How Controlling Your Motivation can improve Your Life

What exactly is motivation? It is a rather slippery term that seems to have a

different definition depending upon who you ask, but if you look at

psychology, it is pared down to the simple definition of: the force that drives

us to act; that means any type of action, including getting a glass of water

or eating food. If we had no motivation whatsoever, we would simply die of

thirst or malnutrition because we had no driving force to get food and water.

Of course, in those cases, the body has certain defenses against starving

or dying of dehydration, but the point is that motivation drives everything.

Psychology describes it as the biological, social, cognitive or emotional

force that makes us do something. Commonly, people talk about motivation

as a compeller to make changes, and that’s basically the definition that

we’re going to use in this post. The force that drives us to make changes

and do big things is motivation and if you can control your motivation, you

can control your destiny.

What is Motivation Made of?

Understanding motivation is the best way to conquer it and that’s why we’re

going to break motivation down further into three parts. If you want to

achieve a goal, you know that simply having the desire isn’t enough. In fact,

achieving your goals require that you maintain your motivation throughout

the obstacles that you will undoubtedly encounter. Here are the three

separate components of motivation:

Activation

Persistence

Intensity

The Activation of Motivation

The activation of motivation is when you have the desire to achieve

something and you take action. For example, if you wanted to lose twenty

pounds, you might create a diet or exercise plan over the next few weeks.

You are motivated because you have the desire to achieve your goal, and

you actually take a step in that direction. This could be anything. In the

case of our example, your activation doesn’t have to be making a diet or

exercise plan. It could be throwing all of the junk food in your cupboards

away, or it could be as simple as stepping on a scale and finding out what

you weigh so that you can know when you’ve reached that 20-pound goal.

Any step you take in the direction of your goal once you have made it is the

activation of motivation. Motivation Requires Persistence

This is the part where people usually fail at achieving whatever it is that

they set out to do. When you first get motivated, you are excited and can’t

wait to start on the steps required. Then, you start doing those steps and

you either get distracted by other things in life, or you find that they are too

hard, that there are too many obstacles in the way. These obstacles will

exist no matter what goal you are trying to achieve, and it is the point when

motivation needs to be strengthened.

Intensity of Motivation

The third component is intensity and it is best described as the amount of

effort that you put into achieving your goal. Although two people can have

the exact same motivation to achieve a goal and even have the persistence

to make it through obstacles, the intensity is what determines how quickly

they will be able to achieve the goal.

Some people are plodders, strong and steady, working towards a goal a

little bit each day. Some are sprinters, moving through the steps of

achieving a goal as fast as the goal will allow. Neither one of these is

wrong, nor is the middle point, which I like to call the jogger. The jogger is

what you should strive for. Neither is he racing through the goal so fast he

is in danger of burning out or moving so slowly that it could take months or

years to achieve a goal that could be achieved within weeks.

The Source of Motivation

There are a couple more things that you should know about motivation.

The first is that it can be intrinsic or extrinsic. In other words, it can come

from inside of us or it can come from outside desires. Intrinsic motivation

means that you do it simply for the personal pleasure. An example might be

cooking with a difficult recipe just for the challenge or completing a

crossword. The main factor here is that you do it not for outside recognition,

but internal pleasure. Extrinsic is just the opposite. Extrinsic motivation

comes from the outside rewards that you’ll get: recognition, fame, money or respect just to name a few.

The second thing that you should know about motivation is that there are

three sources where your motivations come from. Psychologists have

debated this issue for quite a while, but over the years, these have become

the accepted standard sources of motivation.

Needs: Motivation coming from your needs or drives is one of the theories

of motivational sources. Some of these are quite obviously true: eating,

drinking and sleeping for example.

Instincts: Instincts are another source of motivation according to

psychologists like William James and Sigmund Freud. Our brains come

with prewired behavior patterns already included that activate when certain

external stimuli happens.

Arousal: This is an explanation of the type of motivation that people

experience. A person with low levels of arousal might not be found

skydiving or parachuting out of airplanes, but a person with high arousal

levels might do exactly this.

Now that you know more about motivation and some of the factors driving

it, we can move onto some of the techniques to help you control it better.