Discover Your Motivation

Your confidence is intimately connected to and affected by your level of motivation in life. Therefore, it’s up to you to discover your own motivation to pursue the life you desire. And when you do, your confidence grows.

As you can see, confidence, motivation, and achievement of your life dreams work together in two ways: being motivated to go after the life you want brings about confidence, and having confidence motivates you to seek out your desired path.

Try these techniques to discover what motivates you:

1. Read one self-help book a month. Reading and expanding your repertoire of knowledge is important in your pursuit of confidence.

• Reading one self-help book each month will serve as great motivation for you to pursue whatever you’re seeking in life. Your path to self-development will enrich and fulfill you if you read a self-help book each month.

2. Read other books that inspire you. Taking in new information stokes your fires of creativity, imagination, and motivation. Therefore, exposing yourself to any new information that interests, fascinates, or excites you will aid you in your plan to build confidence and go after your dream life.
3. Interview someone who you see as successful. This person could be someone you look up to. They could be from the field you hope to work in someday. Or it might be someone who works in your current field whom you view as striving for excellence.

• Before the interview, ponder what you want to know about the person’s success. Write down those questions so you’ll be prepared. You could ask the person to meet you for coffee, for lunch, or to come to your home some evening for dessert.
• Let the individual know in advance the reason for your meeting. You might mention you want to ask about her or his work habits and career development. Because your goal is to learn more about motivation, ensure you include some questions about how the person has remained motivated throughout their career.

4. Talk with your parents and grandparents. Ask them to share how they were successful in their roles as parents or workers.

• Keep in mind that your plan is to discover what motivates others. Ask things like, “How did you keep going forward when things got tough” and “What got you through the rough spots you mentioned.”

5. Hang out with people who are positive. When you have a chance to be close-up and personal with positive and successful people, you learn about how others remain positive through trying times and what they do to stay motivated in the most difficult situations.

• Plus, you’ll be encouraged to be positive and move forward in your own life. Ultimately, you’ll become motivated to pursue the very life you’ve always wanted.

6. Write down in simple steps what you must do. It’s time to get a tangible “picture” of your life now and the steps to follow from this point forward to achieve your dreams. What is the first baby step you can take to be one inch closer to what you want?

• Having a checklist to check off as you succeed in completing each step is incredibly motivating. Your list will boost your confidence and keep you moving forward.

7. Set mini-goals and timelines about how you’ll achieve each step. For example, each month, you could plan to pursue and complete just one step on your list. Celebrate each success. You’ll stay focused and motivated. Your confidence will build. Plus, you’ll feel excited about moving closer toward your desired life.

• Some steps may take you longer than one month to achieve, like taking a 6 week course or completing that college class you need. But the idea here is to use your list to stay motivated, thus increasing your confidence and ability to reach your life goals.

Discovering your motivation will increase your confidence tenfold. Knowing that you’re moving forward is a wonderful feeling!

Reading, interviewing a successful person, and talking with close family members about how they’ve stayed motivated will shed light on how you can focus on being motivated.

In addition, hanging out with positive people, writing out the steps you can take to work toward achieving your dreams, and using that list to move you forward will all serve to keep the fires of motivation bright. And when they burn, your confidence remains ignited.

Whatever you’re working toward, you can achieve it!

“If my mind can conceive it,

My heart can believe it,

I know I can achieve it!”

~Jesse Jackson