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More often than not, we look to create positive momentum in our lives by identifying one massive item that we can adjust to create change and generate daily motivation. The realistic approach is to take a bite-sized strategy to achieve newfound motivation.
With that in mind, I’ve come up with a list of 15 simple things you can do to boost your daily motivation.
1. Identify and Establish a Long-Term Goal
Motivation can feel as fickle as daily weather predictions, but there are numerous ways to boost your daily motivation and ensure that you are on track to success in your life pursuits.
When working to achieve that required boost, the first step has to be for you to create a long-term, overarching goal that you will start to work towards.
Rome may have not been built in a day, but the idea of what it was going to be had to exist before the result ever materialized.
In the same way, you have to be strategic in creating a long-term goal and then working to pursue it relentlessly.
The hard part is figuring out the goal.
The easy part is activating that boost in your daily motivation.
2. Target Milestones in Your Daily Pursuit
Keeping your long-term goal in mind, the next step in this journey of keeping your motivation levels sky high is to create bite-sized goals within the larger goal for you to pursue.
You won’t have any luck losing 50 pounds if you are trying to do so in a week. But if you create target milestones within the long-term pursuit of being more fit, then you will experience the joys of the smaller victories.
Those small victories will give you a powerful feeling of accomplishment and continue to transform your daily motivational levels for the better.
In time, those victories will compound, and your motivation will only continue to grow as you continue to check off more of the boxes towards your overall goal!
3. From Checking Boxes to Cashing Checks
In creating target milestones within your overarching goal, it is even more important to set up checkpoints within those milestones.
As a parent, it can sometimes be much easier to get my child to comply with a request if I include a small prize for said compliance. We often encourage our daughter to brush her teeth, after which we give her a tasty vitamin gummy, and this has helped establish a positive habit in her morning ritual.
If you have identified your target milestones, pick a few of those and add some kind of reward as a pairing with accomplishing that milestone.
Keep in mind the reward shouldn’t in itself be a negating factor in your long-term pursuit.
4. Firm up Your Foundation
Considering the first few steps in boosting your daily motivation levels, have you spent much time considering the purpose behind your pursuit?
Having a true understanding of why you are pursuing a goal will help you to keep after it in the long term.
Do you know why you are trying to pursue that goal?
Spending time defining your purpose behind the pursuit of a long-term goal will allow for a more successful path and an extended duration of that journey towards the goal.
That strong foundation will serve as a friendly reminder that allows you to keep those motivational levels boosted and in a place that will lead to continued success as you move forward.
5. Publicly Commit
When more people are aware of your pursuit, the pressure to not fail starts to accumulate. While pressure can sometimes be detrimental to a pursuit, a little social pressure can be a healthy thing to keep you focused on the task at hand.
When I know that my parents, significant other, friends, or co-workers are aware of my pursuit, I am more likely to strive towards my end goal with more sincerity.
Similarly, it was much easier for me to work out, exercise, and eat properly in high school when I had a basketball coach that reminded me each day of what I was pursuing.
While it is a simple gesture, opening yourself up to the “public” and making a pronouncement of your intentions can serve as a strong motivational tool for you to keep on keeping on.
6. Meet Motivated People
Too often, we make attempts to increase our daily motivation levels without examining the people who are influencing our life’s direction.
If you are supposed to be the average of the 5 people that you spend the most time with, where does that leave you?
You should strive to seek out people both in your professional career and in your personal life that are more successful than you are.
If you are lacking motivation in life, try to be in regular contact with friends or peers in the workplace who have the levels of motivation that you desire. What empowers them day in and day out to maintain high levels of motivation and accomplish their goals?
If you need a little extra, try posting motivational quotes around your workspace.
7. Develop an Accountability Team
We all have the best intentions when we set out towards any specific goal in our life, but life has a way of throwing in challenges from time to time, which leads to those inevitable collapses in our motivation.
This is the time in your journey when a team of friends, family, or your significant other needs to jump in on your behalf and remind you of what you set out to do.
Sometimes, your accountability team may be a group of strangers that all share a common cause (weight loss groups, group therapy, basketball teammates), and sometimes they are people with whom you are very intimate.
Whatever it looks like for you, this team is vital to your success when you start coming up on roadblocks to your daily motivation.
8. Consider Future Impasses
The prospect of boosting our daily motivation and maintaining it over the long-term is well and good, but you must remember that the road won’t always be silky smooth.
A key aspect of journeying to a better place in your own life is to plan for future successes AND failures.
What obstacles lay ahead of you that you believe you will need to be prepared for?
Without considering what challenges are to come, you will smash into some roadblocks that stop you in your tracks.
If you take the time to consider the trajectory of your path through life and mentally set aside the energy and time to consider what pitfalls may come, you will be more prepared to handle them.
9. Fuel Your Success
Consider, too, the fuel you use daily to give you energy for the day. Are you slamming pizzas in the evening and donuts for breakfast?
Your physical body and how you care for it have a direct and immense impact on your mental state, motivation levels, and energy to get after life positively!
Take a look at what you eat daily. Ask yourself if you should make some subtle changes in what you consume to better maintain energy levels and keep your daily motivation high.
10. Energize Your Pursuit
Coffee and/or tea is such a fantastic way to get your body in a routine of fully waking up, activating your awareness, and starting the day off on the right foot.
What better way to boost your daily motivation than to wake up with a fresh injection of caffeine to clear the fog out of the attic? Research from the American Heart Association shows that[1]:
“[Drinking coffee] gives you energy and may help you lose weight and sharpen your mental focus, thanks to the magic of caffeine. Studies have shown that caffeine may improve your mood, help your brain work better and improve performance during exercise.”
That same study did warn that the way you drink your coffee will play a part in whether it is good for you. Sugar-loaded coffees will end up hurting you more than they help you.
Overconsumption of caffeine can be just as bad, especially if it interrupts your normal sleep cycle, so be careful!
11. Catch Some Z’s!
According to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute[2],
“Sleep plays a vital role in good health and well-being throughout your life. […] The damage from sleep deficiency can occur in an instant, or it can harm you over time. [Sleep deficiency] can affect how well you think, react, work, learn, and get along with others.”
Sleep gives our bodies and minds the time to reset, recharge, and repair the damage that we do in our day-to-day movements, which is why it is so crucial to get proper rest[3].
12. Materialize Motivation
Some of the greatest tools for building up your daily motivation levels are simple yet superbly effective. Exercise is a huge part of contributing toward a healthy mind and body. If you can get out and exercise regularly, your motivation to continue and exercise will increase.
Studies have shown that “moderate exercise could increase your motivation to work out and lead to an all-around healthier lifestyle”[4].
So just by working out 30 minutes a day, research shows that your desire to continue with that positive behavior will increase. Even if you are just walking for 30 minutes each day as your form of exercise, that can be a great way to take strides towards a healthier mind and body.
The better off you are mentally and physically, the stronger your daily motivation will be.
13. Know Yourself
You know yourself best, and you will be most aware of your internal weaknesses, patterns of behaviors, and path to having a decrease in daily motivation towards a specific goal.
Exercise your self-awareness and plan for potential areas of failure that you have encountered in the past. If you work to navigate away from your previous areas of failure that may have led to a decrease in motivation, then you will have a stronger potential for success.
Changing habits is hard, but if you can first control your thoughts and responses, then those conditioned responses will eventually convert into new positive habits. Those will eventually recondition your personality and behavior.
All of this work and effort will go far in increasing your daily motivation.
14. Overcome Your Fears
The retreat of daily motivation is often related to self-doubt or internal fears creeping into your mind.
So often, when we are near the peak of success, we revert to a previous version of ourselves in our mind and allow fear to dictate our ability to continue.
The truth is that internal fear is a mental block that we often allow to enter the equation, and we allow it to bully us out of pursuit or aspiration.
If you work to face your fears, then you will begin to realize that they don’t have any power unless that power is given to those fears by the individual.
Fear is merely an idea and if you overcome it, you will find that there isn’t much of anything holding you back from success!
15. Pool Your Victories
When you’ve been working on a goal for a long time and have painstakingly maintained a strong foundation of motivation throughout, it’s just as important that you enjoy that victory.
You striving to increase your daily motivation is not without pitfalls. But in the end, when you work hard to keep that effort up and see it through, you will experience the benefits of that journey.
Victory never comes easy, so make sure you give yourself some credit and take the time to appreciate your growth through that journey to be more motivated and reach your long-term goals!
Final Thoughts
Daily motivation comes from defining your goals and learning to work toward them through specific steps. Stay focused on what matters to you, look up some inspirational quotes, and watch how your motivation increases day after day!
| [1] | ^ | American Heart Association: Is coffee good for you or not? |
| [2] | ^ | National Herat, Lung, and Blood Institute: Sleep Deprivation and Deficiency |
| [3] | ^ | NHCPS: Can Your Sleeping Habits Affect Your Heart Health? Why Duration and Quality of Sleep Play an Important Role in Heart Health |
| [4] | ^ | Men’s Journal: Moderate Exercise Increases Motivation |
