training or come away from a motivational talk, your motivation and desire can fade. Now I am not saying that it is pointless, it is far from it but after a while your inner voice will then fall back into how it is programmed and will start finding every reason why not to do something and encourage you to do what you have always done.

This is why you have to reinforce your desires through Internal Motivation!

I have mentioned on here before about your inner voice, your subconscious, which takes in every bit of information from around you, what you say and how you say it , what you listen to and see on the tv, what other people are saying and even what you are reading. It is like food for the brain and like food you can consume good stuff that keeps you healthy and Junk that makes you feel crap.

Because of that it is very easily to fall into a habit of capitulation that your inner voice will reinforce, just as you have programmed it to do.

Change your habits

The good news is that you can change the way you think to help sustain your motivation and to get exactly where you want to go. Change they way you speak, use more positive words, “keep going” is way more positive than “don’t stop”. Even though they are taken as meaning the same thing, one is a negative sentence and one is positive and your brain will read it as such.

Use positive affirmations about yourself, tell yourself how great you feel, how great you are. You may not beleive it, but your inner voice doesn’t judge and just accepts it! Pretty soon you will be able to change you old habits to new good habits that with push your motivation through the roof!

Make sure you are hanging around and talking to more like minded people more often, than comes under external motivation, but both internal and external go hand in hand to get you where you want to be.

Visualisation

One final technique is through the use of visualisation. Thinking about what you want achieve isn’t enough, but by using visualisation you think about it, but to the point that you see every detail of where you want to be, how it sounds, smells, looks like and how it feels. The more information you can use the more believable it is, especially to your brain.

Motivation is a great thing, DO NOT let yourself keep your dreams as dreams, REALISE THEM. Make it happen, find like minded people, Bin the media (TV and newspapers), read inspiring books by inspiring people, think positively and talk to yourself in positive way regardless whether you believe it and just see what happens!

I have added some links to some books I recommend on motivation from amazon…..

Take your life and move it forwards.

 

Take care

 

Dean

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About Dean Coulson

• International Best Selling Author of the Fit Formula • Feature writer on Nutrition for the Uk’s biggest selling Martial arts magazine – Martial Arts Illustrated • Presenter & speaker - Tour the UK with Bafta Award Winning writer Geoff Thompson. (www.geofthompsoninspired.com ) • Owner and Performance coach at Assert Fitness Ltd. Taking our clients Dreams and makes them a reality, through the realms of coaching all aspects of health and fitness to busy professionals. • www.assert-fitness.co.uk , www.deancoulson.co.uk

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