3 Quick and Easy Ways to Get Motivated

By Kurt Schmitt Article posted at Affsphere.com

As Zig Ziglar warned us, motivation fades. This means we need a daily boost in order to get motivated.

We need motivation in order to push beyond the ordinary and the mediocre. Whether it’s losing that last 10 pounds, or taking on that tough project at work, or a business venture, motivation wins out. Inertia is a huge factor in our lives.

Try driving down the road and slamming on the breaks and see if you don’t keep going when the car stops. Better yet, don’t do that. It might be bad for your health.

Inertia can work for you, because once you get going, you’ll tend to keep going. The challenging part is to get things started (and re-started), and that’s where motivation comes in.

Below are 3 ways to get motivated, inspired, and unstuck from a rut.

Choose your mantra — Choose a mantra, then use it daily to wipe away the negative and make room for good things to happen. In the traditional sense, a mantra is a sound or series of sounds that are repeated over and over again during meditation. But, they can be much more than that.

Creating short and to the point mantras is what Guy Kawasaki recommends as an alternative to long and sometimes confusing mission statements. Using mantras can evoke a sense of power, and put us in a state of calm strength whenever we need it.

An aptly chosen mantra can also act as a guiding principle for how to act. For example, Google’s “do no harm” philosophy is a mantra.

Mantras should be only a few words long at most. You can use them for meditation sessions as well as a sort of battle cry when you need strength. You can choose any mantra you like, and you can choose several of them for use in various situations.

Get physical — As goes the mind, so goes the body. Here’s an exercise from Tony Robbins. Try being depressed for a moment. What happens? Your shoulders slump, your eyes immediately head toward the ground, and your head sinks down. Can you feel that? When we feel a certain way, our bodies reflect that.

Now, try using your body to prevent a depressed feeling from overtaking you. Stand up tall showing off your best posture. Smile. Lift your arms and put them straight out at your sides to form a cross with your body. Tilt your head back and stare up at the ceiling. Lift one foot off the floor and hum out loud.

Now, hold that position and try to be depressed. It takes a lot of effort to be depressed while in that pose. Now, ask yourself what you can do physically every day to get yourself into a resourceful mental state. Maybe it’s a silly pose like this one. Maybe it’s yoga or pilates that gets you going. No matter what it is, do something physical every day and get motivated.

Time travel — This exercise will get you motivated as fast as anything I know. We all know that hindsight is 20/20. In each and every moment, we have choices to make. I hear people say that they have no choice. This is not true. You can eat the fattening dessert or not. You can do right or you can do wrong. You always have a choice.

Sometimes we delude ourselves into thinking we had no choice in the decisions we made in the past. Even though we regret some of these choices, we believe that we once again won’t be able to choose if faced with similar situations in the future.

So now, pretend that you’re in your own future. Think about what it’s like in your future. It’s moments like this when we see what we really want. Now, look back at the present moment that you’re in right now. What would you have done differently?

What can you do right now to make that future that you want become a reality? Spell it out and say it out loud. Next, make a plan to achieve it and write it down. What are you waiting for? Go do it.

This is just a small sampling of the ways you can alter your reality and get motivated. There’s no limit to the ways that you can gain control of your future if you’ll just apply a few simple principles.