The Psychology of Motivation: How to Stay Driven and Achieve Your Goals

We cannot eat motivation on our breakfast and feel it all day. No, it’s something more magician than any other feeling we have.

Motivation drives any idea, action, or habit we get.

Why do you go to the gym? Because you have the motivation to get great muscle shape, be more attractive, and feel better. Why are you working on this project? Because you want to learn new skills, gain experience, and earn money.

For anything in this life, motivation becomes an engine. Any person on the street is doing something because of the inspiration. People usually work because money motivates them to do it. We talk to people because of the desire to keep a conversation or get any result from that.

That’s why if we lose motivation, we will stay in one place and not move anywhere. That’s true! There are even several stories on the Internet like this one.

He was a man who was pretty successful when he got trauma of his head. Doctors removed part of the brain that was responsible for his emotions, and then he became healthy but without any feelings at all.

Then, this man lost his job, family, friends, etc. Because he didn’t have any motivation or desire for those things, if you want, you can read about this.

We should take care of our emotional brain, be aware of our desires, and control our inner engine. But how can we stay so?

First of all, we need to split motivation into several categories where we need to use it. I underline the next ones:

• habits
• goals
• projects

The first one is a habit. I want to say it’s 99% of the place where we need to be motivated. We do this thing every day or several times per week.

We should do it regularly. But without understanding why we need it, we won’t be able to stick with these habits for an extended period.

It’s a pretty tricky topic. I have written a whole separate article on the subject of habits. You can check below. I also read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear.

The second part is goals. If we can learn to repeat daily things and stick to them, we should work more on our high destinations. For example, you want to achieve excellent results in sports or your job.

Here, your everyday habits will help you. But besides that, you need to concentrate on the right direction and always remember why you do it.

Often, people give up halfway because of a lack of desire and motivation.

Here, it would help if you had a plan, a goal, a strategy, and a mission. This topic is more related to the product management role, but it also works amazingly in life.

Remember, high goals should be split into milestones to track progress.

Progress is the first thing you need to support your motivation. Then, if you see your progress, you need to follow other data to understand if you move in the right direction.

These two articles, written some time ago, can help you work on keeping your motivation and planning correctly.

And the last thing is working on your projects. It’s the most complicated part of all items because it should contain all of them: habits, goals, strategy, etc.

Here, we need to find the end goal we need to achieve and split it into subgoals. Then, we need to plan and strategize to achieve these goals.

And finally, we need to take action and regularly compare our results with the plan.

In this part, these two articles bring you the right ideas and thoughts to work on more mindfully and creatively.

If you liked this article, I will also leave some others here. Please enjoy reading them and find something helpful and valuable for you.