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3 Motivation Strategies Not Many People Know About

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Feeling unmotivated? There are plenty of ways you can motivate yourself to finish your tasks for the day, tasks that will help you get closer to whatever goals you’ve set for yourself. Here are 3 motivation strategies that not many people actually know about.

Reflect On Your Achievements

When you start running out of ideas, or you start feeling like you’re not making any progress at all towards your goals, you can try looking back at your achievements.

Remember how far you’ve come, all the milestones you’ve achieved to date, and you’ll see that everything you’ve done so far has not been wasted.
Start a journal, write down your thoughts and your feelings. You can also use it to chart your progress.

When you’ve got concrete proof in front of you that you’ve made significant steps towards your goals, you’ll feel so much better.

You’ll feel motivated to continue doing your work and to improve yourself as well.

Learn From Others

If you look up to somebody, you can use them as motivation to continue improving yourself. This is especially true if that somebody has found success in life. You’ll learn a lot from them.

You don’t even have to know them in person. You can read news articles and books about them. Learn their background – do they have a special story to tell? Let them inspire you.

You can also start following them on social media, if they’re on there. Many successful people use social media nowadays, and they strive to provide plenty of value to their followers.

Mentor Other People

Teaching other people what you know will also motivate you to become a much better person. Other people are looking up to you, you don’t want to fail them.
You want to show them that you’re capable of being a good mentor. It will help build your self-confidence and your self-esteem.

I’m sure you’ve had a favorite teacher or mentor in school – what did they do to make them stand out from the other teachers?

I’m willing to bet it’s because they taught you a lot about different subjects, maybe about life in general. You can do the same to your mentee(s) – show them you genuinely care for them, it will motivate them to learn. Their motivation will rub off on you – so it’s really a win-win situation.

 

Why Validating Yourself Through Comparisons Is Bad

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We all make comparisons with others throughout our lives. Sometimes a comparison can be really good for you and other times it can be bad. There are people that make comparisons based on jealousy and other negative emotions. These will usually have negative consequences such as making a person feel terrible and lowering their self worth.

Then there are good comparisons. These are when a person wants to improve their life and looks to someone else to understand the gap that they need to close to achieve their goals. Maybe they have a gap in terms of knowledge and experience and once they know what this is then they can create a plan to close the gap.

Using Comparisons to Validate how good you are

Then we have the comparisons that some people make to validate how good they are. There is some good intent here as they want to confirm that they are still great at something. This is a very common type of comparison that happens every day all across the world.

Let’s say that a person is very good at making money. They then compare themselves with someone that is always broke and is the complete opposite of them. When they compare their lives the person that is good at making money gets an ego boost while the person that is broke ends up even more depressed.

But what if this comparison went wrong? If you are the person that is good at making money and you come across a stranger that looks poor to you how can your comparison for an ego boost fail?

Well you do not know anything about this person and appearances can be very deceptive. You are assuming that they don’t know how to make money like you do based solely on their appearance. You don’t really know what their financial position id.

So you think to yourself that you have been right every time in the past so you are going to give the comparison with this stranger a shot and you are feeling confident. But it turns out to be a disaster because the person has a lot more money than you and knows many more money making methods than you do!

How do you react to this? You are in the company of friends and colleagues who are in a state of shock over this. They begin to act warmly towards the stranger because he is their new idol. Do you become bitter and even angry over this? It is very likely isn’t it?

Other Downsides of Validation Comparisons

With a validation comparison there is always likely to be a winner and a loser. It is like a competition and the loser is probably going to be pretty unhappy. In the scenario above the person thought he was going to be victorious and then came crashing down to earth.

If you use the same people for your validation comparisons it will not take long for them to get fed up with this ridiculing and start to avoid you. They will quickly spread the word about you as well. For the validation comparer the world can be a pretty lonely place.

Using validation comparisons rarely move people forward in their lives. They have got to a pint where they are content to wallow in their victories at the expense of others but they are not setting themselves any new challenges and growing as a result.

Why Do We Compare Ourselves To Others?

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The first thing to say here is that it is totally natural for you to want to compare yourself with others so there is no reason to feel bad about this. What is important is how these comparisons make you feel about yourself.

When you think about it if you don’t compare yourself to other people how can you know where you stand and how well you are doing? Since you were a child you learned to compare yourself to others. It is hardwired into your brain, but this doesn’t mean that you cannot change your approach to comparisons so that they benefit you.

The Festinger Research

Nowadays there is a lot of research work into why people compare themselves to others but back in the 1950’s there was hardly any. At that time there was a social psychologist called Leon Festinger that had a strong interest in the subject so he decided to run a number of studies on why people compared themselves to others.

After he completed the studies he concluded two things:

1. People like to compare themselves to others as a way of reducing the uncertainty in their lives.
2. Comparing themselves with others provided them with clues of how they should think and behave.

This was a revolutionary breakthrough in psychology at the time. What Festinger discovered was that each one of us do not have the capability intrinsically or on our own to define who we are. We need to use comparisons with other people to achieve this.

Another important breakthrough was that when there is a huge gap between one person and another in terms of say intellect, ability, character and so on that there would be less chance of a comparison occurring.

He concluded from this that we are far more likely to make comparisons with people that we consider to be similar to ourselves than those that are totally different. So as an example it is far more likely for you to compare yourself with another team member at work than it is to make a comparison with the CEO.

Importance Matters

We all have people in our lives that we consider important. In this situation you will experience a lot more pressure to try and be like these people. So if they have a specific opinion about something then you will try to conform to that opinion because you think that the person is very important.

So if you ask someone important in your life for some advice about something, you are far more likely to accept their advice than you are if you asked the same question online and a total stranger offered different advice. You are not objectively weighing up the two sets of advice you received.

Two Different Reasons to Compare yourself to others

As with most things in life there is a good and a bad way to make comparisons with other people. The bad way can provide you with some short term benefits but if it goes wrong it can cause you a great deal of pain. The good method will not create any pain in your life at all and should be beneficial always.

The bad way to compare yourself to others is to do it to validate how good you are. You choose a person that you know is weaker than you in an area that you excel and use this for an ego boost.

The good way is to make comparisons for your own development. You want to achieve a specific goal so you seek out people that have already done this and learn from them. Can you see the difference here?

 

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