Motivation Is In You. Find Out How to Unlock It.

This is a guest post by Jasmine Henry. If you're interested in getting in front of the readers here, check out our guest posting invitation here.

A few years ago, a then pre-teen me sat in the back of my parent’s car on my way home from school, tears steadily streaming down my face. I hadn’t had a bad day, in fact I’d had a normal, enjoyable day at school.

My parents asked “Jasmine, what’s wrong, are you ok?” and I replied “I don’t want you to die”.

That day, at school, we had learned about the dangers of smoking and how it could eventually lead to a slow and painful death and my parents were smokers at the time and so to think about what could happen to them, reduced me to tears.

For months I urged my parents to stop smoking, I begged and pleaded, I attempted to educate them about what would happen and I even produced pictures of the affects of smoking on the body.

My Dad eventually began to ignore me, refusing to stop smoking and so I decided to try and persuade my Mum to stop smoking instead. One day, when asking her to quit the filthy habit, for me, her daughter, so that she would live long enough to see me get married or have children, she replied

“If I stop smoking, it won’t be for you, it will be for me.”

Through her own efforts my Mum (and my Dad with a little persuasion) eventually stopped smoking and although that was 4 or 5 years ago, her words have stuck with me and it leads me to what I’m going to tell you today.

How to Get Motivated

You may think that you’re a nice person and in fact, you probably are but if you ask me, nobody does anything unless it benefits themselves. When was the last time that you did something nice for someone? Have you ever helped an old lady with heavy shopping get across the street? You may have done it so that you don’t have to see her suffer as she attempts to struggle across the street in pain. See, even the nicest actions have self-beneficial reasons behind them.

1. Think about your reasons: For my Mum it was so she would become healthier and live longer but for you, the reasons for doing something could be completely different. All it takes is being able to acknowledge your motives and that way you know what you’re getting out of it and will be more inclined to actually do something.
2. Visualize: Now that you know why your doing it, it’s important that you visualize the benefits. Finding it difficult to be bothered to do gardening? Think about the beautiful, lush garden that could come out of it. Struggling to get motivated to write a new blog post? Imagine the comments that could come out of it or think about the affect it could have on a reader.
3. Don’t Delay: I’m convinced that I see something telling me why ‘guest posting is awesome’ every day and for weeks I’ve planned to write this with no avail. Before I began to write this I said to myself “Jasmine, just write the post already!” and seeing as though you’re reading this, it worked!

Unlock The Motivation Inside

We all do things for different reasons and hopefully the ideas for motivation that I’ve listed should help a little. One important thing to remember is that you should convince yourself to do something as opposed to people having to force you to get motivated because if they force you into something, you’ll grow to resent them.

Image Credit