It happens a lot in January.
Say, you’ve sworn to follow a food plan – or a five-minute morning meditation.
The first week or so you get up quietly and sit for the allotted five. It’s good and you’re gratified. The next couple mornings, it seems so easy to meditate you wonder what the big deal is. A few days later, you kind of want to blow it off (the computer is calling), but you do it anyway. But, another morning soon, you wake up and absolutely DO NOT want to move when the alarm goes off. Still, you roll out of bed and start meditating when it suddenly occurs to you that it’d be so much smarter to meditate in the evening! And you do that for a couple of nights. But, before you know it, something comes up that needs to be done at the end of the day. And, pretty soon, meditating will seem like a distant and unrealistic thing.
And, there it goes: our deeply wished for desire to build a new habit.
As we move further from the supportive energy of the big buzz around New Year’s declarations, it becomes harder to keep on task.
The same thing can happen after the high you get at a personal-development workshop or from a teaching. The further you move from the supportive environment, the more challenging it becomes to stay psyched.
Where you were in love with you new goal, you begin to wonder if it really is important, smart, or even possible.
And, when you lose enthusiasm and faith in your new goal’s value, you lose your motivation.
What’s at stake when you lose motivation
Breaking your promise to yourself like this feels crummy. Yes, you can sleep in, but something big is lost. Your belief in yourself, and your best ideas, starts to erode. Do this enough, and you’ll build a pattern that sets you up for a lifetime of low self-esteem. When you see others changing their lives for the better you’ll think ‘that’s so great — but I can’t do it’.
Where you’re not going to find motivation
The surface veneer of our culture – the thoughts and images that easily rub off on us – don’t value inner change. TV news? I don’t think so. As much as I revere and support having a free press, bad news is pretty much the only news there is. So that’s a skewed reality. Add in social media and you’re exposed to the same catastrophic headlines dozens of times a day.
TV shows and ads in magazines, billboards, and online advertising show unreal people in perfect lives. They don’t need meditation: just the right iPhone case or car insurance.
Basically, we’re marinated in a vision of an unreal, scary, materialistic, and depressing world.
Which definitely doesn’t support doing something exceptional.
To stay motivated, you’ve got to nourish yourself yourself – somehow. Luckily, there are many ways you can firm up your motivation. Everybody’s different, but in an effort to keep things simple, here are two strategies that work well in tandem. But remember, both of them are practices in themselves! Which means you might have to commit to sticking with them in the same way you committed to a meditation practice!
Two ways to fortify your motivation
Knowing why you want what you want
Belief in the positive value of the new habit you’re building underlies and fortifies motivation. That’s why all the personal development teachers — like Tony Robbins — advise writing out the reasons why you’ve set any new goal you’ve set. So, do that.
Really search your soul to find why you want to make the change, and write it down. For instance, with a weight loss plan, you might find that you want to do it so you can have more energy to hike with your kids. Or, you want to feel better in your own skin. Or because you believe that losing weight or eating a healthier diet will improve your overall wellness. Or that you want to set a good example for someone you love.
Write these reasons out, and reread them every morning, or at various times throughout the day. When you do, really focus on your desires. Remembering and identifying why you’ve set the goal you’ve set, will help keep you motivated.
Enlisting the vast power of your unconscious mind
According to the classic book The Power of the Subconscious Mind, by Joseph Murphy, the subconscious mind does the bidding of the conscious mind.
The subconscious isn’t concerned about good or bad: it simply takes orders and tries to bring about events to support what the conscious mind says.
If you go around saying you’re an idiot, things won’t go so well. It’s like people who are always saying how bad their lives are, and who do, really, seem to attract one difficult thing after another.
It works through the Law of Attraction: like attracts like.
This is supported by so many more sources. I don’t pretend to understand quantum physics, but I have a feel for its common applications. And, it posits that thought gives rise to matter, literally.
So, creating a positive statement to repeat throughout your days can create a supportive scaffolding for your fledgling habit. And having identified why you want to develop the change you want to develop (as suggested above), you’ve got rich material to work with.
But don’t fake an affirmation! In other words, don’t say something so far from your reality that you can’t really believe it. Instead, spend time fashioning your thoughts into a positive statement that you can get behind.
In other words, if you’re heavily in debt, don’t create an over the top affirmation like “I’m a debt-free millionaire!” because you probably can’t believe that at this point.
Affirmations work when you can say them with emotion and excitement.
So, if you don’t believe in a particular affirmation, you won’t be enthusiastic, emotional, and energetic when you work with it.
But, if you put a little effort into creating a great affirmation, you can come up with a very positive statement that excites you.
How does the following affirmation make you feel? “I have absolutely everything I need to become fantastically financially free and I’m doing that now!”
See the difference? To me, the second one feels really good. I can get behind that with energy – and get energy from it!
Once you settle on a great affirmation, write it on a note somewhere in your phone and/or computer (I use Evernote), and keep glancing at it throughout the day until you’ve memorized it. Or you can put it on the wall, or somewhere else where you’ll see it throughout the day.
Then stick with that one, single statement for at least a week – maybe a month — and repeat it throughout the day. And, after saying it to yourself for a while, it will begin to take on a life of its own.
You’ll see: it’ll start popping into your head throughout the day. And it will feed your motivation to do what it is you want to do.
