How to Motivate Yourself with One Word
Your own word: give your word. If you are a person of honor and integrity, you know what it means to give your word.
One method is emotional motivation, pumped up at seminars or at group meetings where the participants leave with that smile on their face, only to have their motivation literally fade away over time, another method is Steve Pavlina's "sans chest-pounding motivation for smart people," intellectual motivation with the main idea to always set unreasonably big and thus intellectually challenging goals.
There are ends to achieve that are important and may be emotionally lit brightly and furthermore intellectually founded and held up by logical reasons and even some scientific evidence... Some goals, the really big ones, can't get enough motivational support to be pursued and focused on, no matter what.
Give your word to someone in order to complete and deliver on the promise whatever it takes. There are not many events that would make an acceptable excuse for yourself showing up with empty hands.
This goes beyond intellectual or emotional motivation. If it is promised, it has to be done. Motivation through honor.
Now, if you develop a similar sense of integrity in dealing with yourself, you may give your word to yourself in order to accomplish any given task even after emotional or logical motivational means are not available for some reason. The emotional momentum may be long gone and logic is hard to employ under certain circumstances.
It doesn't matter why exactly you have to do it, you gave your word and that is more than sufficient to change the world around the issue at hand.
Develop that sense of integrity and give your word to guarantee that things get done. Just make sure to be absolutely convinced that you are not going to give up before the defined and promised goal is achieved. Do not give your word if you are not willing or able to invest whatever you have in order to succeed.
The beauty of this approach is that you do not have to continuously invoke the whole array of "whys" and "what ifs" and "what if nots" in order to stay focused. Your word is a shortcut that let's you switch to autopilot and enables you to work without any doubts or any further questions on the current obsession.
The phrase
because I said so
now takes on a completely new meaning.Labels: goals, honor, how+to, inspiration, integrity, lifehacks, motivation, personal+development, procrastination, productivity, promise, tips, tricks, wow, wow-diet


