05 Jul 4 ways research has found to boost your motivation
It’s hard to be happy sometimes; and it’s hard to find the motivation to do what you need to do for happiness and health and living a great life.
That being said, happiness and wellbeing can definitely be yours if you can find the motivation to engage, consistently, in the right sorts of behaviours.
So, based on the research, here are 4 proven strategies…
via Eric Barker
You’re too tired to do it. Or you’re too wound up to do it. Or you’re too intimidated to do it. Or, plain and simple, you “just don’t feel like it.”
At times we all struggle with how to get motivated. (Hey, sometimes I don’t feel like writing this stuff.)
Well, Daniel McGinn, an editor at Harvard Business Review, reviewed the research on getting your engine going and put it all together in a new book: Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed.
He addresses a number of reasons you may not feel up to a task and offers scientific solutions for how to get yourself going.
For instance, maybe you’re too nervous about what you have to do and so you procrastinate and that’s preventing you from getting started. You need to calm down, right?
Wrong…
Don’t Calm Down. Reappraise.
Don’t calm down. That nervous energy is useful. Studies show it can actually increase performance if you channel it right.
I know, I know — when you think about beginning that awful task your brain starts racing, you get goosebumps, maybe your hands are shaking…
Funny how the symptoms of nervousness are so similar to excitement. So you know what? Tell yourself what you’re feeling is excitement.
Might sound silly, but this process is called “reappraisal” — and it’s got some heavy duty brain research backing it up.
From Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed:
The psychological term for the process Brooks’s work describes is “reappraisal,” and it describes how someone can reevaluate a potentially emotion-eliciting situation in a way that changes its emotional impact.
And crazy as it might sound, it works. In fact, people who told themselves those nerves were excitement performed better than people trying to calm down.
From Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed:
In two follow-up experiments—one that required people to give a work-related speech, and another that required people to do difficult math problems—she again found that people who talked about being “excited” just before the task significantly outperformed people who talked about being nervous, or calm, or were told to try to remain calm.
(To learn more about the science of a successful life, check out my new book here.)
But maybe you’re not lacking motivation because of nerves. Maybe you just don’t have the energy. For the solution to this challenge we need to look at the work of Professor Sylvester Stallone…
…keep reading the full & original article HERE