Motivation

If there's one question that I hear more than any other from students it's this...

How do I get motivated?

How do you maintain that drive for learning that will sustain you through those tough, dry and boring spots when all you feel like doing is eating chips and watching re-runs on TV? 

As students we know all too well that motivation is hard to come by. Often we'll feel motivated for the first couple of weeks of semester. We'll go out and buy our books and we'll decorate them. We'll go to the stationary store and buy all these cool colored pens and highlighters and we'll be all ready to go. Then what happens? 2 weeks later we've lost most of our pens and most of our motivation. 

But why? Why do we lose our motivation so quickly?

The reason is because we expect motivation to come from the outside. We expect to be motivated by an interesting subject or a great teacher or because we have a big important test coming up. But regardless of subject, teacher or test sometimes our motivation continues to fail. What we need to do is learn how to generate true motivation. True motivation comes from within. True motivation is internal and can be generated anytime for anything. 

In this post I just want to mention the first of three steps in generating true motivation and that is...

Perspective.

Perspective really means how you look at things. And here is the point....The way you view a task or activity will be in direct proportion to how motivated you feel to do it. In other words, if you view Math as boring and tiresome then your motivation will be so low you might not even be motivated to go to class! But if you view Math as a challenge and an opportunity to understand the world in a new way what happens to your motivation? It goes straight up. And all that changed was your perspective. 

The key to changing your perspective lies in a simple question:

How else could I see this?

Anytime you feel low on motivation to do something it's because you are seeing that task in a negative light. All you need to say is "how else could I see this" and choose to shift your perspective to a more positive empowering frame of mind....and watch what happens to your drive.

See the key reason why top students stay motivated is because they can consistently frame what they're doing in ways that inspire them rather than deflate them. 

And you can do that too. In fact, you can become an expert at it and become a motivation generating machine. So ask yourself this question often and continually look for all the positives you can find in whatever it is that you are doing....that next assignment you have to do....the next class that you don't like....how else could I see this? What is a more empowering way in which I can look at this?....they're always there...just waiting to be discovered.

Until we chat next - Enjoy your learning!

Thanks for visiting. 

For a more detailed description of motivation including the other two steps for generating motivation come along to my study skills site. There's tons of free information on study skills as well as free audio downloads. See you there!