More often than not, we as humans look to create positive momentum in our lives by identifying one massive item that we can adjust to create change and generate motivation. The realistic approach is to take a bite sized strategy to achieve newfound motivation. With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of 15 simple things you can do to boost your daily motivation.
1. Identify and Establish a Long Term Goal
Motivation can feel as fickle as the weather man’s daily predictions. But there are numerous ways to boost your daily motivation and ensure that you are on a track of success in your pursuits in life. When working to achieve that required boost in your pursuit, the first step has to be for you to create a long term, over-arching goal that you will start to work towards. Rome may have not been built in a day but the idea of what it was to be had to exist before the end result ever materialized. In the same way, you have to be strategic in creating a long term goal and then working to pursue relentlessly. The hard part is figuring out the goal:
The Surefire Way to Set Long Term Goals and Reach Success The easy part? Activating that boost in your daily motivation (with the help of the rest of this list, of course!)
2. Target Milestones in Your Daily Pursuit
Keeping your long term goal in mind, the next step in this journey of keeping your motivation levels sky high is to create bite sized goals within the larger goal for you to pursue. The simple but effective quote comes to mind:
“How does one eat an Elephant? One bite at a time.”
It may be cheesy but the general point remains true. You won’t have any luck losing 50 pounds if you are trying to do so in the span of a week. But if you create target milestones within the long term pursuit of being more fit, then you will experience the joys of the smaller victories that will lead you down the path of achieving that larger goal. Those small victories will give you a powerful feeling of accomplishment and continue to transform your daily motivational levels for the better. In time, those victories will compound and your motivation will only continue to grow as you continue to check off more of the boxes towards your overall goal!
3. From Checking Boxes to Cashing Checks
In creating target milestones within your over-arching goal, it is even more important to setup checkpoints within those milestones where you reward yourself for your efforts thus far. As a parent, it can sometimes be much easier to get my child to comply with a request if I include a small prize for said compliance. We often encourage our daughter to brush her teeth after which we give her a tasty vitamin gummy, and this has helped establish a positive habit in her morning ritual. If you have identified your target milestones, pick a few of those and add some kind of reward as a pairing with accomplishing that milestone. Much like pairing a delicious cut of cheese with a fine wine! It really can be anything that you actually believe. It will help incentivize yourself to continue down your path of self-betterment as long as it helps to maintain your motivation, and doesn’t interfere with your long-term goal. Keep in mind the reward shouldn’t in itself be a negating factor towards your long term pursuit.
4. Firm Up Your Foundation
Considering the first few steps in boosting your daily motivation levels, have you really spent much time considering the purpose behind your pursuit? Having a true understanding into the foundation of why you are pursuing a goal will help you to keep after it in the long term. Do you know why you are trying to pursue that goal? Spending thought and time
defining your purpose behind the pursuit of a long-term goal, will allow for a more successful path and an extended duration of that journey towards the goal. That strong foundation will serve as a friendly reminder that allows you to keep those motivational levels boosted, and in a place that will lead to continued success as you move forward towards your target milestones.
5. Publicly Commit
I’ve found that when I’m willing to make a more public facing commitment to accomplish something, I have a stronger tendency to push through and maintain my daily motivation in that pursuit. When more people are aware of your pursuit, the pressure to not fail starts to accumulate on the brain. While pressure at times can be detrimental to a pursuit, I think that a little social pressure can be a healthy thing to keep you focused on the task at hand. When I know that my parents, significant other, friends, or co-workers are aware of my pursuit, I am more likely to strive towards my end goal with more sincerity. Similarly, it was much easier for me to workout, exercise, and eat properly in high school when I had a basketball coach that reminded me each day why I was actively pursuing being better. Now that I’m an adult and don’t have that built-in coach in my life, I find it more challenging to maintain those pushes to be better. While it is a simple gesture, opening yourself up to the “public” and making a pronouncement of your intentions can serve as a strong motivating tool for you to keep on keeping on.
6. Meet Motivated People
Too often, we make attempts to increase our motivational levels on a day to day basis without examining the people who are influencing our life’s direction. If you are supposed to be
the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with, where does that leave you? You should strive to seek out people both in your professional career and in your personal life that are more successful than you are. If you are lacking motivation in life, try to be in regular contact with friends of yours or peers in the workplace who have the levels of motivation that you desire. Do what you can to learn from them! What empowers them day in and day out to maintain high levels of motivation and accomplish their goals?
7. Develop an Accountability Team
We all have the best intentions when we set out towards any specific goal in our life but, life has that pesky mannerism of getting in our way from time to time which leads to those inevitable collapses in our motivational levels. This is the time in your journey when a team of friends, family, your significant other (anyone who you’d put in your corner if you were a boxer), need to jump in on your behalf and remind you of what you set out to do originally. Sometimes, your accountability team may be a group of strangers that all share a common cause (weight loss groups, group therapy, basketball teammates) and sometimes, they are people with whom you are very intimate. Whatever it looks like for you, this team to help you maintain your promise to YOU, is so vital to your success when you start coming up on roadblocks to your daily motivational levels. Keeping this team on speed dial will be a life saver when you have those Monday blues and begin considering the abandonment of a goal. They will be the ones who you can “trust fall” back on and can help pick you back up, inject you with confidence and restore that motivation that you started with!
8. Consider Future Impasses
The prospect of boosting our motivational levels on a day to day basis and maintaining them over the long term is well and good but, you must remember that the road won’t always be silky smooth. A key aspect of journeying to a better place in your own life and in pursuit of your goals and dreams is considering the direction that you are headed and plan for future successes AND failures. What obstacles lay ahead of you that you believe you will need to be prepared to face? Without considering what challenges are to come as you pursue stronger motivation to push forward towards a better life, you will smash into some road blocks that stop you in your tracks. If you take the time to consider the trajectory of your path through life and mentally set aside the energy and time to consider what pitfalls may come along the way, then when those challenges materialize, you will be more prepared and able to handle them. Take the time in your pursuits to consider where in your pathway you might come across the flashing hazards signs and know what your game plan to address them will be ahead of time. The knowing itself is such a huge element that can help you to defeat your proverbial enemies and will allow for your motivation to stay strong!
9. Fuel Your Success
Consider too, not just your mental health a moment to evaluate the fuel you use on a daily basis to give you energy for the day. Are you slamming pizzas in the evening and donuts for breakfast? Your physical body and how you care for it has a direct and immense impact on your mental state, motivational levels, and energy to get after life in a positive way! My family has taken steps to discontinue our eating of processed, frozen foods and opted for more whole foods, vegetables, fruits, and grains to fuel our success throughout the week. Instead of snacking on a bag of chips for an afternoon snack, I try to incorporate a cheese stick and some grapes! Take a look at what it is that you eat on a daily basis and ask yourself if you should make some subtle changes in what you consume to better maintain those energy levels and keep your motivation boosted.
10. Energize Your Pursuit
I’ve got a confession to make and it might sound a bit crazy but here it goes: I love coffee. Each and every morning, I allow myself a cup to get the day going and on the really tough days when my motivation to get moving for the work day is low, I might even sneak in a second. I’m amazed at the people who have gone entire lifetimes without utilizing a cup of joe to get their day fired up. I actually question those people’s sanity because who the heck doesn’t like coffee?! No matter, coffee and/or tea is such a fantastic way to get your body in a routine of fully waking up, activating your awareness and starting the day off on the right foot. What better way to boost your daily motivation than to wake up with a fresh injection of caffeine to clear the fog out of the attic?
Research from the American Heart Association shows that:((American Heart Association: Is coffee good for you or not?))
“[Drinking coffee] gives you energy and may help you lose weight and sharpen your mental focus, thanks to the magic of caffeine. Studies have shown that caffeine may improve your mood, help your brain work better and improve performance during exercise.”
That same study did go on to warn readers that while drinking coffee has clear health benefits, the manner in which you take your coffee will play a part in whether it is good for you or not as “fancier drinks” or sugar loaded coffees will end up hurting you more than they help you. Over
consumption of caffeine can be just as bad as well especially if it interrupts your normal sleep cycle.
11. Catch Some Z’s!
According to the National Herat, Lung, and Blood Institute,((National Herat, Lung, and Blood Institute:
Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency))
“Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout your life. […] The damage from sleep deficiency can occur in an instant, or it can harm you over time. [Sleep deficiency] can affect how well you think, react, work, learn, and get along with others.”
When I find myself with a strong lack of motivation at work, I often look to examine my most recent week of sleep habits as that can often play a contributing role into my inability to stay on task and motivated. Sleep gives our body and mind the time to reset, recharge, and repair the damage that we do in our day to day movements through life, which is why it is so crucial to take the time to get proper rest. The NHLBI recommends 7-8 hours of sleep for Adults aged 18 years or older which is difficult to achieve at times but, so relevant to your quest to boost those daily motivational levels. Simply put, if you aren’t sleeping enough, you’ll find little success in your pursuit to have more energy for the areas that you really care about being productive in within your life.
12. Making Moves to Materialize Motivation!
Some of the greatest tools for building up your motivation levels are simple yet superbly effective. Exercise is a huge part of contributing towards a healthy mind and body. If you can get out and exercise on a regular basis, your motivation to continue and exercise will actually increase. According to a study referenced in the Men’s Journal by the University of Copenhagen,((Men's Journal:
Moderate Exercise Increases Motivation))
“moderate exercise could increase your motivation to work out and lead to an all-around healthier lifestyle.”
So just by working out 30 minutes a day, research shows that your desire to continue with that positive behavior will increase. Even if you are just walking for 30 minutes each day as your form of exercise, that can be a great way to take strides towards a healthier mind and body. The better off you are mentally and physically, the stronger your daily motivation to be better overall and pursue a long-term goal, will be.
13. Know Yourself
You know yourself best and you will be most aware of your internal weaknesses, patterns of behaviors, and path to having a decrease in motivation levels towards a specific goal. Exercise your self-awareness and plan ahead for potential areas of failure that you have encountered in the past. If you work to navigate away from your previous areas of failure that may have led to a decrease in daily motivational levels, then you will obviously have stronger potential for success. Maintaining a real grasp on our own bad habits and areas of weakness, and ensuring that we disallow those bad habits to kick back in, or weaknesses to re-materialize are so key to maintaining high motivation levels on a day to day basis. Changing habits is hard and is a daily pursuit. But if you can first control your thoughts and responses to a situation, then those conditioned responses will eventually convert into new positive habits, which in turn will eventually recondition your personality and behavior. All of this work and effort will go far in increasing your day to day motivational levels!
14. Overcome Your Fears
The retreat of motivational levels in my opinion is often related to self-doubt or internal fears creeping into your mind. So often when we are near the peak of a success, we revert to a previous version of ourselves in our mind and allow fear to dictate our ability to continue on instead of reality. The truth is that internal fear is a mental block that we often allow to enter the equation, and we allow it to bully us out of a pursuit or aspiration. However I must emphasize that fear is something that you can overcome! If you work to face your fears, then you will begin to realize that they don’t have any power unless that power is given to those fears by the individual. Fear is merely an idea and if you overcome it, you will find that there isn’t much of anything holding you back from success! Motivation levels will continue to grow as you’ve removed yet another obstacle from your internal thought process and allowed more space in your head to build yourself up, implement positive self-talk, and continue to grow in your confidence. Take a look at this guide written by Mandie Holgate on how to overcome your fears:
How to Overcome Your Irrational Fears (That Stop You from Succeeding)
15. Pool Your Victories
When you’ve been working at a goal for a long time and painstakingly maintained a strong foundation of motivation throughout the pursuit, it’s just as important that you take the appropriate time to marinate in that victory. Success doesn’t come easy and it never happens over-night. Your strive to increase your motivation and do so on a day after day basis is not without pitfalls. But in the end, when you work so hard to keep that effort up and see it through, you will experience the benefits of that journey. Victory never comes easy, so make sure you give yourself some credit and take the time to appreciate your growth through that journey to be more motivated and reach your long term goals! Revel in your victory! Count your chickens because after all of that time, patience, hunger and internal doubt, you have finally accomplished your goal. Even if it is a small victory, with each one that you rack up in your life you will grow your confidence in what you are doing and your motivational levels will benefit because of this. After you get that initial taste of a win, it builds up your desire to see future success and as a direct result, you will see your motivation grow even stronger and more resilient than it has ever been!
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