In this article, I’m going to teach you how to stay motivated when building your business. With some much-needed business motivation for entrepreneurs.
If you’re feeling demotivated, disappointed or down about your progress in business, then this article is for you.
I’m not going to give you surface-level tips on how to stay motivated. Instead, I’m going to give you the tools and knowledge you need so you can get off this website and get to work!
So let’s get right to the point.
How to acquire business motivation
When you’re feeling demotivated in business, or life for that matter, this feeling of demotivation is not caused by external factors, but internal ones.
To demonstrate, in her book Instant Motivation, Chantal Burns describes a situation where a sales team is given large bonuses and incentives to help them reach targets.
These targets were completely out of reach so you’d expect the team to not bother aiming for them.
But for some of the team, they found the opposite to be true. Regardless of incentives, in other words, external motivation, some members of the team always excelled due to their own high-performance internal mindset.
Think about any time you’ve felt demotivated.
It’s easy to blame this feeling on an external factor such as not meeting goals or targets, a website malfunction or some bad criticism you might have received.
But the feeling of demotivation itself comes from you. All feelings are created by thought.
Whatever you’re thinking at any given moment, directly influences how you feel.
The cause for your lack of motivation
So, to combat this we should look at the cause for your lack of motivation. Let’s start with how you’re feeling.
You might be feeling:
- Disappointed with yourself
- Ashamed with your lack of progress
- Stressed with all the work you’re doing
- Worried about the future
Whatever you’re feeling, we now know this feeling was caused by a thought you had, in the moment, that caused this feeling.
Think back to any time you’ve thought about what you’re having for dinner. I bet it made you feel hungry right?
Or perhaps any time you’ve begun to think about someone you love, you immediately felt good.
Motivation works in the same way. Your thoughts and feelings work hand in hand.
For these feelings to happen, we had to have a thought to trigger them:
- You might have felt disappointed because you expected to reach your goal and you didn’t.
- You might have felt ashamed with your lack of progress because you believed people would be disappointed in you if you failed.
- Or, you may have felt stressed about all the work you’re doing because you believed you didn’t have enough time to do it.
- And you might have felt worried about the future because you thought you only have one option, to succeed.
All of these thoughts and feelings have contributed to your lack of motivation.
So with these thoughts and feelings in mind, let’s revisit your dinner.
When you stopped thinking about dinner and started focusing on another task, that feeling of hunger goes away.
So if we can stop ourselves from feeling hungry by shifting our thoughts, we can likely stop feeling almost anything.
In this case, your lack of motivation which may actually feel like disappointment, shame, stress or worry.
How to get back your motivation in business
To be specific, the answer to reducing any feeling is not to analyse the situation or dissect your thinking but to move on from it.
So any time you’re feeling disappointed, demotivated, stressed or worried. Recognise it’s happening and then pinpoint the thought that caused the feeling.
In doing this simple act, you’ll be jolted out of the unwanted feeling because you’ve changed your thoughts.
In other words, instead of ruminating on something that’s negative, you’ll shift to a neutral analytical thought.
Trust me when I say this isn’t easy. But it will get easier the more you do it.
If in doubt, every time you recognise a thought that triggers one of these unwanted feelings, move.
Get up if you can, do something to shift your thoughts as quickly as you possibly can. This will be enough to change your mindset.
Time to get off the internet…
Knowledge is power, so when you look at your thoughts and feelings objectively, you’ll be able to train yourself to recognise them and then quickly shift your thoughts to something else.
So with this knowledge in hand, close this article and stop thinking about your lack of motivation because it’s all in your head.
Get back to it, because the world needs what you’re creating.