Self Motivation

Developing and Maintaining Your Self Motivation

To be truly successful and perform to the best of your ability it helps to have a level of self motivation that keeps you driven on a daily basis. Self motivation helps you to set an achieve goals both in your personal and professional lives.

While discouragement and lack of motivation can hit you ate any time, and in fact does affect most people at least once in their lives, it is important to have some techniques on hand to combat this so that you can quickly bounce back once again back on the road to success.

Two of the main techniques for helping you maintain your self motivation include the use of visual goals and the use of written contracts. These two things alone can help you achieve goals that you never even imagined were possible. Let's explore each of them here in a little more detail.

If you are aiming for something - and most people are - then no matter what your goal is - a car, a holiday, a new home or even to have a baby, then whatever it is that you are working for, make it visual. You can do this by cutting out pictures that show your goal or that represent your goal in some way. Take some time to adhere these pictures, images or however you wish to represent them, on a large sheet of poster board. Now find somewhere to hang this visual representation. It might be in your bedroom, in your office or in your bathroom. Make sure it is in a place that you will visit often as you want to be reminded of your goals everyday.

This technique works well for goals that are things we want. The more visual and more real you can make the goal, the better it will work at keeping you motivated.

So what about written contracts? Research tells us that overwhelmingly the people who write out what they are going to do are far more successful in achieving their goals, than people who only verbally tell themselves they will do something. In addition, more often people who make contracts with themselves will achieve more of their goals because they are committed to them on paper. This is because putting something in writing makes it psychologically more powerful.

You can make a contract for your goals right now. In the contract, state what you will do, when you will complete the task and what your reward will be once the contract is fulfilled. Read this contract that you written to yourself every morning and every evening before going to bed.