Ok, so the first thing is you need an answer to the question "What is motivation?"
Well, if you look elsewhere on the web and in your local reference library you'll find many, many ideas about this but my favourite place to start is this rather neat description.
"Motivation is having the desire and willingness to do something." (Source: Wikipedia)
You see that's the point, in order to get anything done you need both the genuine desire to achieve the result and also the willingness to spend some time making it happen.
Take this article. For you to see it I needed to genuinely desire that I share my thoughts and I also had to be willing to take time out of my life to get the thing written?
Let's try those questions
Do you often find your get up and go has got up and went? Ok so perhaps this is a question of another desire getting in the way of the one you feel you should be having? We all have times when we'd really rather be doing anything other than the thing we should be doing and often that's just a lack of desire. The other thing is you could just be unwilling to make the effort - an example could be walking the dog in the rain. You know you ought to do it, and you really want the dog to have it's walk, but it's raining for goodness sake!
Perhaps the motivator here is staying dry and warm in front of the tv?
Poor old dog.
Does work equate to boredom? If it does then you have two choices, change how you feel about the work you currently do or change the work. In actual fact the latter is rather the easier of the two it just takes more faith and belief to do it. I did it. I was dreadfully bored sitting in various offices doing work I didn't believe in and having to do the 7am to 7pm shift just to do the 7 hours work I wouldn't get paid much for. Realising I had the same two choices anyone else has, I started working in the evenings and weekends and gradually got brave enough to take the bull by the horns and start doing what I wanted to do full time. As the saying inevitably goes, if I can do it......
Do you start lots of projects, and don't finish them? Ok, taking the thoughts above in mind here then perhaps what's really happening is you enjoy the start of a project because it's new, it's fresh, it's kind of exciting and then as soon as you've got the bit's out of that box from the DIY store and you've looked in vain for any sense in the diagram that came with the wood and the screws, you're well on the way to "I'll get round to it later" In order for the project to be completed therefore the MOTIVATION needs to equate to the end result not the start of the job, you have to be willing to do the work, put yourself out and do the thing you really didn't want to do in the first place. I hire someone in - it's cheaper and the shelves stay up.
Perhaps what you need is more MOTIVATION? Well maybe that's the case but for my money, this is simply part of the much larger puzzle. In order to have a great life, we need to work on ourselves all the time, to learn, to grow, to evolve so that the world around us, while it still may not care about our lack of motivation, is easier to deal with.
Motivation is inside you, you just need to find it, harness it and use it.
| Alan Gee is a Life Coach and Motivational Speaker "Why waste any part of any day, you're only on the planet once?" |
