How do you maintain your motivation?

Motivation is very personal. Some people are able to maintain their motivation, they just keep going on the path to achieve their goal, irrespective of whether the goal is in 3 months, 8 months or 2 years.

How do they do it? Their goal-setting strategy may be highly effective, and so is mine. Yet I’ve really struggled with motivation over the last few months.

I visualise my success regularly, I created a compelling future for myself. Yet, on these cold mornings, I still hit the snooze button rather than going out for my walk by the sea.

Over the last year or so I’ve been on a journey of weight release and by the end of October I’d released just over 6 stone. I was moving more easily, I was more active, I’d achieved significant personal milestones over the previous 7 months and my motivation then seemed to vanish. My goal was the same. My compelling future was the same.

Where on earth was my motivation?

Recently, I’ve been building the pre-course online study for an NLP Practitioner Certification that I will be delivering in May. I was writing the section on motivation strategies. The lightbulb went on – Eureka! 💡💡💡

You see there are two types of motivation, towards and away from.  Towards what we want or away from what we don’t want.

After analysing my motivation strategy, I realised that it was all about moving away from what I didn’t want.

I had reached a point where I knew I simply couldn’t go on with life as it was, everything was too much effort, every movement was painful, every task was exhausting. I wouldn’t go out or socialize. This meant that my weight release journey didn’t begin until things were so bad that I couldn’t cope with it anymore.  At that point, ‘away from’ was useful. It lit the fuse and propelled me into action.

Now, because I didn’t combine this with ‘towards’ motivation, my unconscious mind recognised that life is better, pain is less, I’ve been doing more, socialising more, walking more. It’s as if my unconscious mind said ‘Ah, OK, we’re not in the ‘I can’t do this anymore’ phase, we’ve moved away from that and things are better, time for me to stand down’.

Bye bye motivation! 👋👋👋

Of course, if all my motivation had been based on ‘towards’ something, then I may well not have even got started at all! 🤔

A Balanced Motivation Strategy

Now, I’m creating a different strategy, one that combines ‘away from’ and ‘towards’.  The ‘away from’ element consists of what I don’t want to go back to and away from this feeling of ‘being stuck’.

The ‘towards’ element is all about what I want to do. Not simply a feeling of freedom or of being ‘unleashed’. It’s about specific things that I want to do by the end of this year, it’s specifically about the type of person I want to be.

I’ve created a rich tapestry in my mind, seeing myself doing all these things, feeling what they mean to me, feeling the value of it all, feeling the purpose of it. Seeing myself experiencing all these things, hearing the positive and supportive voice of my inner-cheerleader, hearing my internal dialogue as I achieve everything I want to achieve, hearing the sounds around me, the laughter, the joy.

This is a motivation strategy that gives me enough ‘away from’ to light the fuse and get me started and also provides the fuel to keep propelling me towards my desired future.

That’s not to say that there won’t be tough days; who knows what life will throw at us over the next 12 months? The difference is that I now know I have a helpful motivation strategy that will allow me to fire myself up when I need to and it will sustain me in the long term.

I began using my new motivation strategy a month ago, and the great news – it’s working! 🥳

How will you maintain your motivation?

Imagine if you could identify your own strategies, break them down and make them more helpful?

What if you could help your children install helpful strategies for learning, spelling, revision, decision-making and motivation?

What would it do for you if you could determine the decision-making strategy of your boss? Or a prospective client’s buying strategy?

To discover this and much, much more, sign up for our NLP Practitioner Training. By combining the best of online learning and face-to-face training, we are able to offer an intensive ‘in person’ course of 5 days along with online pre-course learning.  Find out more here: NLP Training

Interested in 121 support? Check out ‘Coaching with Cake’ to see the various ways we can work together, from one-off sessions to create your inner-cheerleader to intensive day-long breakthrough sessions. All options are available face to face and via Zoom  Coaching with CAKE

If you want to have a chat about coaching or NLP and find out if it’s right for you, book in for a free, no-obligation chat. You’ll come away with a couple of nuggets to help you, whether you decide to work with me or not. BOOK CALL