5 Essential Factors That Contributes to The Level of Self-Motivation in Your Life

What’s your why? And how supportive is your environment?

Why are some people almost always motivated to take the right actions in their lives? And why would some people wake up in the morning feeling unmotivated to work on their goals?

You may have a system in place to help you get things done. You set achievable goals — and anchor them on your reliable system. But nothing significant would be achieved at the end of the day if you’re unable to find the motivation to work on your planned tasks.

Motivation is like an inbuilt engine that empowers and directs you to your tasks — and keeps you at it until they’re done. But the challenge most people face is to be motivated to always work on tasks that are rewarding and not to while away their time each day on unimportant tasks and activities.

We Are All Motivated

Everything you do, you do it because you’re motivated. Motivation drives every action you take each day. You go out for a walk when you’re motivated to take a walk. You write when you’re motivated to write. And when you’re not motivated to work on a planned activity, you find yourself motivated to do something else.

This is why finding yourself working on unimportant tasks, instead of working on important tasks isn’t the absence of motivation, but a manifestation of negative motivation that directs you to unimportant tasks instead of the right tasks.

No one can motivate you to do the things you’re supposed to do. Someone can force, threaten or inspire you to take action, but it can only be temporarily.

There must be a strong reason as to ‘why’ you want to achieve a particular goal. You’d find yourself consistently motivated to work on the things you planned to work on when the ‘why’ is strong enough to keep you going.

#1. What’s Your Why?

I have severally tried to do things that I ended up not being able to finish because there was no strong ‘why’. Self-motivation is internally driven by ‘why’ the action needs to be taken cum the results the action would bring about.

What lies ahead of the actions you want to take contributes immensely to ensure that action is consistently taken until the task is done. The final result in most cases is what achievers set their minds each time they embark on a task. It’s what gravitates their motivation engine to keep rolling until the task is accomplished.

If you don’t have a good reason why you’re chasing after the result. If you don’t foresee it as something that would affect your life in ways that align with your personal development, like financial freedom, promotion, and happier life then you mightn’t be consistently motivated to take actions that would bring about any desired outcome.

#2. Have You Defined Your Purpose?

The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.” — Henry Ford

Knowing your purpose is key to being consistently motivated to work on your goals. A defined purpose makes your ‘why’ strong. It renews your strength every morning. It’s why you’re going to get up from the bed feeling motivated to get going.

But if the purpose isn’t defined, no matter how many self-help books you read, you’d still wake up every morning feeling unmotivated to do anything rewarding because there’s no defined purpose to create a strong ‘why’ that would rightly direct your actions and string you along each day doing rewarding tasks that align with your purpose in life.

#3. The Results You’re Getting Can Induce Self-Motivation

How often do you pause to reflect on your efforts and the results you’ve been getting from pursuing your goals. Are you recording the results? How do you feel about them?

The results are the product of your efforts, and they serve to show what your efforts have been producing — and to keep you going so you can either sustain the results or attain a higher level.

Taking time to reflect is how you service your motivation engine. It’s like doing periodic maintenance on a system to prepare it for future purposeful use. This works because when you reflect, you see the direction you’re heading, and what you’ve been gaining — and determine whether the results are in tandem with what you’re trying to achieve or not.

I find taking time to reflect to be very beneficial. It’s through the process that I can gain more understanding and awareness regarding my current situation and how I’m going about changing it. But if I don’t reflect, I probably won’t remember some important steps I took that yielded impressive results. It’d feel like I don’t know what my efforts are going to produce.

#4. How Supportive is Your Environment?

What kind of environment are you in?

Is it helping you to thrive? Or is it gradually drowning you?

Most people are not able to self-motivate themselves to work on their goals because of their environment.

Your environment can either help you to actualize your goals or work against your purpose. Your environment can enfeeble the strength of your ‘why’ and cause you to underperform on your goals. This is especially when you find yourself in an environment that feels your life with negative experiences. This could be because of your friends, family, colleagues and the place you live.

You don’t befriend anyone you come across if you know your direction in life, so you should often take some time to ruminate on the kind of friends you are keeping at the moment.

Are they true friends? Or are they hanging around you because of what they are benefitting from you? How do you feel after spending time with them? Do you feel uplifted? Or drained from their incessant complaints about their lives?

Being able to answer the above questions correctly will help you understand the kind of friends you have and to determine whether they’re worth keeping or not.

I know what it feels like to stay around selfish and negatively-minded people. You’d fail in every attempt to work hard and achieve any desired outcome. Instead, you’d gradually see yourself descending instead of ascending. This would continue until you move to a positive environment.

Leaving a negative environment is why many people excel in life after leaving where they grew up and move to uninspiring to where the people are friendly, kind, and supportive. Living in a positive environment can fuel your motivation engine and help you to accomplish many things over time.

You can’t defeat your environment. But your environment can help you record several winnings if you’re staying in a conducive and peaceful environment that allows you to work whenever you want to work.

#5. Enthusiasm.

“Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm…Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”Ralph Waldo Emerson

Take some time to ponder on what your experience has been like working on your goals if you find yourself lacking self-Motivation to keep working on them.

Has it been fun? Or draining? Is it something you look forward to each day? Or would you rather be doing something else?

The more enthusiastic you’re with your goals, and working on them, the more self-motivated you become. Enthusiasm helps individuals to be self-motivated to pursue their goals because they enjoy the process of working on the tasks. Enthusiasm is also why they’re going to find the reason to keep going when they encounter difficulties.

You should be having a good time working on your goals else you abandon it for some other activities you’d enjoy doing. Thus the process you follow each day must be rewarding and reinvigorating to keep you going.

But you’d lack self-motivation when there’s no enthusiasm — and this is why you’d get distracted and easily drawn to unimportant activities instead of doing the tasks you planned to do.

Final Word.

“Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.” — Proverb

People don’t just find themselves almost always motivated. What happens is that their motivation engine keeps them going because it’s powered by many life-driven reasons and meanings that reside at the core of their purpose in life.

They have a defined purpose, and a strong ‘why.’ They make sure that their environment is helping them to stay focused each time they’re motivated to work.

High achievers are almost always motivated to achieve their goals and move their lives forward because their motivation engine is set to consistently motivate them to work on their goals.

But on the other hand, underachievers lack the self-Motivation that would consistently drive them to take the right actions that would improve their lives.

Your environment can stymie your chances of accomplishing major achievements in life. It can, on the other hand, make getting things done easier for you.

Once your purpose is defined, the next important thing is to find a conducive environment where you can do your tasks with little or no distractions. Where unhelpful memories and useless friends won’t distract you from getting your tasks done.

You should also reserve time each week to reflect. Reflecting on your life helps to recognize what you’ve spent your time doing, the results you’re getting, and how to improve. After each episode of reflection, your motivation engine will be empowered to make you feel eager and ready to continue to pursue your goals.