How to Gain Motivation
Posted on July 05, 2012 by Dawn Greaney, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
If you find yourself crying over your to-do list, wishing you had the motivation to accomplish just one thing on it…ignore it instead.
Q: How does one keep moving forward with their dreams when they don’t feel motivated?
A: So many of us are dealing with this issue. We had dreams at some point when we were younger, but life has continuously knocked us down. We became convinced that dreams aren’t obtainable. But as we ignore our dreams and our lives get more mundane, we hear about other people achieving their dreams usually against all odds. We are envious and immediately look for the things they have that we don’t have, which explains why they are able to achieve their dreams and we can’t achieve ours. They may not have arms, but they have money. Or they may be paralyzed, but they have a friend in the publishing industry. We spend so much more time identifying our obstacles, instead of focusing on what we want and what our lives will look like when we get it.
We’ve likely been trained to define happiness as the result of gaining external prizes. And so we create a to-do list in order to achieve these things so that we can finally be happy. But we soon lose motivation because we experience such difficulties in keeping that boyfriend or landing that promotion that will bring us more money. So our happiness is constantly in waiting. And it will likely never come one-hundred percent since the external things we depend on are not constant. Ultimately, we lose motivation and give up.
The times when we’re fantasizing about being where we dream of being, we’re experiencing pure joy. But the minute we try to develop a plan for HOW we’re going to get there, we become discouraged and ultimately unmotivated. This is a pretty common phenomenon.I believe most of us need happiness first before we can accomplish our dreams. When we’re happy and joyful, we are emitting less resistance and are therefore better able to see opportunities that might lead us in the right direction. Rarely do we attract those same opportunities if we’re angry or convinced that we’re the victims of a cruel universe. Or if those opportunities do exist, we miss them altogether or we convince ourselves that they won’t amount to anything so why take advantage of them. In that resistant state, all we see is evidence for why we can’t succeed. But when we’re happy, the world is brighter and ideas of how to make our dreams come true are more forthcoming. We notice the opportunities available and we’re more optimistic that our efforts will bring us closer to what we want.
So we should be spending more time creating our own happiness and getting ourselves in that treasured state of joy before trying to knock out all the items on our master to-do list. Instead of assuming that we can’t be happy until something external happens, do yourself a favor and find out how you can be happy right at this moment. If you find yourself crying over your to-do list, wishing you had the motivation to accomplish just one thing on it…ignore it instead. Go and do something that you’re completely in love with. Focus on getting in a better mood and spend some time with joy. When you’re in a happy state, you’ll likely believe in yourself again and may be inspired to accomplish the steps that will get you closer to your dreams.
www.dawngreaney.com
