5 Common Mistakes That Kill Your Motivation

Motivation is the driving force behind our actions. More motivation to do the right things is therefore one of the most common desires people have. But having motivation sometimes means not doing the things that kill it.

Do you make any of these five mistakes that kill your motivation to do what matters?

Each reason includes a powerful technique to help you overcome it and stay motivated.

1. You Wait For It

Motivation is based on your emotions and environment. The best way to increase your motivation, then, is to change your emotions or environment. But how do you do that?

Take action. It can change your emotions and environment at the same time.

Many people believe they need motivation to take action, but it more commonly follows action. Think about your motivation levels prior to and during a workout. Once you begin, do you notice an increase in motivation to finish? Of course, because nothing is more motivating than taking action, which triggers an emotional shift and changes your environment in one fell swoop.

How To Overcome Waiting For It

The way to take action before you’re motivated is to aim for the first small step. This works because it doesn’t require much motivation, and yet it triggers additional motivation. To work out, begin by getting your gym clothes on. To write, open your word processor (and write one sentence).

If you always wait for motivation to come first, you’ll be waiting half your life. And waiting for motivation is often demotivating! But if you get the process started, your emotional state and motivation will align with what your body is already doing.

 

2. You Don’t Believe In Yourself

Motivation is very sensitive to your beliefs. If you want to get in great shape, but don’t fully believe that your gym efforts will get you there, then you won’t be motivated to go to the gym. Psychologists call this self-efficacy, which is your belief in your ability to influence an outcome.

How To Overcome Self Doubt

If you don’t believe that taking action will change your life in a meaningful way, do some research. Read stories of others who have done it and focus on the cause and effect of their actions. It can be difficult to believe you can do something you’ve never done, and that’s what hurts motivation. But if you do your research and take action (with small steps), your beliefs will change, and your motivation to continue will increase.

 

3. You Let Short-Term Feelings Get In The Way

The word “motivation” has a short-term and long-term meaning. I’m 100% motivated to be fit in general and that never changes. But I’m not always motivated to exercise in this very moment.

In other words, you can want something in general, but not want it in any given moment due to your feelings and circumstances. Because the things we want tend to require hard work and effort, it’s easy to want them, but not want to put the required work in to get them.

How To Overcome Negative Short-Term Feelings 

Accept that you don’t need to feel motivated to work in this moment. It does not have to stop you. It only stops people when they confuse how they feel as being the same as their long-term desires. Again, small steps combat these short-term feelings well because they activate your longer-term, intrinsic motivation.

 

4. You Lose Track Of Why

For any goal, it’s imperative to remember why you’re pursuing it in the first place. What are the benefits? If you forget about the benefits, your goal is going to seem like an undesirable mountain of work! And there is nothing less motivating than a lot of work without a meaningful reward.

How To Remember Why

I recommend using a vision board to keep you mindful of why you’re putting forth all this effort. Vision boards are visual representations of your goals. They’re so effective because our minds think of concepts in a visual way.

 

5. You Try Too Much At Once

I’m a firm believer in aiming for small goals that can be built higher. Most people aim high immediately because the allure of the big reward gives them a motivating surge at first. This backfires, however, when they enter the inevitable “grind” phase of goal pursuit. This is when the reward seems distant, yet the work is demanding. How unmotivating!

How To Overcome Unrealistic Goals 

Start small to keep your goal unintimidating; even when the reward seems distant, your workload will be bearable and you’ll be able to push through to bigger and better things. When you aim for the sure win, you’re much less likely to get discouraged and lose your motivation.

Source: http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/5-common-mistakes-kill-motivation/

Inspiring and Motivational - How This Man Built A $3M Business A Year After Four Years In Prison

 

Frederick Hutson, CEO and cofounder of Pigeonly

 

Frederick Hutson is a man who sees business opportunities in everything. By his own admission, this doesn’t always work out for the best. Hutson spent over four years in prison after getting busted for an opportunity he saw in drug trafficking, a huge market, and one that was as he saw it, ripe for disruption. Police busted him at his Vegas mail store, where he’d been reducing inefficiencies by rerouting marijuana through his Florida business via FedEx, UPS and DHL.

Hutson, who’d built several businesses before and after a stint in the Air Force, which he left with an honorable discharge, began meditating on new ideas soon after he started his 51-month sentence in 2007, aged 24. “I did my time that way,” he says. “While I was there I just saw how grossly inefficient the prison system was and there was just so many opportunities.”

A big gripe for the 2.3 million doing time in the US is keeping in touch with friends and family on the outside. There’s no internet in prison so all communication is through snail mail or the phone. Calls are often expensive and long distance. Relatives and friends, leading increasingly digitized lives, write less and don’t get around to sending photos for weeks on end.

“It was a pain point I experienced firsthand,” says Hutson. “I’m very close with my family and I knew they cared about me but even with knowing how much they cared about me they were still sometimes unable to send me photos.”

Transitioning from digital to analog is tough, says Hutson. It’s hard to sit down and write a letter now but simple to text or email. What if you created a website that printed out emails, texts or photos from your computer, Facebook or Instagram and mailed them for you in the plain white envelopes these institutions favored?

The idea for Pigeonly was born. Essentially, it’s a platform that centralizes the myriad state-level databases making it a quick search to find where an inmate is in the system – Hutson himself was moved eight times during his stay – as well as a way to communicate. “People get lost in the system all the time,” he explains. “We have attorneys contacting us trying to find their clients.”

Through its sub-brands, Fotopigeon, which sends digital prints to inmates and Telepigeon which lowers phone call rates through VoIP, Pigeonly is on track to be profitable on about $1 million in revenue in its first year following $2 million in seed financing from Silicon Valley investors. 

Hutson’s Las Vegas-based team has grown from two to twelve. Key to this was getting accepted to NewMe, a Sillicon Valley-based accelerator for underrepresented minorities. It was the only accelerator to accept Hutson, he says.

When he started as part of the winter 2013 cohort, he and his cofounder Alfonzo Brooks had already launched a version of Pigeonly while Hutson was still in his halfway house. They’d quickly picked up 2,000 customers by directly mailing inmates touting their services.

“We identified 500 people and sent them greeting cards saying here’s a product people can use to send you photographs. Three or four days after our cards landed we started seeing people show up on our website creating accounts and sending photos so we kept doing that,” says Hutson.

At NewMe Hutson started re-orienting the business from a few services to a searchable platform and began taking meetings with investors. “In the very beginning I was hesitant to even talk about my background but the question would always come up, well how do you know?” he says.

NewMe’s founder Angela Benton gave Hutson some advice. “She said, look some people are not going to vibe with you and they’re not going to be able to get on board with what you’re doing – there’s going to be a block because you’ve been in prison and you don’t look like the typical person they invest in,” he remembers.

When he focused instead on the people who were open and understood that his background was why he knew this problem exists he started gaining ground. “A lot of times a thing that can be perceived as a weakness actually turn into the greatest strength and for me it was that. It actually became the reason people invested – because I’d been there, and I know and understand this market better than anybody else,” he says.

Still, fundraising was no cakewalk, he says. “It can be hard because as an entrepreneur you feel like it’s your baby and when you talk to someone about your baby and they go, no that’s whack I’m not interested you can’t take that personal, you have to be able to talk to the next person with the same intensity and fervor,” he says.

Convincing investors to write a check for the first million was the hardest. “I probably talked to about 60 investors, and in our seed round we had six, so that gives you an idea of how many no’s you had to get to the six yes’s,” he says.

Hutson thinks prisons are a natural pool of entrepreneurs. “When you take away that seven percent or so that did something violent that people are afraid of, people who we need to have locked up, most of the other guys were selling drugs or involved in some kind of scam or did some kind of wire fraud, or white collar crime that was motivated by finances,” he says. “So you just really got the business model wrong, you got the product wrong, the goal was wrong but if you can apply that same drive and bottom line principles to something positive then now you have a viable business.”

He learned a lot from his fellow inmates inside. “In some facilities that the classes they have aren’t taught by people outside, they’re taught by other inmates,” he says. “So you’ll have a guy who has a white collar crime who might have embezzled 40 million dollars and he knows something about business because he ran some listed company and now he has a 36 month federal sentence for tax evasion – he’ll teach a class on how to form an LLP or start a balance sheet.”

Still, getting prisoners ready to reenter society isn’t a big priority, thinks Hutson. “Most institutions are geared around containment,” he says. “Most are based around ‘you don’t leave and you guys don’t kill each other while you’re here’ – that’s their priority number one.”

With reoffending rife – one study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005 and found 68% were rearrested within three years – some organizations are already turning to entrepreneurship as a way forward. For example, the Houston-TX-based Prison Entrepreneurship Program, which trains around 250 prisoners a year in launching a business says instances of inmates reoffending once they’ve completed the course is only 5%.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/hollieslade/2014/08/21/how-this-man-built-a-3m-business-a-year-on-from-four-years-in-prison/

This Inspiring Video Will Change your Attitude Towards Helping Other People

First, Take the Plank Out of Your Own Eye - Sunday Inspiration

A young couple moved into a new neighbourhood. The next morning while they were eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbour hanging the wash outside.

“That laundry is not very clean,” she said. “She doesn’t know how to wash correctly. Perhaps she needs better laundry soap.” 

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.

Every time her neighbour would hang her wash to dry, the young woman would make the same comments. 

About a month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: “Look, she has learned how to wash correctly. I wonder who taught her this.” 

The husband replied, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”

And so it is with life…What we see when watching others, depends on the window through which we look.

When you never fail to spot something wrong with other people, stop and check yourself…it is very likely that you have a similar, perhaps even worse problem, which you should address first…then you can go help your neighbour (that is if they need your help in the first place).

How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye?

First, take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. Luke 6: 41 – 42 (NIV)

So, have you ever tried to remove a speck from someone else’s eye when in fact you had a plank in yours? Inspire us with your example - leave a comment, please.

Anthony Robbins Motivates You in 20 minutes

Shake off the Dust…Don’t Give Up!

 

There was a farmer who had a donkey that he was very fond of; the donkey had served him faithfully for years and was very precious to him. 

As the donkey grew older, the farmer would allow it to go around the farm unaccompanied and it would return to the barn after some time. The donkey went out one morning and had not returned by noon – which was very unusual. The farmer was uncomfortable and decided to look for the donkey; as he moved around the farm, he heard a noise from one of the pits located at the far end of the farm. On getting to the pit, he saw that the donkey had fallen into the pit and was struggling to come out. It was crying and wailing, seeking for help.

The farmer called his sons and they tried to lift the donkey from the pit using ropes but it was too heavy. Neighbours came along to help get the donkey out but all to no avail. 

The more they tried, the more tired everyone including the donkey became. It was probably going to take a crane or the aid of a chopper to get the big old donkey out of the pit, but they could not afford either.

After trying all they could, they finally decided that burying the donkey was the only viable option… the farmer could no longer stand the anguish and pain it was going through. The earth from the pit was still close by so they all grabbed shovels and started throwing earth back into the pit. As they started the process, the cry became louder but then the donkey became quiet and everyone felt it was due to tiredness.

One of the farmer’s sons wanted to see what was happening and was shocked by what he saw when he looked into the pit. 

As each load of earth thrown into the pit landed on the donkey’s back, it would shake it off and then step on the sand. Thus, it was moving up the pit. When the son told the farmer about the development, they all started throwing in the earth with renewed enthusiasm and the donkey was lifted by every shovel of earth. Before long, the donkey simply walked out of the pit.

The farmer was so glad to have his reliable old donkey back…

How often do we give up when things are not going our way? 

Oftentimes, we resign to fate instead of pushing just a little more. Like the donkey in the story, we need to learn to shake off disappointments, failures and problems, and not dwell too long on them.

It is also interesting to note that what was meant to bury the donkey, lifted it out of its predicament! That ugly situation will only get the better of you if you allow it to. No problem is as bad as it appears. Something good can still come out of that mess. 

Your attitude to your problem is more important than the problem itself. It is what you make out of your situation that counts. If others have given up on you, do not give up on yourself. Shake off the dust…don’t give up!

Even More Inspiring Than We Realised...Michelle Obama

We're reliving Michelle Obama's most inspirational quotes to date. What an incredible First Lady and generally fabulous human being... 

 

1. 'You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.'

2. 'One of the lessons that I grew up with was to always stay true to yourself and never let what somebody else says distract you from your goals. And so when I hear about negative and false attacks, I really don't invest any energy in them, because I know who I am.'

3. 'I am an example of what is possible when girls from the very beginning of their lives are loved and nurtured by people around them. I was surrounded by extraordinary women in my life who taught me about quiet strength and dignity.'

4. 'Women in particular need to keep an eye on their physical and mental health, because if we're scurrying to and from appointments and errands, we don't have a lot of time to take care of ourselves. We need to do a better job of putting ourselves higher on our own "to do" list.'

5. 'Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values, like you work hard for what you want in life. That your word is your bond, that you do what you say you're going to do. That you treat people with dignity and respect, even if you don't know them and even if you don't agree with them.'

6. 'I never cut class. I loved getting As, I liked being smart. I liked being on time. I thought being smart is cooler than anything in the world.'

7. 'Whether you come from a council estate or a country estate, your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.'

8. 'And in my own life, in my own small way, I've tried to give back to this country that has given me so much. That's why I left a job at a law firm for a career in public service, working to empower young people to volunteer in their communities. Because I believe that each of us - no matter what our age or background or walk of life - each of us has something to contribute to the life of this nation.'

9. 'Success is only meaningful and enjoyable if it feels like your own.'

10. 'There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.'

11. 'I am so tired of fear. And I don't want my girls to live in a country, in a world, based on fear.'

12. 'When I get up and work out, I'm working out just as much for my girls as I am for me, because I want them to see a mother who loves them dearly, who invests in them, but who also invests in herself. It's just as much about letting them know as young women that it is okay to put yourself a little higher on your priority list.'

13. 'We should always have three friends in our lives: one who walks ahead, who we look up to and follow; one who walks beside us, who is with us every step of our journey; and then, one who we reach back for and bring along after we've cleared the way.'

14. 'Do not bring people in your life who weigh you down. And trust your instincts... Good relationships feel good. They feel right. They don't hurt. They're not painful. That's not just with somebody you want to marry, but it's with the friends that you choose. It's with the people you surround yourselves with.'

15. 'Just do what works for you, because there will always be someone who thinks differently.'

Source: http://www.marieclaire.co.uk/blogs/545340/and-here-s-why-michelle-obama-is-a-total-inspiration.html

First Within, Then Without - An Inspirational Story of Change

 

The Barbers and Hairstylists of the United States were about to have their national convention. They wanted people to appreciate their profession and wanted  to give Americans a better image of their profession. 

They hired a young Public Relations executive to handle the job and help in packaging the convention. 

The young man thought of a very brilliant idea and went to work immediately. He went down town the city of New York, to the slums, and picked up a young man who obviously was a street urchin, who was looking so unkempt, with clothes that were tattered and soiled. His hair was unkempt and his beard dirty. 

The guy listened to the young executive’s offer, and since there was some money involved, they bargained and the area boy agreed to the conditions given.

The young executive took him first to a photographer’s shop and had some snaps of him taken the way he was; dirty and unkempt. Then he gave him a face lift: a steam bath, a shave and a hair cut, and then took him to the photographer for another round of snapshots. But he was not finished. The young executive took the man to town and got him professionally made suits, shirts, ties and shoes. Then he had a third round of photographs snapped.

On the day the convention started, the young executive positioned three life-size photographs of his subject in the lobby of the hotel, so every one who came in saw the transformation that had happened to the man. And he wrote at the top of those pictures, “See what the Barbers and Hairstylists of America can do to a man”. And the story immediately hit the headlines across America.

For effect, the well-suited street urchin was positioned at the hotel lobby to shake hands with people as they came in for the convention. The strategy worked. The campaign was a success. 

The Manager of the Hotel was touched; he fell in love with the young man and decided to do something to help him. He decided to get him a job. He made some phone calls and it was agreed that the man should start work with one of the manager’s friends. So he had an agreement with the man to come back on Monday to resume work.

However, on the agreed Monday, he expected the man all day but he didn’t show up. The next day, there was still no sign of him. When the young man didn’t show up after a month the manager forgot about him.

After some months, they were going through their store, when the manager saw the picture of the man again and then decided to go down to the slum to look for the guy. He had the picture of the guy, and he kept asking but nobody knew the man. Then after one hour it occurred to him that he was holding the picture of the street urchin after he had been cleaned up. So he went back to pick the picture he took before he was cleaned up and within a few minutes the man was located - back in the slums.

The message in the story is this; the Barbers and Hairstylists of America can change the outside of a person in a few hours but if they don’t change the person’s inside, that person has not yet changed. Although the young man was changed outwardly, inwardly he was the same old street urchin.

Source: http://www.successpowermedia.com/first-within-then-without/

RIP Robin Williams - 10 Quotes From the Man Who Inspired Us With Laughter

The death of Robin Williams silenced one of Hollywood's most famous voices. 

 

An animated and prolific performer, Williams was known for colorful and thoughtful personality. With more than 100 acting roles and charismatic personality out of character, the actor touched fans with his words.
 
Keep Williams' spirit alive through some of his most memorable quotes that capture his powerful voice both on screen and off.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/08/11/robin-williams-quotes/

Looking past limits - Inspirational Talk by Caroline Casey