How do you motivate yourself in these challenging economic times?
What sustains your drive, hope and sense of purpose to keep moving forward towards what you want?
How do you fend off procrastination and prevent it from stalling you?
In this short article, Kathy McAfee, The Marketing Motivator, shares 4 sure-fire ways to motivate yourself to action. One of these ideas may help you to “get it done.”
True Confession: I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time, but found that the procrastination demons have gotten in my way and stalled my progress. (How ironic!) Even the Marketing Motivator has to fend off the negative forces of procrastination!
Here are 4 ways that I have found to keep myself motivated and moving forward. One or more of them may work for you. It’s worth a try…
Strategy #1: Tackle the Big Stuff First (and Never Open Email First Thing in the Morning!)
Julie Morgenstein is a guru of organization. Her book, Never Check Email in the Morning has saved me many a morning from falling into the trappings of virtual distraction. I literally do not open my web browser, but rather spend the first hour of my day doing what I set out to accomplish – the large, significant, business-producing activities. By giving myself 60 minutes first thing in the morning, I find that I set the pace for productivity vs. distraction. It’s a simple thing, but does require a good deal of discipline. It takes a strong person to resist the temptation of email (or unproductive, time-wasting meetings and other such distracting stuff). Tackle the big stuff first. You can play later!
Strategy #2: Re-create the state of motivation in your body right now. We’ve all experienced times in our lives when we felt a heightened sense of motivation. Nothing could stop us. We were a maniac with a mission. Look out. Here we come. If you’ve ever felt that way or can imagine having that kind of energy and determination, then you can call up that motivated state when you need it. Motivation, like happiness, is a state, not a goal. It is something you have right now, rather than an objective that takes time to produce. Motivation is literally a state of mind and state of body that impacts our behavior and ultimately, our outcome.
My study into Neuro Linguistic Programming has taught me several techniques that allow me to re-create any positive state when I need it. It can be as easy as recalling a specific event in the past when you were totally motivated. Remember this event looking through your own eyes as if it was happening now. Ask yourself:
- What did you see? Who were you with?
- What were you feeling?
- What were you thinking?
- What did you hear when you were totally motivated?
By calling up this memory and looking at it through your own eyes, you are stimulating your neurology to produce the motivated state. This is turn will affect your thinking, supercharge your feeling, alter your physiology and ultimately change your behavior. And imagine what you could do in this powerful state of motivation?!
Strategy #3: Get an Accountability Partner. Nothing motivates quite like obligation. When you share your goals with key people who want to see you successful, you are setting yourself up for positive accountability. And accountability is one of the keys to success (see article entitled: The key to success lies in your accountability)
Ask your accountability partner to check in with you regularly (daily if necessary) to help you hold you accountable to your stated goal. Remember that it probably takes you more time and energy to continue to make excuses for yourself than to actually do the thing itself.
Stategy #4: Visualize Completion! Visualization is a powerful personal management resource. It helps professional athletes break world-records and win games, diseased people to help heal themselves, innovators create the next big idea and business professionals (like you and me) advance career and business success.
To tap into your powers of visualization you just need to be relaxed and allow your imagination to get carried away. Try this exercise on and see if you can visualize completion of your goal:
- Have a seat. Shut of door. Turn off the computer and Blackberry. No distractions.
- Close your eyes and focus on your breathing. See if you can relax your eyelids as much as possible. Even more now.
- Go out in the future (pretend with me for a bit) and go at least 15 minutes past the completion of your goal. Turn and look back on it.
- Moving into the event itself, looking through your own eyes, describe what is happening- as much detail as you can. What’s going on? Who’s there? What conversations are happening? What are people saying? What are you thinking to yourself? How are you feeling? What’s the energy like in that room? Any music playing?
- Now, kick up the imagination to the next level of extreme. Exaggerate the success you are experiencing. Allow the excitement to fill every pore in your body. Revel in it!
- Now, pull yourself out of the scene and look down on it as an observer. Notice again, what’s going on. Turn and look back towards now (back along your time line) and see all the events align themselves to support this outcome perfectly.
- Come back to now, along your time line, and when you are ready, pop back into your body and open your eyes.
- How do you feel about that goal? Are you motivated to complete it?
For more motivation, please visit www.MarketingMotivator.net and download FREE STUFF including free videos, tools and articles about motivation, presentations, networking, meeting management and more.
To learn more about NLP, check out Master Practitioner and NLP Trainer, Mark Shepard’s web site: www.ModernJedi.com
Need more of a kick in the seat of the pants? Hire Kathy McAfee, The Marketing Motivator as a motivational speaker for your next conference or event. She’ll help you and your team to see past the current strife and leverage all available resources to help you create a positively productive and rewarding 2009!
Call us at (860) 408-0033 or email Kathy@MarketingMotivator.net
