I am Always Late

Every second we make a choice connected with doing or not doing something. Certainly, these choices have certain influence on our future. Very frequently we have to enter a fight against ourselves in order to achieve one or another important goal. This fight is for making ourselves do the things we do not want to do, or avoid doing the things we would like to do, in order to advance in this life, achieve success, obtain or win something, improve our reputation and so on. In terms of such fight, an effective self-motivation can be one of the most powerful weapons of ours. Below you can find some tips on boosting your self-motivation and achieving your goals.

1. Everything you do and any of your decision should lead to a certain result, directly or indirectly. The way you organize all your activities influences your self-motivation to a great extent. Try to organize your daily routine and activities in such a way that you will enjoy doing everything you have to or decided to do.

2. Try to select the most important ONE goal and work on achieving it without spending your time and efforts for something else. One of the most common mistakes is trying to achieve many goals and doing a lot of not important things to achieve those goals. Too many goals always take too much time to achieve. That is why it is essential to choose only one goal (for the moment) and do everything possible to achieve it.

3. It is very important, especially in small things or actions, to minimize the time between making a decision about something to be done, and actually doing that. If you say to yourself “I should do that”, it means that you set up a goal of doing something for uncertain time. It can unconsciously leave a feeling of something undone and some discomfort connected with this. It is the best to complete the task as soon as it is possible and not to look for the reasons to feed your laziness.

4. Do not think about possible difficulties or obstacles. Instead, think about how useful it will be, the thing you need to do. Thinking about good and positive sides of what you are about to do can be a good self-motivation. You should have a clear picture of what you are trying to achieve, and thinking about your goals will help you to find the most effective ways to attain it.

5. Look for someone’s support. If you face difficulties when doing something, find someone who can help you. Find an apprentice or a partner. However, sometimes it is good to find a competitor: a good competition is a very powerful motivator.

6. Make a public promise to achieve something. Take this responsibility and, if you are a man of your word, you will have no other way but doing what you have promised to do and achieve what you have promised to achieve.

7. Try to find some inspiration. It can be a book or a personal story of one of your friends. Sometimes we feel motivated for doing absolutely impossible things after only listening to a song or watching a movie.

8. Be always sure that you will succeed, and never say to yourself “Oh, I’ll never make it!” If the task you need to complete is very difficult and bulky, try to begin with small things. Every long way starts with a small step, followed by many many other steps, big and small. The main thing is to start. Even if you have a lack of time to move toward your goal, you can spend just 5 minutes every day. Collect your small achievements, one to one, and after every small victory you will feel positive and optimistic. Go on moving along the path towards your goals, step by step. Soon, when you turn back, you’ll see that there’s quite a long way behind you…

In my previous articles I was mentioning motivation as the main moving force for personal development and success. It is quite obvious that if a person is not enough motivated and challenged to do something, he or she will not struggle to succeed, as well as never feel sad for lost opportunities. Now, we are about to learn the second not less important factor which frequently causes our absolute indifference and poor self-discipline. This factor is lack of clarity: a lack of clear and specific goals, and lack of understanding what we want to achieve, when and in what way.

It is reported that only 3-5% of people have clear realistic written goals and objectives for their life. Such people are supposed to be more confident and more determined on their way to achieving those goals. They are also considered to be more reliable, more pragmatic and precise, and they usually have fewer problems with estimating the time for accomplishing their tasks. Finally, they are supposed to be more successful.

That is why time management specialists recommend to write down your specific long-term goals on a piece of paper, then write down your short-term goals, and then do all that “scheduling” thing, specify the deadlines for every step, etc. They say that this will be your roadmap to success. Well, this idea can sound useless and quite senseless to many people, especially to those who have some unclear and “standard” goals in their mind, like “I will buy a better car when I get paid for this project” or “I will start a diet and lose 10 pounds till the end of this year”. I understand those people, and I admit that they can live their life happily without any planning and scheduling on paper.

All I want to ask you now is just giving a clear answer to yourself: do you have some certain ambitions or aspirations in your life? What are you trying to achieve in this life? What is you life? Is it like going with the flow and sitting on fence, or like looking for something special and helping other people to feel comfortable in this world? Where do you want to be in 10 or 20 years? What do you need to do for that? It is not for scheduling or planning something, it is for yourself. Take a break from your daily routine for a minute, sit down and think about your future, your goals and reasons you live this life for. Also, try to understand that the clearer your goals are, the easier it will be for you to overcome your procrastination and laziness, learn being successful and find your place among the most productive people of your generation.