We have all seen those motivational videos, telling us that “We can achieve it, if we believe it”. We have even stayed motivated after watching these videos for a while or a day or maybe even a month. But the reality is, with passage of time the motivation also fades away and all that we are left with is another white flag waiting to be dropped down on the floor.
Benjamin Franklin once said, “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.”
• Planning a day, before going to bed.
• Scribbling in your journal what you want to achieve.
• Using post-its/ pins/ white boards to make a blue print of your future.
These are just few tactics which are usually used by many of us for overcoming the ‘sinking of our motivation ship’. What most of us fail to realize is, that even if we write things down and plan a lot ahead, we still will be faced with the uncertain challenges around us happening every single day. And most of these challenges are created by our ‘self-doubt and laziness’.
There is an insightful concept shared by Mr. Robin Sharma in his “The 5AM Club book”. He says that, if we want to get things actually done, then we need to strengthen our ‘Will power muscle’. Each time that you are faced with a lack of motivation to do something that you wanted to do; you just need to get past this feeling of postponing the task needed to be done. (Paraphrased)
A will power muscle, like all the other muscles in our body, needs to be trained. Only practicing it can make it stronger than it was the day before.
Say, you want to start waking up early in the morning. You set your alarm and slept cozy in your bed. The next morning, you turned off the alarm and went back to sleep because your hard-wired brain was habited to act like that. The whole day after that feels unsettling because you failed to achieve a task early in the morning, which you had promised yourself to be done. This results into lack of motivation for executing this same task again the next day. This lack of motivation and interest damages your willpower slowly. You start things but then don’t get them done completely all the way through. It keeps getting complicated, and we definitely don’t need a piled-up stack of ‘not done things’ at the end of the day.
So, the question is, how do you simplify this?
By ‘Rewarding yourself’ for each task done or set a motivation trap!
A motivation trap is something I arrange for myself to get my things done in time. We have all arranged motivation traps for us in our childhood. Most of us used to ‘Keep a chocolate aside for each chapter learned’, during examinations. Same concept applies on ‘putting your favorite food/object in front of your treadmill’, to complete that workout session.
These little rewards are highly helpful in keeping us motivated all along. Planning out your day along with planning to achieve what you have planned is important. What matters here is that you start your day with a little win, ‘waking up early, getting that first workout done as planned, completing your walk or even completing your meditation’.
This practice can actually help strengthen your will-power muscle and you get rewarded with extended motivation plus positivity. Also, the rise in self-confidence occurs naturally once you become committed to your tasks. It is said that ‘One healthy choice leads to another’. So, make a healthy choice today by strengthening your Will- Power muscle and getting things done.