A lot of mothers tend to rely on external motivation rather than self motivation before they act.

They find themselves reacting rather than responding.

Many of us are living mediocre lives yet we lie to ourselves that we are doing our best. I am putting up my hand because I know I do this sometimes.

Yes we work hard but sometimes we don’t always commit to pushing ourselves to truly do our best.

We don’t do things like

• get the right amount of sleep because our favourite show is on
• get rid of distractions
• commit to staying 100% focused on the job at hand as we can

because focus is hard work!

How can I say this with certainty, because of something called the “living room principle”.

Think about this.

How many times have you told yourself you can’t clean up the living room because it will take long and you have all these other things to do but as soon as someone calls and tell you they are twenty minutes away and would love to drop by, the living room miraculously gets cleaned up really fast?

Or you have been faffing around all day at work and your boss suddenly says to you he needs a (2 hour job) report done in 1 hour and somehow the report gets written?

We tend to do our best when there is external pressure on us however we need to reach a point where it is not just external pressure driving us to do our best.

We should be able to motivate ourselves internally by aiming to do our best every day by getting rid of distractions and staying focused on the task at hand.

 

3 Quick Tips For self motivation

 

Quick Tip 1- Apply the time box principle

One way you can self motivate or push your limits is by applying the time box principle. This is the act of setting a short, specific deadline to accomplish a task.

This is essentially what we see in the living room principle, because the external deadline forces you to focus on getting the living room cleaned within a time frame.

The only difference here in time boxing is that instead of the pressure being external it is internal. You are the one making the conscious effort to tackle that task within that time frame exercising self-discipline and personal power.

By time boxing your activities you are less likely to get distracted because mentally you’ll tell yourself “I need to finish this in 30 minutes and then I can check my email after that” or if something comes up as form as an interruption like a text or phone call, you can tell yourself “I will attend to that after I finish this task in 20 minutes.”

Quick Tip 2- View your time in minutes

Another tip is that instead of looking at your time in hours, look at your time in minutes.

I sometimes feel I have all the time in the world when I say “two hours” but when I view my time in blocks of 15, 20, 30 minutes all of a sudden I realise there isn’t really much time to waste. This helps with self motivation.

Break down your tasks into small chunk bites that you can accomplish in minutes. Of course some tasks will take longer than others and you can take breaks in-between if the task is taking long to work on.

Just make sure you time box your break as well so you can get back to work.

To make it fun see time boxing or breaking down your tasks as a game that you want to win.

[Tweet “Set a timer to help you focus on the task at hand.”]

Sure some hiccups may happen along the way which means you will need to be flexible but at least you are aware of how you are spending your time.

Quick Tip 3- Start small

My last tip on for self motivation is by starting small.

For example you may have said to yourself you wanted to get into shape but somehow never managed to get round to exercising.

Start small with maybe 1 or 2 pushups a day. Try this for a week and your brain will adjust to thinking this is a regular thing for you to do, then within that time frame you can begin to push yourself to do more pushups.

This can be applied to anything in your life you are finding difficult to do. The key is in starting small.

Now imagine if you worked on motivating yourself everyday by applying these 3 quick tips. How many regrets would you have five years from now?

 

Who is in your network?

A big challenge in overcoming mediocre behaviour and learning how to motivate yourself is with the people you surround yourself with.

They say we are an average of the 5 people we spend our time with.

If the people around you are not pushing themselves or are indifferent, you may feel less inclined to do more, as there is no one to call you out.

To combat this, get a mentor, hang out with other women who are driven, join a  mastermind group or a support group like the Super Working Mum Academy.

Maybe the action you need to take today is to start hanging out with a friend or a mentor who will challenge you to raise the bar in the new year.

Tell me how do you motivate yourself?