100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

by Steve Chandler

The rush we get after running through the waterfall of fear is the most energizing feeling in the world. If you are ever in an undermotivated mood, find somethin...

“After all, team-building and customer relations are surely more important than self-motivation.”

When we view relationships as opportunities for creativity, they always get better.

When our relationships get better, we are even more motivated. My

The more thoughtful our questions are, the more interactive the conversations. Look for opportunities for interactivity to motivate yourself to higher levels of experience.

If you think you have no willpower, you are undermining your own success. Everyone has willpower.

Make a promise to yourself to be clear and truthful about your own willpower. It is always there.

It would overload the left side of his brain so the right could open up and create without judgment.

Many times in my life I have had a problem that seemed too overwhelming to do anything about,

“Be an artist at whatever you do. Even if you are a street sweeper, be the Michelangelo of street sweepers!”

happiness is a place to come from, not to try to go to.

Your happiness is your birthright. It shouldn’t depend on your achieving something. Start by claiming it and using it to make your self-motivation fun all the way and not just fun at the end.

Yet he knew that the key to enjoying any activity was in the discipline.

Language leads to power, so be conscious of the creative potential of the language you use, and guide it in the direction of more personal power.

must be the change you wish to see.

Don’t live in the past (unless you want guilt) or worry about the future (unless you want fear), but stay focused on today (in case you want happiness).

“you have not become master of yourself. You will never be happy until you can determine what you are going to think about for the next hour.”

Being prepared is the secret.

“The will to win is not as important as the will to prepare to win.”

Motivate yourself by giving someone else the ideas necessary for self-motivation.

Progress toward your goals is never going to be a straight line. It will always be a bumpy line. You’ll go up and then come down a little. Two steps forward and one step back. There’s a good rhythm in that. It is like a dance. There’s no rhythm in a straight line upward.

This is what happens when we make love, play games, write poetry, hold a baby, or face a threatening crisis: The left brain commands the right brain to come alive and get involved. That is when you get whole-brain thinking, or what psychologist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences.

The three best ways to activate whole-brain thinking are through 1) goal-visualization, 2) joyful work, and 3) revitalizing play. Rather than wait for external crises to appear, create internal challenge games of your own—goals and purposes—that lead you in growth toward the motivated person you want to become.

But he finishes all his talks by saying it is really a simple thing to be creative—all you do is “get your stars out.” That’s how you tap into the untapped you.

Whatever it is you have to do, whether it’s a major project at work or a huge cleaning job at home, turning it into a game will always bring you higher levels of energy and motivation.

Active relaxation refreshes and restores the mind. It keeps it flexible and toned for thinking. Great thinkers have known this secret for a long time. Winston Churchill used to paint to relax. Albert Einstein played the violin. They could relax one part of the brain while stimulating another. When

“Thinking is the hardest work we do,” said Henry Ford, “which is why so few people ever do it.” But when we find ways to link thinking to recreation, our lives get richer. We become players in the game of life and not just spectators.

boy—“Make each day your masterpiece.”

While other coaches would try to gear their players toward important games in the future, Wooden always focused on today. His practice sessions at UCLA were every bit as important as any championship game. In his philosophy, there was no reason not to make today the proudest day of your life. There was no reason not to play as hard in practice as you do in a game. He wanted every player to go to bed each night thinking, “Today I was at my best.” Most

The key to personal transformation is in your willingness to do very tiny things—but to do them today.

You were “born” when you woke up, and you’ll “die” when you go to sleep. It was designed this way so that you could live your whole life in a day.

We have demonized problems to such a degree that they are like monsters that live under the bed. And by not solving them during the day, we tremble over them at night.

“Every problem in your life,” said Richard Bach, author of Illusions, “carries a gift inside it.”

He is right. But we have to be thinking that way first, or the gift will never appear.

If you see your problems as curses, the motivation you’re looking for in life will be hard to find. If you learn to love the opportunities your problems present, then your motivational energy will rise.

start treating self-motivational ideas as if they were songs.

Any time a thought, sentence, or paragraph inspires you or opens up your thinking, you need to capture it, like a butterfly in a net, and later release it into your own field of consciousness.

So the real question is this: is mastering the art of motivation as important as learning another language?

had some free time during a break so I wrote myself a letter. I put down all the ideas I wanted to remember from the seminar and I sealed them in an envelope. I took it home and a month later I mailed it to myself. When I opened it at work and read it, it was like a fresh experience all over again. I was so impressed by how effective this was for me that I employed the idea in one of my own seminars. I

The reports I got back were remarkable. Some people said seeing those thoughts written to themselves in their own handwriting brought the whole seminar back to them. They felt a rush of excitement and a new commitment to take action.

Are you willing to remind yourself to treat yourself to your own best thoughts? Are you willing to set visual traps and ambushes, so you’ll always see words and thoughts you know you want to remember?

refers to large goals as “outcome” goals and small goals as “process” goals. The beauty of process goals is that they are always within your immediate power to achieve.

beginning

If you’re not in the habit of setting process goals, you might say, “I guess I ought to do some paperwork or make a call or two before I go home.” You look at the pile of paper on your desk, or you mindlessly thumb through phone numbers, and all of a sudden someone comes by your desk to chat. Because you have nothing specific to do you engage in conversation and, before you know it, the half hour is gone and you have to go home. Even though you didn’t leave anything specific unfinished, you still have that vague feeling of having wasted time.

People who get into the swing of setting small goals all day long report a much higher level of consciousness and energy. It’s as if they are athletes constantly coaching themselves through an ongoing game. They are happier people because their day is being created by the power inside their own minds, and not by the power of the world around them.

Because pessimists have a habit of thinking it’s hopeless”or nothing can be done, they quit thinking too soon. An optimist may have the same initial negative feelings about a project, but he or she keeps thinking until smaller possibilities open up. This is why Alan Loy McGinnis, in his inspiring book The Power of Optimism, refers to optimists as “tough-minded.”

Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep thinking. The more you think about a situation, the more you will see small opportunities for action—and the more small actions you take, the more optimistic energy you will receive. An optimist keeps thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking—and then just quits.

1) optimism is more effective than pessimism; and 2) optimism can be learned.

If you really want to open up your life and motivate yourself to succeed, become an optimistic thinker.

One of my favorite tricks for flipping my mind over to the optimistic side is to ask myself the question: How can I use this?