Success in 12 Months: Who Motivates You?
Motivation can drop off quickly if working toward your goals becomes stale. Even when you’re passionate about your goals, day-to-day activities can become tedious. Keeping yourself motivated is important.
Last week, we started exploring your motivations about your goals, and the exercise was to daily visualize yourself living from the place of having achieved those goals. The visualization process is an internal one; we’re now going to start looking at external forces. External forces are those things outside of us, rather than coming from inside of us. Some of those external forces are the people in our lives and world.
One of the best ways to get motivated is to look to other people who are already living inspirational lives or who have lived inspirational lives. They may no longer be living, but they left an incredible mark on the world.
Two People Who Have Motivated Me
Two people who must get some credit for motivating me in my journey of becoming a life coach and entrepreneur are Oprah Winfrey and Iyanla Vanzant., who I’ve written about, both individually and collectively, in previous blog posts.
Oprah inspired me at the time when she was ending the Oprah Winfrey Show, and transitioning to her network, OWN. As I watched her move on to her “next chapter,” I was motivated to make my own transition, and left my corporate job to create my own coaching and consulting business—my next chapter.
Iyanla Vanzant inspired me back when I first saw her on—you guessed it—the Oprah Winfrey Show. Back then, she motivated me to “check myself” and I began looking at the thoughts I was thinking and the words I was speaking—both in relation to the life experiences I was creating as a result. When she and Oprah had their televised reunion, which paved the way for them to collaborate and create “Iyanla, Fix My Life,” Iyanla motivated me in a different way than before: She motivated me to integrate spiritual principles into my coaching and consulting, which had been the foundation of my own awakening and personal growth and development. I woke up, took responsibility for my contribution in creating the life I was living, and did my work—and that’s what I want for the people who choose to work with me.
I share this with you to illustrate this point: The people who inspire and motivate you don’t have to be people who you know in life—and they don’t necessarily have to know you. In my case, while I have been in personal communication with Iyanla, I have not had the pleasure or opportunity to connect with Oprah—yet.
Your Exercise for the Week: Who Motivates You?
You can start finding people who inspire and motivate you and start making a list of them.
Write down people who give you inspiration in the area of courage, maybe give you inspiration in the area of philanthropy or public speaking or just energy, high levels of energy. People that you see that were able to accomplish so much more in a year than the average person could do in a decade.
Write down all these different people and start studying their traits and their characteristics and the achievements they had in their lives, and it will immediately begin to help raise your standards.
This doesn’t have to be noted motivational speakers (although it very well may be). For inspiration here are some examples:
Traditional Motivators: Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill, Brian Tracy
Online Motivators: Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin
New School: Eric Thomas, CT Fletcher
…or anyone that inspires you regardless of their profession. Athletes like Muhammad Ali inspire some people. People who have overcome great odds inspire others etc…
Find people who inspire and motivate you, period. List (at least) 5 motivating people you discover this week…
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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