Do you ever struggle to get motivated and stay motivated? Have you ever wondered why? You’re not alone! Most people don’t understand the power they have over their own levels of motivation. However, if you can learn how to become highly self-motivated, your business is going to explode!

IGNITING YOUR MOTIVATION

Motivation is a topic that comes up over and over and over again. “How do I get motivated?” You hear people say this all the time, “I just don’t have the motivation.” Most people don’t understand that there are three phases to motivation. However, if you understand what those phases are and how you can trigger them, how you can make them better and improve on them, you can really harness your motivation and ultimately achieve more of what it is you are trying to get to or trying to achieve.

INTRINSIC VS. EXTRINSIC

First you have to understand before we get into the phases, the difference between intrinsic motivation, or internal motivation, and extrinsic motivation or external motivation. When most people say “I’m not feeling motivated” what they’re saying is that something outside of themselves has not sparked them to be motivated to do anything. The problem with extrinsic motivation is it usually comes with pain and/or regret. Think of it this way, it’s the guy who says “I wasn’t really motivated to exercise and lose weight until I had a heart attack.” So the heart attack is the extrinsic motivator but it comes with a little bit of pain and potentially regret in that they didn’t act sooner to change their lifestyle, to change their habits, or to change their patterns. It’s not always fun to wait for pain and regret to hit before we take action. How do we become more intrinsically or internally motivated? That’s what we’re going to be covering here and then ultimately through the next two parts of this series.

Ignite

The first phase we have to understand is what ignites your motivation. What gets it going? What creates that spark?

Sustain

The next thing you need to understand is how do you sustain the motivation? As you start to build momentum, as you start to take action, what do you need to do to sustain that motivation when things get challenging or when things get hard?

Accelerate

The third phase is this: what can you do to accelerate that motivation? What can you do to really kick it into high gear so that all the sudden the growth curve in your business or in some area of your life just really spikes up?

IGNITE YOUR MOTIVATION

Your motivation is sparked by two things. The first is desire or ambition. The second thing is the belief or the expectancy that you have that you can achieve that ambition. When most people think of ambition or desire, they  think of it in terms of the negative. Somebody is too ambitious or they’re too driven or they want too much (as if wanting more is a bad thing in life). It’s not about wanting more in a level of discontent, but we can be content and still at the same time be dissatisfied. I want you to be content, but I never want you to be satisfied with the status quo. Wanting more is about saying “I want more for my life, I want more for my business, I want more for my relationships, more for my family” and that’s a good thing! That desire, that ambition for more can start to drive you and motivate you and excite you.

Have you been setting your ambitions a little bit too low? Often times when we’re not motivated it’s because what it is that we’re supposedly saying we want isn’t all that exciting to us.  We look at it and go “well it’s kind of a foregone conclusion that I’m going to get that“, we set our goals way too low and therefore we look at it and we’re like “it’s kind of boring. That’s not exciting. That’s not motivating in and of itself.”

What you need to do is you need to raise your ambition line. Keep upping that level higher and higher and higher until you start getting really excited about what it’s going to mean for your life, for your business, for your health, and for your relationships. People always ask “well how high is too high?” At some point, that ambition line is going to be at the point that the belief in your ability to do it or to achieve it drops. That’s when you know you’ve raised your ambition level high enough. Raise the ambition line only to the point that you believe that you can still achieve what it is that you’ve set out for yourself to accomplish.

For example, say you want to set an income goal or a revenue goal for your business. For sake of example,  let’s say this last year you made $250,000. As you look at the next year and you think you can make $500,000 or even $750,000. You’re looking at it and think “I think I can do that. I think I can triple my revenue or triple my income next year based off of what I’m willing to invest and what I’m willing to do.” All the sudden that ambition starts to spark the motivation and you get excited about it. Then you go “what if I went for a million dollars?” Then all the sudden maybe at that million dollar mark you realize that your level of belief or expectancy that it could happen drops. That’s when you know that that $750K mark might be the goal that you need to set for yourself. That ambitious drive that you set for yourself because that’s one you still believe that you are capable of doing. Raise the ambition line only until the expectancy starts to drop and that’s the goal that you need to set for yourself because that’s what’s going to spark, or ignite, the motivation in you.

That’s how you move from being extrinsically, or externally, motivated to being more intrinsically, or internally, motivated. If you’re not motivated, you need to realize “wait a minute. I have control over my motivation. I have control over how I feel in this given instance or how I feel about my goals, my business, my plan, and my life. And if I can control my motivation, there’s really nothing that can stop me from achieving what I want to achieve.”

What are the different areas of your life that could use some motivation? Go back and watch one of my previous videos where I talk about the nine different areas for setting goals in your life. Look at that and think about the nine different areas of your life that you need to raise that ambition line, set bigger, more ambitious goals and desires for yourself, so that you can get to that next level and so that you can motivate and excite yourself.