Being self-motivated is what separates those who get and those who fret. Which group are you in?
To help you find out, here is my list of attributes that describe you at your most motivated.
The Celebrated Self-Motivated
Life is generally a spectrum, but for extraordinary results (when it comes to life, those are the only results you should be concerned about honestly) you are either self-motivated, or you’re not.
Plus, motivation is what causes action, and we act 24/7. So if your actions aren’t self-motivated, who’s motivating you? Who’s causing you to act?
Being self-motivated means
- You are filled with excitement and energy, all day.
- You experience flow state constantly
- Disciplined habits and routines keep your “ball of life” snowballing an unstoppable path
- You are contagious and have an electrifying effect on others. You become inspiring.
- Are full confidence in your ability to achieve whatever you set out to
BEING SELF-MOTIVATED ALSO MEANS
- You know what you can do better than anyone else and use that to get ahead
- Practice self-restraint and moderation with your addictions, vices, and unhealthy habits
- You actively seek out those who know more and listen to their ideas about work and life
- You consume a ton of information and your life is better because of it
- When you notice someone whom you can help, you offer you knowledge and experience in a suggestive and non-arrogant way
Attributes of the Self-motivated
- Courageous
- Self-reliant
- Hopeful
- Curious
- Perfectionists when they need to be
- Confident
Well, how’d you do? Go ahead and score yourself to figure out which group you’re in.
If you’re too embarrassed to show your results, that’s ok, because we can easily figure out what it takes to be self-motivated, and how to stay that way.
First, let’s discuss why we want to be in this group in the first place.
When you live a motivated life, that has direction, focus, and action behind it you develop one of the greatest feelings ever–appreciation.
Some of you who are “doin it the most” “crushin it” and all that know what I’m talking about. It’s a swirly feeling in your chest OR those moments when you are doing regular things, but because your life is guided exactly how you want it to be, you just feel like letting out a big scream.
So here’s my usual tough love. If you’re not serious about making sure you are self-motivated, you’re wrong. About everything.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at what happens when you’re not.
Not being self-motivated
Not being self-motivated causes our lives to shrink
- We don’t pursue our happiness and passion
- We progressively become depressed and dissatisfied
- Then the false limitations born in our imaginations slowly become our realities and we get stuck
Before we know it, we’ve gone from what we used to be, to half that.
Humans are inherently dynamic, and it’s our duty to ourselves to create a life where we can develop and express our unique genius.
The only way to do this is by maintaining a state of constantly being self-motivated.
Someone Who Needs Motivation
The primary characteristic of someone who lacks motivation is they make excuses. An excuse is anything that sounds like “I can’t do that because…”.
You have no idea how common it is for us to defeat ourselves before we even try. There is nobody out there actively trying to thwart every attempt you make at bettering yourself, yet for some of us, we make it seem that way.
Most of the defeats in our lives are nothing but the boogeyman.
Common Phrases
- “That would never work because of…”
- “I couldn’t do that because of…”
- “That’s never going to happen!”
- “What are the odds I could do that?”
These phrases are a combination of limiting beliefs and learned helplessness
Limiting Beliefs
Limiting beliefs are subconscious thoughts about how the world works and what our relationship with it is that limit the possibilities of our lives and the actions we take each day.
When we are certain that the world always works a certain way, our actions will take that shape.
Basically, a limiting belief is an idea deep in our lower mind as to whether something is possible
or not.
When limiting beliefs are present, our motivation can only take root in areas that are accommodated by the belief. They constrain our potential and cram us into a box.
Most limiting beliefs that we have, have an only relative basis in reality, and don’t need to be adopted as the “laws of life”.
LEARNED HELPLESSNESS
Another characteristic of someone who needs motivation is a sense of powerlessness
- They think that who they are is set in stone
- That change is impossible
- These people struggle with feeling deserving of what they desire
- This causes their lives to dim to an almost gray functional depression
In other words, they have desires for how they want their lives to be, limit themselves automatically by decided that they cannot have it, and then trick themselves into thinking they never wanted it in the first place.
The result of this is someone who is:
- Uninspired
- Nonchalant about life
- Lives their lives mostly in their head, dreaming about what they’d like to have and be like
Their minds are on the future they desire, but they are constantly defeated each day.
So the question of motivation is how do we experience a life where we squeeze every ounce of juice from our lives, rather than being crushed under it?
Someone who is explosively motivated
When we have a serious motivation, we are unstoppable, and we can see that practically in others lives.
- How does someone make hundreds of millions of dollars?
- How does that person have a body that looks like you could grate cheese on it?
- How is it that people have smiles on their faces all day and accomplish things that are not only great, awesome to look at, but frightening to us simultaneously?
Knowingly or unknowingly, these people understand the secret to cultivating serious amounts of that special human stuff we call ACTION: MOTIVATION.
The motivated life
- Wake up, with energy, feeling well rested
- The serious morning routine of keystone habits that give us self-control and willpower for the rest of the day.
- A checklist of a few hugely progressive tasks we are going to steamroll during the day
- AUTOMATIC commitment to those tasks
- TIMELY completion of those tasks
- Genuine interest in life and the lives of others
- Moment to moment feelings of accomplishment, contentment, gratitude, satisfaction, and completeness.
With motivation, life has direction, activity, and progress. These three words sort out almost all the problems of life.
Imagine for a moment all the little things you would like to change about yourself and your life.
Now all the things you would like to learn how to do. Then after that, understand that there are people around you that have those things.
The difference?
They did it, and you haven’t done it.
The fact is, that’s the only reason, and there is no other reason. You are not too “blank”, it’s not too “blank” and all those excuses are nonsense. We all know they’re bogus, so throw them out.
There is a segment of humanity, who literally live as though they are on fire. Motivation makes you feel like you’re about to explode, in a good way. It’s not a clique or a club it’s a lifestyle that should be the default for humans.
To be one of the motivated few, you need to cultivate it in reference to making your life the way you want it to be.
You could have your life exactly as you want it. It’s not saying something wishy-washy. There is no law that says you cannot make the changes you would like to see in your life.
How to get and stay self-motivated
There are gross and subtle ways to remain self-motivated and, since everyone is different, you will need to look at your list of options and see what motivates you and what leaves you saying “eh, I don’t care”.
Biological Motivations
Everybody needs to maintain their physiology to a standard that allows them to keep on living. This not counts for us, but also for those we love.
When we are self-motivated in this way, we set goals that will increase our quality of life in a physical way.
- To eat better, healthier foods
- To live in a nicer safer neighborhood
- To look healthier, have more energy and experience greater longevity
Entropy has no greater power than the control it has over physical things.
So when we understand that, unless we put energy back into our physical bodies, we die faster, we become self-motivated to move in a direction where we are robust and vital.
Mental Motivations
Mental motivations are our psychological disposition and our emotional content. We are motivated by things that cause emotions we like.
Our personalities and world vision cause us to become motivated to act in different ways.
- Someone who is more practical may be motivated differently than someone who is more emotional in nature.
- Someone who is more social may be motivated differently than someone who is quiet and methodical.
Intellectual Motivations
The ideas in our heads about ourselves, others and how the world works is a huge motivating factor.
When we are motivated in this way, we place emphasis on behaving in relation to our intelligence and what it deems is the best way of acquiring what we think is important in life.
Social Motivations
Society and what it exposes us to keep us focused on participating in and belonging to social norms.
Spiritual Motivations
When we have spiritual interests or a world vision that involves some type of mystical experience as it’s endgame, we become self-motivated towards behaving in relation to whatever rules and regulations are involved in that practice.
Spiritual motivations are capable of giving us a slightly different sense of right and wrong and cause us to behave in accordance with that.
Maslow’s Hierarchy
Maslow says that there is a pyramid with five levels of human motivation
- Physiological
- Safety
- Belonging
- Ego needs
- Self Actualization
Meaning that what we want to do needs to adhere to our desire for
- stable health and basic survival,
- less immediate but still important physical maintenance in the form of long-term safety,
- feeling like an important piece that belongs to a larger whole,
- status relative to our peers,
- and finally, rich experiences that fulfill us at a deep level.
Motivation in A Nutshell
It’s easy for us to look at others who have, and just see that alone. We don’t see the years of struggle, the hours of pain, or the 5 am wake ups just to drive to the gym in the rain, with a headache…etc
Becoming self- motivated will require that you change your view, and change your behavior. AND YES, you need both. Sorry.
Self-Motivated Means Different Mindset
In order to succeed at anything, you need to have the right mindset about it.
This means that you need to first, decide you want it.
Two, decide you can get it, and three decide you actually deserve to get it.
Your mindset is going to make or break you. FACT. Think about it.
Imagine you find this Arnold Schwarzenegger looking guy who looks like he could give Atlas a serious run for his money, and bench press the entire world….
He’s sitting on the ground weeping because he doesn’t think he can live some grocery bags.
In your mind, you’re like, “seriously guy?”
Because in your mind, he can obviously lift the grocery bags, but his ability only goes as far as his mindset. Even though he could easily lift them, he doesn’t believe he can, and he’s just sitting there on the ground, already defeated.
By what you ask? By himself, how pathetic and sad.
All activity begins first in the mind. If your mind ain’t right, everything that comes after is wrong, like tainted water upstream. No good.
Just like you, there are successful people there who came from cities with mud in the streets and are on top of their game now because
- They believed they could
- They believed they deserved it
Self-Motivated Means Different Habits
I know I just gave you the “you can do anything” speech, and that’s true. But I kind of, sort of, almost, barely know a farmer who once said that “there is no change without a change in routine”.
Why? Because it gets hard sometimes.
And your success will be slow as hell or right on time depending on whether you can keep doing it even when it rains (not a good example because I’m a pluviophile).
- When your boyfriend broke up with you, did you forget to brush your teeth?
- When you lost your executive position, did you have an issue going to your favorite gym?
No, because those things aren’t hard to do.
But they are hard for some, going to the gym is torture for some, but some love it.
The point is all difficulty resides in the brain, and in the mind. Everything else is just effort.
- Farmboy’s don’t have a hard time doing what they do, but a city boy might. It’s not habitual for him.
- And that city boy might enjoy getting home and going to sleep, whereas the farm boy cannot stand the ambient noise of the city. So, habits are super important.
What your brain is used to doing, day in and day out becomes wired in as a “brain template”.
How Habits work in your Life
Imagine you typed up memos for work every week. The same memo each time with different information, but all the sections are the same.
So what you do is you take the first memo and save all the bold sections for the second memo, and when the next week rolls around, all you have to do is delete last weeks info, and replace it with this weeks info.
That’s what your brain does. When you do something every day, you become wired to do it easier the next time.
The problem is, moving toward what you want in life after you embark on the journey to being self-motivated requires that you fight this conditioning.
The solution is to make your new change habitual the same way you made your behavior now habitual, one small step at a time.
Otherwise, you will only have an idea in your head of how you want to be in the future. Without changing your behavior, you will continue to get the same results.
Your actions are what get you results. Same actions, same results. Period.
Some Good News
The good thing is that changing habits can be easy with the right tools. Consistency is going to be your secret weapon.
When your brain sees a brand new activity as hard, difficult, or requiring too much of the organism’s (you and me) resources, it will inhibit your motivation to act, and cause you to procrastinate.
The secret weapon is to make the activity seem harmless. If your brain doesn’t see it as a threat, it won’t hinder you.
Self-Motivated: Eat your Chunky Soup
If you were to take a large task like going to the gym and found that you lacked the motivation to even start making it a habit, you could break it down into smaller chunks (which is actually called chunking) and see how that works.
So, “get up and go to the gym Frank” becomes
- Put on tennis shoes and gym wear
- Walk to car
- Drive to gym
- Etc…
And there are several ways you can manipulate the chunking!
One method is to tell yourself you are only going to do “whatever” for five minutes. Your brain won’t stop you for that. That’s a harmless amount of time. After five minutes, you will find you can easily continue.
Another way to increase your odds is to make your list based on tasks that you know you think are easy. Break them down as far as you need to in order to look at each task and feel “yeah, I could definitely do that no problem. That’s barely doing anything.”
Well it might be, but you have ten tasks lined up that are “barely doing anything” and they combine to create you doing a whole lotta something. It’s like freakin’ magic I swear.
So now that you’re super into being part of the celebrated self-motivated, here is a FREE chunking download for you. Join my library and get access to it!
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