How to Get Motivated – Again!

You make a goal sheet...and then you end up putting it off til next time... Then there's the vision board with the latest to-do list but more often than not, it never gets started. And this habit sadly happens every year. What could be the problem?

Why are we so good in planning but actually, there isn't much follow – through? There must be something else missing aside from the plan.

According to Psychology Today, motivation is the desire to do things that gives the difference between waking up before dawn to pound the pavement and lazing around the house all day. You may have done the first step which is to visualize your goals and what supporting activities to attain the goal but staying focused with a high emotional quotient (E.Q.) spell the difference.

Feelings are crucial and inevitable that is why we do what we do and that includes indirectly losing a grip at motivation. According to The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (cited from Time.com):

“...when experimental subjects are told of unhappy event, but then instructed

to try not to feel sad about it, they end up feeling worse than people who are

informed of the event, but given no instructions about how to feel. In

another study, when patients who were suffering from panic disorders

listened to relaxation tapes, their hearts beat faster than patients who

listened to audiobooks with no explicitly 'relaxing' content. Bereaved people

who make the most effort to avoid feeling grief, research suggests, take the

longest to recover from their loss. Our efforts at mental suppression fail in

the sexual arena, too: people instructed not to think about sex exhibit greater

arousal, as measured by the electricak conductivity of their skin, than

those not instructed to suppress such thoughts.”

Having said this, what does it relate to motivation? It means that it is good that we have a visible plan in place to achieve our goals, but we also need the “feel” of accomplishing that goal. According to an article from Time Magazine, in order to get that “feeling” we need to do the following:

1. Be positive. Winston Churchill said, “a pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” To be positive and stay positive, we have to believe that either way is a choice. We maintain the positivity in our lives because we want to despite of the criticisms and setbacks we face in our career. Being in business and staying in business demand optimism to go through the ups and downs in the industry. To keep and stay focused, we have to think that “I am in control of my attitude, and no one can take that away from me.”

2. Secondly, we need to get rid of the negative people around us. There is a big difference between positive and negative criticisms. Good criticisms build you up; you stay inspired to do better. While negative criticisms take your dreams away from you and people think that your dream is not worth your time.

3. Get rewarded. To be happy and stay happy, you have to reward yourself while working on your plans for every little achievement that you make. Prepare immediate or short-term, medium-term to long-term goals for your business goals to determine your milestones.

4. Get peer pressure. To keep yourself motivated throughout the ups and downs of your upcoming venture, it is crucial that you surround yourself with people you admire and want to be in the future. Steer clear from people who just drain your energy away from you. To improve this situation, you need to circulate and radiate positive energy in your relationships. Advance your self-mage to create a good vibe and generate a high self-worth with everyone you talk to. Believe in yourself that you know the business more than they do, but acknowledge that to stay competitive in the industry – you need to continuously learn about the tricks of the trade and encourage collaboration with likeminded people.

To sum it up, it’s great to be objective when planning, but do not ignore your E.Q. while you cruise your way to success. Just remember the three things to keep you going – positivity, reward yourself and peer pressure, not to mention that you have to have confidence to pull everything off.

5 Easy Ways to Supercharge your Willpower

New Year is the time of re-aligning your life plans – whether it’s about your career or your personal relationships. More often than not, it’s the career part that we fine tune during this season. We check what we have accomplished in the previous year – some inspirational, some aren’t. To boost positivism to the New Year, here are some tips to boost our willpower.

1. Focus on what's important. In the previous articles, I have mentioned about focus and why it's important. Here, focus is also critical when dealing with fear. Given the vision you have, trim down the activities that you cannot control, instead work on your way to efforts that can be controlled and can be translated into results. In that way, you will realize fear can be your buddy too!

2. Positivity. List all the possible outcomes once you have achieved your goal. Ideally, the end-result of your goal should make you feel good inside and makes you happy. This is where your excitement and passion unfold. Stay away from unsupportive people to veer from negative energy.

3. Face your fears. We never lose sight of failure whenever we face untested waters. Instead, use the experience to equip you to think harder and better. If you feel the need to learn to fill some gaps (i.e. skill), then set some time to learn something new or read some articles that contain topics that you think will help your business. Also, when you learn to face your fears, you create calculated risk to combat different market forces that affect your business. In this way you will be able to keep up with the competition and better yet stand out. When you learn to face your fears, you will eventually learn how to control them.

4. A Vision Board. Collect images from magazines or from online sources like Pinterest that will represent the outputs from achieving your goal. This is a good method for people who are visual learners too. For instance, if you would like to go to Paris during summer break, you may want to collect a photo of the Eiffel Tower or the Champs Elysees. Browsing art is another great way to launch your vision to success!

5. Be Patient. Success doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a series of heart breaks, research, failure, realization, discovery and enlightenment. Each day as you review your set milestones, see if it equates to your desired results. Otherwise, fine tune and test it again. This way, you monitor your progress as you get closer to your goal.

Achieving our goals doesn’t need to be difficult to capture. Your techniques to reach them can be as flexible depending on what’s happening in the market. By identifying strong and weak points of your strategy to meet your goal will make a difference from success and failure.

5 Handy Tips in Believing Your Dreams and Living It!

Are you a dreamer? I am sure you are too! Dreams ignite our passion to work hard to achieve it - either for ourselves or for our love ones. We have our own unique dreams and believing in it brings meaning and purpose in our lives when taken care of. Dreams help us mold our identity and unfold what's important to us. They encourage us to evolve into a better person. Here are some tips to realize our dreams.

1. Explore the power of dreams. Dreams are vision of our future and recognizing it is the first step in achieving it. Accept the power of your mind and visualize that you are already experiencing the fruits of your dreams.

2. Write down the steps to realize your dreams. To reach for your dreams, its practical to understand that there has to be a strategic way to achieve it. Appreciate small steps. In a quote from Lao-tzu, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

3. Be optimistic that you will succeed. While networking and marketing, it is certain that there will be unsupportive people that you will come across with. These are negative people who may be in your circle of friends or family that do not believe in your dreams. Avoid these types of crowd like plague so that the negative energy does not creep in you. In this way you stay positive, instead, treat them as pebbles that you need to deal with while you continue your journey. Browse some art and craft fairs in your hometown - if not possible, do it virtually. Observe

the difference.

4. Patience is a virtue. True, it pays to be patient. Treat it like a rare breed of wine that takes years to mature. Same with your dreams – if things get slow, persist and don’t give up.

5. Review your progress and listen to like-minded people. Do not forget that as you cruise your way to success, evaluate your strategies to make sure that it is still workable. In this way, you will be able to determine whether your techniques to achieve your dreams are still working or requires a different approach. Check if you are getting the results that you need. If it does, continue. Otherwise, replace it with something else. Also, don’t be afraid to outsource or delegate tasks that you know it’s not your strength. This saves you time and helps you reach your goals faster.

All great things start in a dream. Although when challenges arise, we tend to set aside our dreams but sooner or later we get to hear a little voice in us that asking us to pursue it. In the course of time, entrepreneurs like Sir Richard Branson believed in his dream and now he's living it as founder of the Virgin Group. In one of his interviews with Entrepreneur magazine, he said that "You will live a much better life if you pursue your passions. People who work on the things that they love usually enjoy life more than everyone else does simply because they are chasing their dreams." When we get to know entrepreneurs like him, we admire and aspire to be like one because we, too, want to make our own dreams come to reality.