You understand that you are the only responsible person about your productivity and advancement, but sometimes you feel you are not doing enough about it and sometimes you feel so energized as you are able to accomplish 10 folds of your work compared to what you have previously done.
Does this inner power sound mysterious to you? Would you like to penetrate deeper into it and reveal more about this decisive energy? I have always wanted to know more about motivation, since a superficial knowledge about it can’t allow me to use it in my favor intentionally. That’s why I did so and now I am representing to you too the clearest definition of motivation.
What does motivation mean
I want to start with the general definition of motivation which states that motivation is the desire, enthusiasm, interest and energy that cause you to take action to a certain goal. You have a lot of goals in every important area of life and of course, motivation isn’t equal in all of them.
Actually you may give higher importance to some areas of your life, for instance to relationships and not recognizing well if other fields like studying are really useful or significant for your happiness. And that causes you to be highly energetic and enthusiast about your social life and less motivated to other goals.
Such a high level of motivation not only obsesses you more with the first goal, but it strongly triggers you to take a lot of action only to that direction. So apart of knowing what does motivation mean in general terms, you should understand well the psychology of motivation to keep a balance between every area of your life that may result later more important than you are thinking right now.
To do this you need to clarify your real needs and wants. Figure out the importance of the exam a week before, not only after you make it. Visualize the situation you will face in the future if you don’t work properly, or if you disrespect people. Figure out how you will feel and look, or how much admiration and money will you get if you get good results. This way you will realize the real importance of every goal you may overlook and procrastinate at the moment.
Internal and External motivation
You might ask yourself: Ok I got what is motivation, and I understand how important it is to be highly enthusiastic about goals that I really need and want to accomplish, but what is exactly causing such a powerful emotional state of mind? Many theories explain this subject by dividing motivation in internal and external.
Try to remember the time when you experienced a powerful desire to do a certain activity. If you dig deeply into the reasons that made you so passionate about that activity you will find that you felt so happy, proud or confident while you were dealing with that thing.
Internal and external motivation theory consists exactly on rewards you get from doing something, and in the case above the reward that caused you to feel motivated about your work is feeling good and worthy while you were performing it. I mentioned this fact in Find Studying Interesting that we find things interesting for emotional reasons.
Rewards that can increase your motivation are not only emotional, but money, high status, admiration and respect can deeply affect the level of motivation and can trigger a huge energy inside you to get things done as soon as possible in order to get those attractive external rewards.
3 Components of motivation
How can you measure the strength of your motivation? You may feel so energized to accomplish a task, but you might be confused if your level of motivation is normal, just enough, or extraordinary compared to strong motivation you have heard on many articles. In order to understand this you should know the components of motivation which are activation, perseverance and concentration.
Activation is the ability to initiate the action to a desired goal. This is the first trait of a strong motivation that is more present in people with a high initiative soul. If you decide to get a better job and after this decision you immediately go to attend additional courses and create new important relationships, then you have a strong initiative which is an indicator of a healthy motivation.
Perseverance is the ability to make continued efforts toward a single direction. You know that the success of any goal is depended on the realization of the nr of tries until you do it, or on the ability to focus on the same work or project for a long time until you get results and make it work, especially when the needed task is very lengthy. So here are 2 contents about perseverance which are equally important about success, so they must be a part of your motivation.
Concentration is the ability to remain focused and to pay the whole attention to things you do. Your motivation shouldn’t only make you initiate and persevere in a task, but it must make you dedicate a lot of efforts, time and care to what you do. I said in my article Why you should overcome laziness that additional efforts make your work stand out, so it will be more effective to success because only a few people do things that require many efforts.
Areas where motivation affects your results
It’s a common belief in positive psychology that you become the person you want to be. And that’s absolutely true. Every theory accepts this belief as a fact. There is no any magic in motivation that makes you become who you want to be in a strange way, but that happens as a result of the hard work you are willing to do if you get yourself motivated.
This fact is reflected in every area of your life, but here are mentioned only the main fields. One of these fields is education. Learning is a hard activity that many people might find boring. This happens when you learn and study without being motivated by the desire to know more about a certain topic. But you study extremely hard the topics you consider very useful, because you have a big desire to master that subject.
Workplace is another area where you feel the importance of your motivation levels, because your productivity at work is directly related with how much you enjoy your work and with the amount of money you earn from it. Strong motivation might come from the desire to not lose the job too. You might really face weak results if you don’t enjoy your work, or if it doesn’t pay you the money you want.
Hobbies and activities you like to do in your free time are usually motivated by the pleasure and enjoyment you get when you perform them well. That’s why you are always in search of new ways to perfect your hobby or your art. However the lack of external motives can run your level of enthusiasm if you start to create some limiting beliefs about it. Remember those moments?
Achievement motivation
Do you have a big dream? It’s easy to motivate yourself to follow your daily goals, because they are so realistic and achievable. But, what about big achievements? Of course things are different here, because big dreams can’t be achieved over night, not through normal ways.
If you aim to reach big success, you can success after an exceptional and hard work, but you might fail many times too. However you will never achieve something big if you don’t aim it first, simply because you will not feel motivated to make efforts toward that direction. So if there are no efforts toward that goal, a miracle is needed to make it happen. Miracles don’t happen everyday so it is better to know how to put yourself on track.
What affects the most achievement motivation? You need a huge ego to dream big, but you have to be careful about limiting beliefs too. There are many factors that affect the feelings of motivation to achieve something special, but these 2 factors are decisive, specially limiting beliefs.
Society tries to induce in your belief system many wrong ideas to make you stop and behave “normal”. This normal way of acting is a result of a superficial thinking process of all society. “It takes money to make money”, “only geniuses can do extraordinary things” etc.. These are limiting beliefs that are proved to be wrong everyday by courageous people.
This doesn’t mean that things are simple and easy, but their difficulty doesn’t lay at where people think, so listen only to the right people and don’t let the society stop you at things you shouldn’t stop.
Final words: Definition of motivation shouldn’t be general and superficial like many other definitions you see everywhere. Even though I gave you a clear definition on this article, this doesn’t have to stop you reflecting about it.
After you feel you have understood it enough you must use this power in your favor. This blog is a ultimate guide to develop your motivation, so you will find many other interesting blog posts that will inform, encourage and improve you.