Surely you have ever started something with great enthusiasm and have given up shortly after due to lack of motivation. This lack of motivation can arise as a consequence of two premises:
Imagine a person who is studying for public examinations at the city council and also decides to enroll in a language school in order to be more competitive in the labor market if they do not obtain a place with the opposition. Shortly after starting to study the new language, he passes the exam and gets a place in the town hall.
Their initial goal was purely to be more competitive in an unstable job market. However, thanks to the fact that he has obtained the place, his future job is assured for life. As a consequence, your motivation to finish the language you have started to study will have lost a lot of strength. The best thing to do in this case is to find a new goal.
This is where the vast majority of people find ourselves. We started something with great enthusiasm but soon after we realized that achieving our goal is more difficult than we thought. We still have the same illusion as at the beginning but we had not calculated well the amount of effort we would have to make, does this sound familiar to you??.
There are many examples. A person joins the gym determined to lose those kilos that take them away from the figure they have always dreamed of and after a few weeks they realize that going to the gym every day is not easy.
The excuses to justify their laziness are very varied: "Today has been a very hard day at work, I just want to get home and lie on the couch", "I think I would have time to go to the gym ... but my house is a mess, I'm going to take advantage and clean it", "It's cold and it's raining"… And here is my favorite excuse that we usually use on Thursdays to justify our beers with friends: "Monday I start in earnest". So we can drink those straws with a clear conscience because of how much we are going to crush ourselves from Monday.
Then Monday comes and the week becomes a copy of the previous one and we create new excuses or modify the previous ones in order to continue to justify our laziness until eternity. We think that with the arrival of the new week, our motivation will change and this never happens.
With so much excuse, the days to do sports are reduced by half. If we also add the power factor, we discover that getting that beautiful figure becomes almost impossible. The objective has not lost any of its initial value, however we have lost part of our motivation when discovering how much it costs to get where we want.
The days of the week are a social convention, why do you rely on them to start doing something? Your body gets the same benefit whether you do sports on Sunday or Monday. So why wait for tomorrow if today is a good day and you can go for a run? Maybe tomorrow it's raining. Don't wait any longer and put on your sneakers.
When I'm on vacation is when I do the most sport. This has made me hear some comment of the type "but man don't go to the gym, you're on vacation". Precisely being on vacation, with so much free and rested time, makes me want to do sports much more. Do not turn your vacation into another new excuse for not doing sports, if not a good reason to practice it.
It is incredible how many good resolutions we set ourselves with the beginning of the New Year and it has not been a month yet and we have already abandoned them. If something is good for you, don't wait until January 1 to put it into practice. Get started today. If you let your life turn to the rhythm of social conventions, you will never be able to achieve your goals since it will be very easy to create excuses that separate you from them..
Your life must rotate to the rhythm that marks your interior. When your motivation comes from within, it is much more difficult to create excuses. I recently heard a person say that as soon as he finished his degree he would quit smoking since the exams cause him a lot of nerves and today it is impossible for him to quit ... What do you think will happen when that person finishes his degree? You will no doubt find a new excuse to keep smoking, such as a boss who causes you a lot of stress. Start listening to yourself and stop looking at the calendar.
The more specific your goal, the more difficult it will be for you to lose motivation. Your goals must be concrete and measurable. You must also be able to achieve them in a specific time frame. A goal such as "lose weight" is neither quantifiable nor does it have a specific time frame. For this you can transform that objective into a more specific one such as "lose two kilos a month for 5 months".
Without realizing it, 5 months will pass and you will have lost 10 kilos. Actually the goal of losing 10 kilos has been divided into 5 small goals that have helped you stay motivated all the time. Every month that passes and you check that you have achieved that mini-goal, your motivation increases and you gain more strength for the following month.
When I prepare for my Psychology exams and I see the volume of some of the books that I have to study, my motivation to finish my degree falters a bit.. For this reason I am forced to establish a study schedule in order to achieve weekly mini-objectives.. When the exams get closer, those mini-goals become daily mini-goals instead of being weekly..
When I run a Half Marathon I am never on the starting line thinking that I have 21 km ahead. I only think about the first 5 kilometers. When I get to the 5th kilometer I think about reaching km.10. When I get to 10 I think about reaching 15. And I continue like this until I reach km 21. If instead of establishing this mental strategy, I was already thinking about km 21 from the same starting line, the race would probably be much harder for me..
I like to show examples with body weight and sport as they are easily quantifiable areas. You should think of these examples as metaphors for whatever goal you set for yourself in your life..
Yet No Comments