Motivate your Motivation

By Clara Centeno

How do you keep pushing forward when your heart isn’t in it, your mind is exhausted, and your body is begging you to slow down? Motivation is hard, but it’s also very personal. Your roommate who goes on runs every morning might find exercise to be a great way to start the day. You, on the other hand, might find the mere thought of morning runs to be exhausting. The point is: what works to motivate one person might not work for the next.

Deciding when to start can be overwhelming when your to-do list is staring at you in the face, remaining long and incomplete. When you feel this way, it might help if you prioritize. To do so, you can split your tasks into different parts: urgent and important (school/work deadlines, appointment-making), important but not urgent (opportunities, job application, highly valued tasks) urgent but not as important (maintenance, chores, routine tasks), and not urgent and not important. Once you have a (more or less) hierarchical order of your tasks, you might gain some clarity on the timeline of them.

The next important steps of goal setting, and digging up the motivation to do so, are a) understanding your driving factors, and b) understanding how you, personally, can best maintain said driving factors. To do this, you must understand your own intrinsic motivators which are grounded by your beliefs, experiences, and behaviors. The heaviness of the previous sentence may push you, and many others, away from putting in the work. However, it really does sound deeper than it is. Personally, I am driven by clearcut progress and by continuing to learn. Because I understand that these two things are enjoyable for me, I’m able to set tasks and goals that will align with them. For example, I’ll study for a psychopathology exam by teaching my roommate about the mental health disorders pertinent to the exam. Doing so helps me attain clearcut progress, since I integrate the information better by teaching it to someone else. In turn, I prove success to myself and am more motivated to keep moving forward. Thinking of tasks as goals that fulfill your pleasures can help you highlight the enjoyable elements of otherwise dreadful tasks. 

Everyone is motivated in different ways. The next time you’re struggling with self-motivation or setting goals, remember to consider how the completion of them can be effective to your personal motivators.