Self-Motivation - 39 Best Ways to Motivate Yourself

One person studies and works all day long with pleasure, while another does it through force. And the point is not that the first, unlike the second, does what he likes. Much more often the reason is due motivation. It generates the desire and opportunity to achieve goals by overcoming oneself. To enjoy waking up early in the morning or doing monotonous work, you need to properly motivate yourself. There are many effective ways that, once mastered, you can achieve success in any business.

How is motivation different from self-motivation?

Motivation in most cases involves external influence. This could be an illustrative example of other people, instructions from management, or any other factors that require a person to match the circumstances. It is optimal when it is not too intrusive and involves receiving a reward. So, if the bosses demand to do more work in less time, and without additional payment, this situation will be unprofitable for the employee. At first, it may continue to work by inertia, but this is not a fact. Therefore, such an unfair strategy is doomed to failure. However, even here there are exceptions. When a person truly loves his job, he is interested in further development and professional achievements are not on the same level as financial gain, we talk about self-motivation. It differs from the motivation described above in that a person independently strives for perfection, despite the accompanying external factors. Personal growth is important to him, not benefit or praise from superiors. There is no need for additional incentives and control, even in difficult situations.

Method two: Keep a “Success Journal”

A success journal is a very effective tool for motivating yourself. It is a kind of diary in which you must record all your achievements. Even the smallest ones. This could be a successful acquaintance that occurred on your initiative, praise from your boss for a well-prepared report, an increase in income, getting rid of a bad habit, etc. It is advisable to keep this diary every day, because every day is filled with many events, among which there will certainly be good ones. The more you write down, the more success you will have in your journal. Scroll through and read it in the morning and evening, and whenever you are in a bad mood and feel low energy, loss of motivation, or feel like you are standing still and not making progress. Visually displaying all your successes and achievements will give you a new positive charge and strength to continue to act.

How to develop intrinsic motivation

Various methods of motivation work successfully in real conditions, but only if the action is under control. First it must be created, and then maintained at the proper level. You can motivate yourself or another person like this:

• induce;
• force;
• create the right situation.

When managing motivation, you need to take into account a person’s character traits and his leading qualities. For example, someone who cannot enjoy work may be motivated only by the result. Self-motivation has an inextricable connection with desires, beliefs, aspirations in life and everything that is important for a person. It is these factors that can prompt specific actions.

It is worth noting that the presence of motivating circumstances is an important, but not necessary condition in order to achieve what you want. Without understanding this, people wait for a long time for the “right mood” and, without waiting for a motivated state, they abandon their plans, giving up. In fact, to start taking action, just simple prudence is enough. The main thing is to adequately assess the importance of the goal and remember self-discipline in time. When studying various methods of motivation, it is necessary to understand how they work and in what situations they are powerless:

• a long period of apathy - may signal health problems, and not a lack of proper incentives;
• the expectation that the desire to do what you don’t want will come on its own - you need to learn to activate it yourself, otherwise it may never come;
• the use of methods that are incompatible with goals and character traits;
• multiple attempts to use the same methods, despite the lack of results;
• telling yourself “should” instead of “want” - any action should be a voluntary choice, and not a forced measure.

To develop internal motivation, it is very important to properly deal with breakdowns. Failure should not be a reason to give up what you want. It is better to use it as an additional “kick” for further actions.

Psychology of self-motivation

There is no person in the modern world who does not experience difficulties. Only some people are strengthened by difficulties. Others, on the contrary, are demotivated.

Our excuses get in the way of success. Therefore, let us outline the reasons for a person’s motivation to great deeds:

• Cash reward. A person will be interested in action subject to personal material gain.
• Professional growth.
• The need for society, social connections.

But it happens that you don’t want to do anything. Everything is falling out of hand. The psychology of self-motivation offers two options for resolving this situation:

1. Continue the planned action through laziness. Force yourself to get up and move forward.
2. Stop. Allow yourself to be lazy and gain new strength. But then you will have to speed up to catch up.

Ways and methods of self-motivation

The following ways will help you move forward confidently, develop and get what you want:

1. Burn bridges. If you get rid of any possibility of retreat, you can significantly increase your own chances of success. Anyone who has decided to open a business (and has every opportunity to do so) should quit their main job. Otherwise, it will be very difficult to bring the idea to life: stability will always outweigh the risky endeavor.
2. Surround yourself with motivating objects. A person who dreams of losing weight can hang posters with the images he strives for. And anyone who wants to get rich can change the screensaver on their phone or computer to a picture with the treasured amount of money.
3. Create a positive environment. Maximum communication with those who motivate and support will bring invaluable benefits. The same cannot be said about those who spew negativity and dissuade us from achieving our goals in every possible way.
4. Be inspired by other people's examples. Stories from people who have already done what a person strives for will charge you with energy and motivate you to succeed. After all, if someone has already done it, then everything is possible.
5. Get rid of sources of negativity. It is advisable to remove from life everything that causes negative emotions, including news on TV. Positive thinking 100% per day provides significant support in increasing motivation.
6. Act immediately. You can't put off your plans for later. After making a decision to change your life, you need to start doing it immediately. Do you have a goal to invest money in a profitable business? So, it's time to read thematic literature. Do you want to get rid of 15 kg? The first thing to start with is to remove harmful foods from the refrigerator.

The listed methods of motivation are effective in almost every case. Sometimes you just need to believe in yourself and everything starts to work out.

What to do if nothing works out

Self-motivation methods only work if you really want to achieve what you want. What to do if nothing works:

• Determine if this is what you really want. If your goal is imposed by someone (society, family, friends), no self-motivation methods will work. By doing something you don't really want, you're not motivating yourself, you're forcing yourself. A person cannot act through force for long; sooner or later devastation or emotional burnout will occur.
• Learn to enjoy the process, not just the result. It is difficult to achieve this; encouragement will come to the rescue for any success, even if insignificant.
• Think positively. Don't focus on the negative and failures, think only about the good.
• Take responsibility for your life. If something doesn't work out for you, accept it. Instead of blaming others or your circumstances for your failures, tell yourself: “I made a mistake, but I know how to fix it.”

The listed methods of self-motivation will help you always stay resourceful. If this is not enough, pay attention to the “Energy of Life” training. You will receive unique knowledge that will help you always remain energetic and purposeful.

Examples of positive and negative motivation

Positive motivation is built on similarly positive, correct incentives, and negative motivation, accordingly, on negative ones. A simple example can be given. When a child is told: “if he studies well, they will buy him a new computer,” his thinking is set in a positive way and he is encouraged to try harder in his studies. When the condition sounds like this: “if you complete your homework, you will not be punished,” the stimulus is the fear of experiencing pain. The attitude is fundamentally negative, although often effective.

The third way: work in a suitable environment

At first glance, this may seem naive, but in fact, the environment around us has a very strong influence on our mood and our motivation. Where you work doesn't matter. But if your workplace is in disarray, dusty, everything is not the way you like it, or the environment generally irritates you, be sure to correct this state of affairs. You should work in an atmosphere that suits you, gives you positive emotions, where you feel comfortable and comfortable. Clean up, arrange everything the way you like, use your creativity: hang a couple of pictures that inspire you, stick on stickers with motivational messages, put a book next to you that you like to read, turn on your favorite music. “Your” environment will have a beneficial effect on you and contribute to productive work, because you will enjoy being in it.

Self-motivation exercises and trainings

Articles on ways to achieve success have been studied, motivational stories have been read to the gills, but there is still no incentive to get off the couch? You can use some exercises that can help develop self-motivation:

• set priorities - put everything that is important in the first positions, and put everything unnecessary into the background;
• clearly set goals - draw up an action plan on paper and place it in a visible place;
• keep a success diary and write down all positive actions in it, even the most insignificant ones;
• regularly watch motivational videos, read inspiring books;
• divide one large task into several small ones, and reward yourself after completing each of them;
• create a suitable environment - calm for introverts, active for extroverts;
• surround yourself with optimists and laugh more often;
• publicly declare your goals;
• get rid of the feeling of perfectionism and not get upset over trifles - few people manage to do everything perfectly, so there is no need to strive for an unreasonably perfect result;
• do what you are good at - even if this activity brings little benefit, the main thing is satisfaction.

During mass trainings, exercises are performed in a group where many people participate at once. This has its advantage - you can take an example from another person or take into account his mistakes. For example, all participants are given the task to talk about those people who motivate them and compare themselves with them. Or a certain situation is conceived in which each of the training participants conditionally wants to be, and one person is given the task of acting as a demotivator. He does this as best he can for one minute, then the situation is discussed and conclusions are drawn.

Proper motivation is the key to success. It can and should be developed. By applying expert advice in practice, you can really achieve what you want. The main thing is to act and not sit in one place in the hope that everything will happen by itself.

The first method: leave aside everything unnecessary

You must learn to ignore everything that distracts you from achieving your goals and pushes you off your intended path. Developing this skill is not that difficult, but the results you get from using it can be amazing. Take some free time to think about what your plans for life are. Think about what tasks you have set at the moment and realize whether you need absolutely all of them. Surely, you can find something that does not require your effort and that you can simply throw aside. It happens that some aspirations are imposed on us by society, advertising, even parents. If you really want something, keep only this for yourself and forget about the rest. Anything unnecessary is a psychological burden that prevents you from using your full potential to achieve what you really need. The energy released as a result of ignoring everything unnecessary will constantly fuel you and increase your personal productivity.

All about motivation

Salute, Khabrovsk residents!

It’s another Monday, which means that all over the country, and all over the world, millions of people will “go to that job again,” in which they are only happy about Friday and payday. So I wanted to share my thoughts on the topic of motivation at work - motivating yourself and others. I will try to show that often the negative emotions experienced from work are associated not with the type of activity, but with improper organization, and that by performing the same actions in a different way, you can achieve amazing results in your own emotional state, which cannot but affect on the results. But first things first.

There is no such thing as uninteresting work

I'm a programmer by profession, and it's easy to love the job of a programmer. It is somewhere on the border between creativity and science. Everyone will love this one. Therefore, as an example, I will tell you about my working childhood, when I was not yet a programmer, and will show how I managed to find interest in work.

Spatula and wall

Once I was charged with scraping off oil paint from a kitchen wall with a spatula (such a flat flexible spatula). At the stage of reconnaissance of a new tool, in which I became familiar with the most effective movements, there was still nothing. But when I discovered that you couldn’t just cut paint off, like peeling a potato, and assessed the results of my labors, expressed as a small speck, with the threatening amount of work ahead in the amount of one wall, I was completely depressed. What can you do? Work is work. I began to scratch the wall, having nothing better to do, looking closely at the front of the work. The line between the cleared and uncleaned territory was painfully curved (who else but me would know this), which reminded me of the state borders between countries that are often at war (these borders are straight in all deserts, and where there were wars, blood was shed for every kilometer, as I poured sweat with a spatula). This is what inspired the battle analogy. I imagined that the cleared territory was my army, which was fighting to the death with the surrounding enemy - oil paint. And I, the hero commander, threw my troops into battle. Surprisingly, this metaphor allowed me to discover a more efficient way to scrape off paint. If before I had been stupidly scraping in different directions, trying to evenly expand the front, now I was furiously knocking off islands of paint from the main front, and when surrounded I could easily cope with them. This is how I independently discovered gamification and the concept of a batch of works.

Sand for SEGA

Another time, I decided to earn money for a SEGA game console and got a job as a laborer. As part of the task, I had to lift half a cubic meter of sand to the fifth floor to screed the balcony. A bucket of sand weighs about twelve kilograms, and in half a cubic meter of sand there are fifty such buckets. Two buckets at a time - twenty-five passes. My flimsy hands started to hurt after the third time, which is 12% of the work. Then I mentally disassembled my ultimate goal - shogu - into parts and roughly estimated how each of the approaches affects achieving the goal. For example, pouring out the sand and going downstairs for the next batch, I thought: “Here, I’ve already earned the power button,” “Here’s our joystick, let’s go get the cord!” And I went down for the next batch with enthusiasm. This is how I independently discovered the influence of dopamine and norepinephrine on mood and physical well-being. Oh yes, I finally bought and defeated Shao Kahn even with Sonya.

Definition of Motivation

The word “motivation” has four meanings (as if there could be integers!), some of which it inherits from the word “motivation”. Here they are:

1. The process of giving reasons to explain or justify an action.
2. A set of arguments to justify something.
3. A psychophysiological signal that causes excitation of parts of the brain and encourages animals and humans to satisfy their needs.
4. Derivative connections between words

In the managerial everyday sense, all these (except perhaps the last) meanings are mixed into one heap, so that a kind of incomprehensible hybrid is obtained, the only possible statement about which is “employees have no motivation.” It is important to understand that managerial motivation (1), which consists of providing motivation (2), to obtain motivation (3), is a non-atomic process and can fall apart at any stage. For greater certainty, I will give my definition of motivation in a work context, which will solve the same problems as the set of ambiguous analogue.

Why do you need motivation?

In simple terms, employee motivation is necessary to ensure that the work process does not fade away.
If employees have no motivation, then the initiative of the project manager, expressed in the form of periodic kicks, is the only driving force that ensures the project moves forward. The movement is not progressive, but impetuous, diluted with periodic regressions. If an unmotivated employee does not fully understand something about the task at hand, he will think it through and do it as he understands. If an unmotivated employee has no tasks, he will mind his own business and wait for the manager to give him the job. An unmotivated employee completely gives the manager the initiative, and with it the responsibility for the final result. Lack of motivation from the manager's point of view is reminiscent of the Italian strike - everyone formally does what they are told, and therefore work efficiency tends to zero. The reason for the degradation of efficiency lies in the fact that a high degree of uncertainty is inherent in the IT field itself, which requires an employee - be it project or operational activities - to have a high degree of intellectual involvement. Don’t think that motivation is needed only in the IT field. Not at all. In any field, motivation increases work efficiency, and my examples with a spatula and sand prove this. It’s just that in the IT field, employee motivation changes work efficiency by orders of magnitude. The proof of this thesis is a topic for a separate article, so we will not focus on it here.

So, motivated employees are a means of saving project resources, such as the time and effort of the project manager. Unmotivated employees have to be driven like a shepherd to prevent them from scattering, but motivated employees can be led like the leader of a wolf pack.

What is motivation?

For the purposes of this article, we will call motivation the emotional and psychological state of an employee, which, when setting a task, allows us to receive from him more energy than was invested in bringing it to him.

This definition ensures the life of running processes, preventing them from dying out.
In a sense, this definition is equivalent to the definition of user engagement that ensures viral marketing of a product. And this is not surprising. User involvement is based on the same cognitive mechanisms as employee motivation, and a marketing campaign is similar to collective design creativity. This definition also shows why, in the absence of motivation (or low levels of it), the project needs a periodic injection of energy in the form of kicks and the so-favorite questions of all employees, “how’s the task?” If you ride a bicycle, you need to pedal all the time. In a car, you can press the pedal once, and it will take you along. Motivation, by the way, etymologically goes back to the Latin verb moveo, meaning “to move” (compare with the English move).

Anatomy of Motivation

Since we have defined motivation as an emotional and psychological state, let’s look at how motivation is provided by the brain. By the way, due to the incorrect interpretation of the word “motivation” (namely, as the meaning of (1)), it seems to many that motivation is a conscious process based on correctly chosen words. Many managers like to hold motivational meetings and speak at them in a rather monotonous manner, which at the second meeting is declared by employees as “bullshitting” (nonsense), and begins to demotivate more than if it had not taken place. A fairly common pattern - we are the best, but we need to work even harder to be even better. Even if such words motivate someone, this is not the motivation we are talking about. The very mechanisms of brain functioning cannot, on the basis of the quarterly repeated mantra, that we are the best, but we must be even better, to ensure an influx of cognitive energy. The brain works differently.

Motivation in the brain

The need-information theory states that before taking any action, the brain first predicts the expected result exactly as the probability of its achievement and, after taking the action, compares the actual result with the predicted one. We are talking about any
action - absolutely any. Even when sending a signal to the eyes to “blink,” the brain predicts the neural signal from the eyelids “we are closed” and “we are open.” When observing a moving object, the brain predicts its next position and expects the retina to confirm its hypothesis. In a sense, the brain lives in eternal TDD - they announced the expected result, took an action and checked the coincidence of expectations with reality.

When expectations coincide with reality, the brain rewards itself with the release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter responsible for consolidating positive experiences from a person’s point of view. For example, dopamine is actively released during sex and eating tasty food. In a sense, dopamine is the chemical responsible for happiness. In the same sense, the brain is happy when it doesn’t make mistakes.

The more data the brain has about the results of an upcoming action, the more accurately it makes a forecast. The lower the probability of achieving the prediction as a result of the action taken, the more dopamine is released by the brain to “mark a successful release.” Thus, accumulated experience increases the accuracy of forecasts, reducing the improbability of success, giving the action taken a shade of despondency. It is on this formula that the routine is based - repeated actions do not offer any challenges to the brain, so it goes on a dopamine diet.

Conclusions from the anatomy of motivation

If the brain has a lot of data about the upcoming task, then the probability of achieving the forecast is high, so the brain gets little pleasure. However, if there is too little data or no data at all, then the brain will not be able to build an achievable forecast and the action itself will be ineffective from its point of view. This is the state called “I’m doing something I don’t know what to do.” In this state, no dopamine is produced at all, and the brain operates in /dev/NULL. Such activity is even more dull than a good routine in which the brain periodically checks that the world is still as it should be. Insufficient information when setting a task is the best way to turn an employee away from it.

However, this is only the first part. After an action is completed, it is vital for the brain to know where the resources it invested were spent. If this information is hidden from the brain, it experiences the same disappointment as if it did not know what to expect. Feedback is a vital mechanism in increasing motivation. Not just the connection itself, but also its timeliness. The brain even has mechanisms that override the perception of time to provide motor causation. This is why working with a sluggish application that asynchronously responds to actions infuriates users so much - the feedback that closes the motivational cycle is disrupted.

Motivation as a process

So, we have defined motivation as a mental state, but by itself it will start in the brains of employees either by accident or if they instill it themselves. As a rule, self-motivated employees stay on a project for a short time and motivate themselves to more ambitious tasks, so both phenomena are quite rare in a project. Thus, if a manager needs motivation in a project, he must develop it himself. The word “if” in the previous sentence is not a rhetorical device. Before starting to develop motivation, a manager must honestly answer the question of whether he really needs it. It so happens that “motivation” is one of the buzzwords that managers rush to attach to their project, although they understand the benefits and costs of this phenomenon rather vaguely. Motivation is a subtle and clearly balanced matter, the maintenance of which can turn the process upside down, depriving the manager of his usual rights and methods. Product development is possible without motivating employees - if motivation is not a priority, you need to honestly admit this and not torture yourself or your employees, saving your energy for life-giving kicks.

Motivation formula

Motivation in a project is provided by the following formula: Any action performed by employees within the framework of the project must have the following three components:

1. Context of the problem statement
2. Formulation of the problem
3. The fastest possible feedback on the integration of results with the project

When we talk about a project, we mean not just a development project, but a project in a broader sense - as the result of a focused collective creativity, be it a collection of signatures in support of penguin rights in South Africa, an employee satisfaction survey, or a bug fix project for a legacy system. In my experience, project managers focus only on point 2., more sophisticated ones care a little about point 1., but point 3. is the most ignored and misunderstood aspect, which painfully affects motivation and develops a division between “we” and “we” in employees. "managers". Let's consider each aspect separately.

Task context

Context is the very information that gives the brain the opportunity to make a forecast about the expected result. Without context, the brain considers the proposed action meaningless and does not provide motivational support for it. By describing the context, you yourself lead the employee’s brain to determine the need for the upcoming task. And if the context is determined correctly, and the brain has made exactly the forecast about the expected result that corresponds to the task, this is no longer your
task - this is the task of the employee’s brain.
You have engaged your brain and given it ownership of the task. By owning a task that the brain came up with on its own
, it becomes responsible for it. The brain achieves only its own goals. Achieving someone else's goal is considered by the brain as exploitation. That is why it is important that the brain creates this goal itself.

It is important to understand that communicating the context of the task is not a formal process, and it is not necessary to have a confidential conversation with the employee before each task. If the context is clear based on past experience, the brain will construct a goal without suggestion or persuasion. Therefore, in order to save effort on introducing the context of a task, it is important to structure the process so that the completion of one task is the context for the next one - then you can save on introductory conversations. However, if there is no confidence in the presence of context, you cannot skimp on the conversation under any circumstances - otherwise you can forget about the employee’s personal responsibility for the work.

Formulation of the problem

If the context of the task is communicated correctly, this stage is a formality.
But it is a formality. After all, the brain that made the forecast has solved the subtask of predicting the expected result, and it needs confirmation. By formulating the task, you confirm the brain’s hypothesis, forcing it to produce dopamine - the employee is happy that he received exactly the task he wanted. And he wanted it himself - after all, it was his brain that discovered the need to do what was missing. Statement of the task is not necessarily expressed by your formulation to the employee. It’s best when the employee himself formulates the task that he understands, and you agree with it. I had a manager (the best in the world!) who never told me what to do. He would just start talking about the project until you yourself said that you should do this, that, and that. Then he said - oh, great, will you do it? How not to do something after this? Note that this approach also ensures that the problem is understood correctly. The answer “aha,” expressed as a result of familiarization with the formulation of the problem, does not mean that the person understood exactly what is written there.

Feedback

Having received the task correctly, the employee becomes motivated and rushes to do it.
As a rule, a motivated employee copes with it well, so that it is successfully integrated with the project. This is where the time comes for the main mistake that most managers make - success is not conveyed to the employee. What for? The task is done, it’s time to move on to the next one. Let us recall the cycle of brain motivation and note that, having completed a task, the brain waits for confirmation of its hypothesis. Yes, he understood the problem correctly, and you confirmed this hypothesis at the formulation stage, but he also coped with this task! How can he understand that what he did actually corresponds to his ideas about realistic expectations? The argument that “if there were problems, they would have turned to him” does not work. It is in UNIX that the commands are silent if everything is fine, and swear when an error occurs. The brain needs explicit confirmation. Even when he decides to blink, he expects a clear signal that the blink has taken place. Thus, logical calculations and conventions do not work. If, after completing a task, the brain does not receive clear confirmation of success, it considers the effort wasted, which is especially offensive considering how inspired it was to struggle with it. This is why feedback is an ongoing process. This is not an annual (or at least quarterly) appraisal conversation in the style of “You’re great! Keep it up!". How to hold it? Again, feedback does not have to be verbal. After each successful assembly, you don’t need to run up to your employees, shake their hands and kiss them on the cheek. It is enough for a person to see where his work went and how it merged with the overall project. See clearly, without additional effort. Determining that a task was completed successfully should not be a source for another task, so excuses like “let him open the bug tracker and look for it” don’t work. The work process must be visualized, easily accessible and understandable. The completed task should itself return to the employee as feedback, showing that he is in tune with the project, and that his ideas about beauty correspond to the ideas of the project as a whole.

Motivation levels

Motivation is a multi-level concept.
Even to blink the brain needs motivation, not to mention the motivation to get involved in six-month projects. Just as actions are nested within each other, so are motivations. The motivation to talk to a colleague is embedded in the motivation to better understand the task, which is embedded in the motivation to efficiently cope with the functionality for which you are responsible, which in turn is part of the motivation to release the product on time and in proper quality. The lower levels of motivation are necessary for the existence of the upper ones, but the upper levels also support the lower ones. For example, if you love the product, it gives you another reason to care about the quality of the task, even if you don't like it. After all, it is needed for a purpose dear to the heart (brain). And the brain knows how to tolerate inconvenience if it knows why it is necessary. From all this variety of motivations, we will isolate two levels that are most important for building a process of motivated development.

Motivation for the task

Motivation at the task level is the motivation to do this task with all your heart, to mobilize all emotional and intellectual efforts for it, since it seems absolutely necessary at the moment. To achieve task motivation, a competent introduction to the context
and
formulation of the task
. Without them, the task is unnatural, it is done carelessly, and “this manager” bears responsibility for it. If an employee works on a task without fire in his eyes, most likely he does not have task motivation.

Motivation for the project

This level of motivation allows you to work on even tedious (i.e., tasks with a high probability of success) tasks with enthusiasm in order to move towards the higher-order goal of successfully completing the project. This level is strongly influenced by feedback
, showing the degree of approach to the final desired goal, turning the completed uninteresting task into a positive experience, which is also washed by the brain with dopamine. If you don't show how the completed task affected the project as a whole, no matter how interesting it may be, the employee will feel exploited, because the best impulses of his soul merge into a black hole of the unknown. Even if an employee enjoys his own productivity, impersonal tasks without a global sense of forward movement create the sense of routine that is inherent in most large organizations. Feedback is the secret that closes the cycle of project motivation, turning employees into fighters.

Motivation with bucket and spatula

Now that we know how motivation works, let's try to understand why I became motivated when I was scrubbing the wall and carrying buckets of sand.
In the case of the wall, I lacked task motivation, since the actions of my brain had no effect on achieving the goal. By learning how to scrape paint, my brain increased its experience to the point where its predictions of success with the spatula were 100% accurate, so it began to feel overwhelmed by the routine. When I came up with the “encircle and destroy” game, each new environment offered the brain a new problem that it had not yet solved, so it was interesting for it to decide each time the most optimal strategy for encirclement and destruction, depending on the topography of the front. As a result, the brain received a bunch of interesting tasks, which it was interested in solving even in isolation from the context for which it was doing it. I could scrape paint off the Great Wall of China with this method, and my brain would still play like the brain of an avid gamer.

In the case of buckets of sand, the task was uninteresting and uncomfortable by definition - dragging 24 kg of sand to the fifth floor has a minimum level of uncertainty and a maximum level of discomfort. However, by imagining a goal, a shogoo, I assigned each of the uninteresting tasks a fictitious reward that showed my progress toward the ultimate goal. Even though it was self-hypnosis, the brain endowed each of the actions with a hypothesis, which it had no reason to refute. That's why he was filled with dopamine happiness after every rise. And not only this. He also anticipated happiness on the rise, and what is happiness if not the anticipation of happiness?

What is not work motivation?

In conclusion, I would like to debunk some statements about motivation that I have encountered.
Namely, that the main and only means of motivation is money. Money can be a motivation, but only if it is an indicator of the success of the efforts made - the brain does not care how to determine that its efforts have achieved the goal. The entrepreneur is motivated by the money that is returned as a result of his marketing campaign. A worker paid on a piece-rate basis can be motivated by viewing the money as an act of confirmation of a completed contract. But money transferred to an account twice a month and text messages ringing around the office cannot be motivation, because the brain does not see the correlation between its efforts and the autonomous process of money transfer. If one wants to motivate workers with money, he must provide payments for each task, which converts money into some kind of feedback, fitting into the process described above. Exactly for the same reason, all sorts of causeless buns, cookies, candies and corporate parties cannot be motivation. The only thing these awards motivate is the desire for the same awards. A fiery speech at a meeting is often considered motivation, especially if the speaker is gifted as a speaker. Who, listening to William Wallace's speech before the Battle of Stirling in Braveheart, does not feel the strength to rush into battle? Who, listening to the speech of King Theoden before attacking the army of Mordor, is not ready to shout “To death!” and rush to kill the reptiles? What is this if not motivation? Yes, this is motivation, but if you look closely, all this happens before the battle. You can get out of the battle with this motivation, but you cannot win the war with this motivation. In our terminology, this is task motivation, but it will quickly fade if it is not supported by feedback after the heated wars are out of the battle.

The only thing that gives motivation to work is properly organized work.

Tenth way: develop your inner world

The desire to develop their inner world is common to most successful people. Try to keep your inner world clean and protect it from the invasion of any negative factors that destroy it and have a destructive effect. The consequence of such “hygiene” will be a free flow of thoughts, a sense of harmony, the development of intuition, inner lightness and even better physical condition and well-being. And as the most effective methods for protecting your inner world from destruction and developing it, we can recommend practices such as meditation, reading mantras, mindfulness practice, etc.

And finally, one more effective recommendation : always remember that time tends to pass and life passes. And it’s up to you how you live it: will you remain among those who failed to grow themselves, letting your whole life take its course, forgetting about your goals and betraying your dreams, or will you pull yourself together and make yourself the way you want and will be able to achieve what you want more than anything in the world! Think about the fact that you will always have the opportunity to throw up your hands and head, cry and become a slave to circumstances. But only today and only now can you decide to become a winner - a winner over your fears, your insecurities, your bad habits and, ultimately, over yourself!

Dear readers, leave your comments and share your opinions. Which of the above methods did you find most effective? What else can you recommend to people who want to increase their motivation and learn to be in a state of psychological readiness to take action more often?

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Key words:1Self-knowledge

Ninth way: understand that fear is normal

Many people have big goals and plans for life, but never achieve anything. Fear hinders them. He fetters all their thoughts and movements, like little rabbits who saw a wolf. Understand that it is normal to feel fear. The only difference is that for some fear is a reason to fold their arms and do nothing, while for others it is an incentive to grow, develop and achieve success. Go forward even if you are afraid of failure. This is the only way you can test your strength and find out what you are capable of. It's better to try something and find out whether it worked out for you or not, than to hesitate and never find out. Make your fear your ally, which will always motivate you to take action. Naturally, you shouldn’t rush into the pool headlong - always maintain sobriety and composure.

Eighth way: communicate with the best

Believe me, this method can dramatically change your whole life for the better. In order to become better, you need to communicate with people who are better than you in some ways. In order to achieve high results, you need to communicate with people whose results are better than yours. This will inevitably lead you to personal growth and conquering new heights. But, besides this, you need to strive to communicate not only with the best, but also with positively minded people. The fact is that there is such a category of people as negative people. They are always complaining about something, constantly whining about problems, judging other people and being skeptical about any success. Communication with them is an anchor that pulls you to the bottom. It sounds tough, but it’s worth “filtering” your social circle and trying to interact with negative people to a minimum. Meet those who are positive, who are motivated, enjoy life, smile and joke, no matter what. After some time, you will be very surprised that the quality of your life has improved, and you yourself have become a more cheerful and happy person.

Fifth method: use motivating materials

This method is one of the most motivating. It lies in the fact that you systematically (for example, half an hour or an hour a day) get acquainted with the success stories of different people. And you can find a great many such stories. Watch feature films and documentaries that talk about how someone achieved success. Read books and articles, listen to motivating audio recordings. Thanks to the Internet, today you can find an incredible amount of a wide variety of motivating materials on almost any topic. By practicing this method regularly, you will be able to provide yourself with a constant flow of only the information you need, which will charge you with creative energy, change the direction of your thinking towards achieving success and motivate you. In addition, success stories of different people are clear examples of the fact that any person can achieve the most amazing results.

Method four: set clear goals

Setting goals has an extremely motivating effect on a person. First, when you practice goal setting, you automatically start thinking about exactly the things that motivate you. Secondly, when setting goals, you think about the time frame for achieving each of them, which already brings their achievement closer and serves as an additional motivator. Thirdly, when you think about your goals and their achievement, you unconsciously think through various options for their implementation. It’s not for nothing that they say that thoughts are material. The energy impulses of your thoughts will attract more and more new events into your life, which, quite likely, will open for you, figuratively speaking, those doors that were previously closed. For effective goal setting today, there are a considerable number of effective methods. You can familiarize yourself with some of them here and here.

Sixth method: perform different tasks

Thanks to various psychological studies, it is already known for certain that constant work on one project tends to tire and become boring. If you do only one thing for a long time, then the state of fatigue sets in much faster than in situations where you do different things. If you feel that you are starting to get tired of what you are doing, stop, switch your attention to something else, do some small but unrelated task, or just rest. Take a break and take a break. After some time, your strength will be restored, and you will be able to do what you were doing with new strength and renewed motivation.