MoHow Posted By Dr. MO Creating and maintaining motivation are the keys to achieving anything in life and then sustaining the achievement. It is this motivation that plays a crucial part in helping us maintain momentum through thick and thin. The momentum I am referring to is the energy we require to create, regain, and sustain our efforts to move forward and upward in life,. To have this energy we need to learn and practice a range of skills, and use a number of tools to motivate ourselves.

In today’s post, and over the next week, I will outline what I believe are the skills and tools.

Motivator One: Record Your Progress

A Progress Tracking chart helps us record where we are on an achievement journey and to provide feedback on how we are doing.

The chart is not just for information purposes, to look back and see what you have done, it’s also a way to motivate yourself in terms of how ell you are doing. If you are responsible in completing your chart every day, and marking dots or “x”s, then you will want to make sure I fill it with dots. You will say to yourself, “Since I want to mark a dot here, I need to do the required activity today.” Progress tracking can also be done using a log which works just as well. However you do it, track your progress, and allow yourself to feel good each time you give yourself a good mark.

It’s important to realize that sometimes you will have some no marks on your chart. That’s OK, so long as you don’t temporary poor performance to stop you from continuing. Strive instead to get the good marks next time.

Over time, if you stick with this motivational tool, you will start to get a lot of good marks. And that is one of the best feelings in the world.

Motivator Two: Slow and Sure

When I start with a new program, or work on any new goal, I am full of excitement, and my enthusiasm is endless. I think I can accomplish anything. However, after a short time I learn that I do have limitations, and my enthusiasm begins to wane.

Well, a great motivation extending strategy that I’ve learned is to slow myself down when when I want to go full tilt at the beginning of a new initiative. Don’t let yourself do everything you want to do. Only let yourself ease into it. And plan out a course of action where you slowly increase your activity over time. For example, if you want to start running, you may think you can run 5 miles at first. But instead of letting yourself do that, start by only running a mile. When you are doing that mile, telling yourself that you can do more! But I don’t let yourself. After that run look forward to the next one, when you will do a little more. Keep your energy reined in, harness it, so that you can ride it even further.

This has an added benefit of stopping yourself from getting injured or burned out. And I can assure you, if you hold yourself back, your desire to continue only increases.

Tomorrow, in Part Two, I will outline three more keys to motivation for you to understand and use.

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