At the start of the day, we all feel motivated to study, complete our work or do the chores. You wake up with great energy and excitement to start the day fresh. You convince yourself that today you will complete the assessment that you were supposed to start weeks ago, or finish preparing for the seminar work that should have taken you a couple of hours instead of three days, thus, slowly you prepare a list of things to do. But this list is never ending, in fact it keeps growing, pages after pages of work that needs to be completed and chores that need to be done. You try to be positive, and persuade yourself that this can be done – you just need some motivation. You look at that list and you reflect on your life, and suddenly all that energy and the excitement that you woke up with is gone. Why? Because you demotivated yourself. You feel helpless and possibly a little desperate of wanting to get your motivation back.
This happens to many people every day. You think you can get something done, but then you become lazy and convince yourself that there are better things to do than complete your seminar work or assessment. And when deadline day approaches, you go into panic mode and try and write a coherent and clear essay within a day, hoping to get a first. Whilst miracles do happen, something like this is unlikely to happen unless you are some kind of super human with amazing knowledge and power. You need to be inspired and regain your motivation in order to become more organised and prepared so you can complete all your work. Losing motivation can lead you into places that are filled with regret and hopelessness. So the main question is how can you restore your lost motivation? By hoping that some kind of miracle will occur or by taking action and regaining your energy?
- You can – growing up in a society where there was and still is great inequality between men and women, I always heard people say that women cannot complete their education or that women cannot pursue a career in medicine or law. Well guess what, we can. We can pursue a career in law or medicine or even engineering. What motivates us to move forward and complete our work, is the people who bring us down because we can show them that we are strong and they are wrong. You have to establish faith within yourself in order to feel motivated. You have to persuade yourself that if you can work hard now, you can always relax later when everything is finished. You need to convince yourself that you can do this and let others not drag you down; think of all the amazing benefits that you will receive and the job that you will be starting once this nightmare is over. Get passed this stage and regain your motivation by believing in yourself that you can do this no matter what society says.
- Take action – now that you have established your strong feelings of getting motivated, you have to take action. Do not sit there for hours thinking that you can do this, you have to get up, get your pens, your books and start doing what needs to be done. By changing your habits, for example getting up earlier or going to the gym to become more energised, you will learn and establish a routine that will work out perfectly allowing you to balance work and social life. And regularly adopting these new habits will enable you to approach things differently, hopefully giving yourself more time to actually do some work. Focus on what you have now, and believe that you can complete this. You have to accept the fact that you will sacrifice many things once you decide to start working hard, and one of the most difficult things to sacrifice is sleep. The relationship that you have with your bed is unbreakable but you cannot allow yourself to lay there hours and hours knowing that you have things to do and work to complete.
It seems a lot harder to restore motivation once it is lost. Don’t force yourself but try slowly changing your habits every day to ensure that there is balance. Motivation doesn’t come automatically to you; you need to convince yourself that you can do this and then take action to complete your work. Remember to work hard now, and relax later.