Welcome back to your “Success in 12 Months” Program, and now we’re now in month 2.  This month’s topic is on the concept of motivation.

 

Think about this: Success really has everything to do with one’s motivation.  It’s really the most important thing anyone can do.

 

If you can find out what really motivates you, what gets you to take action despite circumstances and events going on in your life, despite how negative you might feel at the moment, then you can ask yourself this question: How do I actually react and respond to what’s going on?  You want to ask this so you can get yourself to move forward, to take action on the things you want to be doing, especially now that you’ve defined these goals and you’ve started working on these goals.

 

How do you stay motivated to keep evolving your goals and really crystallize and build that vision, bring that vision into life that we’ve talked about in month one?

 

Achieving your goals and dreams is obviously more than just dreading, and I’m sure you already see plenty of people in your world, in your life, who are very good at dreaming.  They talk about all these different things they want to create and lots of things they want to do, and they’ve been having that same discussion now for years and years and yet the results they’re producing in their life are very much the same they’ve been doing the past 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

 

They love the dreaming part; they don’t like the doing part.  That’s where you’re going to be setting yourself apart from the pack here.

 

It takes commitment.  It takes hard work and consistent hard work, and in order to be consistent you must understand how to motivate yourself and everybody’s different.

 

Let’s start thinking about truly, inside of you, what makes you come to life?  What really motivates you?

 

For you yourself, knowing what motivates you is going to be your key to success, so I really want to get you to think about this.

 

Think about the situations in your life where you’ve had a high level of energy, a high level of drive and you were extremely productive.  Start brainstorming in your mind different scenarios and times when that’s happened.

 

Then fast forward in your mind and think about other times where you really seemed to be at a low.  You couldn’t get anything done, you were procrastinating things, maybe you were just sitting on the couch feeling sorry for yourself and really not getting anything productive done at all, and in fact you got into a negative cycle where because you hadn’t achieved anything productive yesterday and then same pattern continued today and often you can fall into a rut like this for weeks or months.

 

Now, if you’ve ever gone through that and you’ve had the challenging experience of being extremely motivated in one scenario and extremely unmotivated in another scenario, start studying that.

 

Start thinking about what your mindset was like, what was happening in your world at the time and how can you protect yourself from moving back into that lower state of motivation moving forward.

 

Motivation: Your Exercise for the Week

 

When it comes to motivation, there is no “right answer.”  The key is to discover what motivates you and then to keep that idea at the forefront of your mind.  This month you will work on motivating yourself so you are excited to strive for your vision.

The more clearly you can picture your success and the more often you do so, the quicker you will be able to achieve your goals. Did you know that studies have shown that your subconscious mind can’t distinguish between what is real and what you believe is true? That’s why visualization is so powerful. It is one of the most effective ways to keep motivated. After the work you did last month, you have a clear, detailed picture of the unique, authentic, successful life you want for yourself. Spend 10 minutes each day this week visualizing already having achieved that life.

For example, a friend of mine, who is a businessman, recently shared his daily visualization with me. He told me every morning he spends 10 minutes visualizing himself going in to the bank. He goes to the teller and gives her a check to deposit into his account. When she looks at the check, her eyes widen, shocked by its amount. He smiles at her and says, “I know, right?” He sees himself making a lot of money in the business every day, and prepares the way for that experience.

This would be an excellent exercise to practice often, even daily, from now on. Remember, whatever you visualize clearly and often will eventually become a part of your reality.

To help you be honest with yourself write down the time you visualized and for how long.

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

Sunday:

Next week, I will present your next exercise to help you keep motivated. In the meantime, I invite you to share with me your progress throughout your program. Share your thoughts, insights, inspirations and results with me in the comments section below, or you can shoot me an e-mail and let me know what’s going on.

Your partner in motivation,

James