SERIES: "Nurture Your Talent"
Propel career through self-motivation - By: Mr. GP Gupta
Self-motivation or the ability to motivate ourself is one of the most important skill in every human being especially in leadership roles. It helps us to carry on despite adverse circumstances.
Personal motivation can come from various places in life. It could be a promotion at work or admission to the university of your dreams. But understanding what comes naturally to us and what pushes us to perform better lies at the heart of self-motivation.
What Is Self-Motivation?
Self-motivation is the reason why we do what we do. To put it simply, it’s the reason why we go to work, why we love our family, and why we enjoy traveling or reading. It’s about knowing what we really want and pursue it.
The meaning of self-motivated is derived from passion and an underlying desire to achieve something. Personal motivation is a key driving force in our professional journey. Nothing can stand in our way if we’re sure of what we want to do and how we want to do it.
Self-motivation can be developed if we leverage our strengths to our advantage.
Why Is Self-Motivation Important?
Self-motivation is important because it does not let us depend on others and drives us tap our strengths to meet our goals. It also helps us to ensure that we work on our weaknesses and don’t let them hinder our plans.
Here are some key aspects of Self-Motivation and ‘Why weneed to build it’:
1. Achieving Personal Goals
Try to understand the meaning of self-motivated in the context of our personal life. Reasons such as lack of funds, trepidation about visiting a new country or a fear of stepping out of our comfort zone will always hold us back. The first step comes from conviction and determination. We have to believe in our self and convince our self that we can do anything we put our mind to.
2. Doing Well In A Professional Setting
To really do well at work, we need to know our strengths and weaknesses. Self-motivation drives us to move past setbacks and failures to learn from our mistakes. It’s easy to feel bogged down at work, especially when we have a deadline coming up and we’re already running behind schedule.
3. Surviving In a Competitive World
The world may throw problem after problem at us, but if we’re motivated we can overcome any challenge. To hold out against the competition is one of the most useful skills we can develop. Not only does it give us the power to withstand setbacks but also helps us grow as an individual.
We can approach this problem in two ways. We can either continue to feel discouraged or we can buckle up and get moving. Part of personal motivation is to push ourself to face every hurdle that comes along.
What Are Internal And External Motivators?
What we think, do or say is determined by both internal and external factors.
Internal motivators:-
1. Include our thoughts
2. Passion
3. Desire to do something.
External motivators:-
1. Buying a house
2. Performing well at work. etc
Every day we have to strive to strike a balance between internal and external motivators. Internal motivators are back bone of any successful person. When you move up in life, lot of people may not like it or may misguide you in this competitive world, it is your internal motivation which will keep you going. Self-motivation helps us persevere and deal with testing situations on a daily basis.
Ways To Sustain Self-Motivation
We’ve all heard the saying “you are your own worst critic”. Instead of telling ourself why we can’t do something, think of why we can. We can do a lot more than we give our self-credit for. Work hard to refine our existing skills so that we become the best version ofourself. Nurture you talent.
However, it’s important to remember that because we’re feeling motivated today doesn’t guarantee we’ll feel motivated tomorrow. This is a continuous process where we have to act as a personal coach to train our thought process.
Some Self-Motivation practices to achieve our long-term goals:
1. Adopt apositive belief system
Always remain positive. It’s not easy to stay positive in this over jealous world, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try. Make you own positive world. Stay away from the people who give you negativity and discourage you. Always remain the company of positive people who encourage you and you will good after meeting them and talking to them. Adopting a positive belief system can help us during difficult times. Try to inculcate positive habits and embrace positive thoughts to block negativity. Trust in God.
To apply “the power of positive thinking”, do the following:
• Become aware of our thoughts. Write down these throughout the day.
• Challenge our negative thoughts and replace them with positive ones.
• Create a strong and vivid picture of what it will be like to achieve the goals.
• Develop affirmation or statements that we can repeat to our self throughout the day. These statements remind us of what we want to achieve, and why we should achieve it.
• Practice positive thinking until we automatically think about our self and the world in a positive way, every day.
2. Self-Confidence
• Thinking about the achievements in our life.
• Examining our strengths to understand what we can build on.
• Determine what other people see as our strengths and key capabilities.
• Set achievable goals for our self, work to achieve them, and enjoy that achievement.
• Seek out mentors and other people who model the competencies, skills and attributes our desire.
3. Vision Boards
A great source of personal motivation is a vision board. Creating a vision board and adding pictures of things we wish to buy, our favorite bands or artists we want to meet, our dream travel destination and one thing we want to achieve in the next year. That’ll serve as a constant reminder to get moving on your goals.
4. Focus Our Attention On The Most Important Task
Prioritizing our tasks to motivate ourself. The good way to categorize our to-do list is to mark them as the ‘urgent-important matrix’ to categorize tasks as ‘urgent’, ‘not urgent’, and ‘important’ and ‘not important’. This is a useful tool to prioritize tasks and work on the ones that require immediate attention.
5. Focus and Strong Goals
Our goal should have the following characteristics:
• Clarity - Effective goals are clear, measurable, specific, and based on behavior, not outcomes.
• Challenge - Goals should be difficult enough to be interesting, but not so difficult that we can't reach them.
• Commitment - Goals should be attainable, and should be relevant - that is, they should contribute in a significant way to the major objectives we're trying to achieve.
• Regularity of Feedback - Monitor our progress towards our goals regularly to maintain our sense of momentum and enthusiasm, and enjoy our progress towards those goals.
• Sufficient Respect For Complexity - If the goal involves complex work, make sure that we don't over-commit yourself. Complex work can take an unpredictably long time to complete (particularly if we have to learn how to do the task "on the job").
6. Nature Is Therapeutic
Now more than ever, we understand the importance of connecting with our natural environment. Going to the neighborhood park and enjoying a leisurely walk outdoors as much as possible. Will help to organize our thoughts and think clearly.
7. Music Can Lift Our Soul
It may be a tired cliché but music can really lift our soul. There’ll be multiple situations when we won’t know what to do. In such cases, music can be the escape we need to clear our head and come up with an action plan
Personal motivation is important because it gives us room to think about ourself.
Please remember our ability only decides ‘what we can do’, however our motivation decides what we will actually do’!
Always stay self-motivated!
