10/01/2025
10 Tips to Assist Motivation from talkingtherapiesbristol.com
1. Maintaining your motivation is important to making progress and ultimately reaching your goal. Stack the odds in your favour by focusing on making daily progress {the small steps} rather than on the “big picture” goal. Break your goal into smaller, more manageable tasks and mini-goals. Reaching your goals more frequently, you get a greater sense of accomplishment and confidence and this motivates you to continue.
2. When you set a goal, make a side note to yourself to remind you what excites and keeps you interested in meeting the goal. Maintaining your excitement is one of the top strategies that helps ensure that you succeed and achieve your goal.
3. Identify and create a list of your motives for taking specific actions that are related to achieving your goal. Try to associate an emotion with each motive to make it more meaningful and effective.
4. When you get frustrated and feel like giving up for the day, always try to reach a small milestone or small goal, just one more time. Just try your best and give it all you’ve got. If you don’t quite make it, think of it as warming up and practicing for tomorrow’s success.
5. Competition is a great motivator. Competing with your own “record,” on a daily basis, helps to inspire and motivate you to progress with small but important achievements, however, as in tip four, make sure not to negatively judge yourself if you don’t reach your allotted target (see tip 9).
6. Pay special attention to your thoughts and mindset. They affect everything else in your life from your words to your actions and habits. Remember thoughts frequently and uncontrollably just pop into our heads, but we can choose what we do with those thoughts. You can choose the thoughts that you allow to affect your life. Choose them wisely.
7. Be patient with yourself as you focus on taking action to meet your goals. It is better to reach your goals slower than anticipated rather than to give space to self-critical thoughts or go so fast that you miss important lessons and insights from the process.
8. Create a list of strategies, activities, and actions that encourage you. Use them to protect you from the discouraging comments of others or your own negative self-talk.
9. Don’t let fear of failure keep you from succeeding. You are human like everyone else. You will fail to do something or reach a target sometimes, this is a normal human experience, but that does not mean you are a failure, you are not your actions or inactions. It is up to you to choose to see it as a learning experience rather than an excuse to give up. You can pick yourself up and move forward.
10. Most importantly always try to be compassionate (kind and caring) towards yourself. Self-compassion helps to balance our emotions and to sooth us when we are struggling, therefore assisting us to be in our optimum state to achieve our goals or simply to just be!
Susan Bellew BSc (Hons) MSc DHP MBPsS., is a warm and friendly online hypnotherapist and psychotherapist, who gently helps people make significant positive changes within a relatively short space of time. A free, no obligation, initial consultation is offered to discuss your issues and explain how t...