The topic for this week is Motivation. The New Year is fast approaching, and with it the inevitable round of resolution making and intention setting. It’s important to understand why you want to set that particular intention and to know what motivates you to work at being successful.

Three Factors To Think About When You Find It Hard To Stay Motivated

It’s easy to make a New Year’s resolution or set an intention. It’s a little harder sometimes to stay motivated enough to see it through to a successful conclusion. Losing weight is a good example of this. I can’t even begin to count the number of people who say their resolution every January is to lose weight, and then by February they are back to their old habits. It creates a sense of failure that’s hard to get over. Just this weekend I heard at least a dozen people say they don’t bother making weight loss resolutions anymore because it just sets them up for failure. If this sounds like something you might think or say, you could be a person who is hard to motivate.

For myself, I know that I am definitely hard to motivate. Even when I think I have a really good reason why for my intentions, I often lack the real drive that comes with a true sense of motivation. It’s something that I really have to work at every day if I want to achieve my goals. In thinking about what makes me hard to motivate, I’ve found that there are three factors that play a major role in the process. These are my mindset, comfort zone, and past experiences.

Mindset is a biggie when it comes to being motivated because it pretty much has an impact on everything related to how you think and why you think it.

Going back to the weight loss example, it doesn’t matter how strong a reason you have for wanting to lose weight, if your mindset is that you’re fat, you’ve always been fat, and this isn’t going to change much, then you’re not going to be able to motivate yourself to get to the gym every day because you don’t believe that it’s going to make a difference regardless of how much work you put in.

Your mindset also has an impact on the second factor that could make you hard to motivate — your comfort zone. Everyone has a comfort zone — that place where we feel safe, in our element, and, well, comfortable.

Pushing against the boundaries of that comfort zone can be really easy for some people, but for most of us it’s a very scary experience. Every limiting belief that you possess comes screaming into play when you get close to those boundaries you mind has set for you. This is why so many people, myself included, have such a hard time trying new things. The fear of change that comes along with the fear of moving out of your comfort zone can also make you hard to motivate no matter how badly you want to make those changes.

The third factor that can play a role in how easy or hard you are to motivate is your past experiences. This may well be the most important of the three since your mindset will often be influenced by things that have happened to you in the past.

Every experience you’ve ever had plays some role in how you think now, and how open you are to change and being motivated to change is a direct result of how well you have dealt with these experiences. I can tell you from experience that when I least expect it, some random thought from my past shows up and has the effect of blowing both my self-confidence and my motivation to smithereens. The usual result is a round of “what’s the use” questioning that distracts me from my goal and makes me very hard to motivate.

By now you must be thinking “what’s the use” yourself. I know I’ve painted a pretty bleak picture here. But there is hope, and you can train yourself to be more easily motivated. One of the keys is to start small, deal with your mindset and the past experiences that influence it before you start making big changes. We’ll talk more about this over the course of the week.

For now, know that you are not alone and that you CAN change your mindset and put those days of being hard to motivate behind you.

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