There are times during the year that many people feel a bit unmotivated. Students towards the end of a semester are anxious to finish up, but may feel overwhelmed and/or burned out. Staff in the middle of a summer or winter session may find it difficult to stay on task if the students and faculty are not buzzing around. Faculty members who have struggled with tenure and promotion often feel like giving up and lose the energy needed to publish. What can we do to restore our motivation?
Below are six ideas.
- Increase Internal Motivation
There are external and internal sources of motivation. Well known external sources are grades, pay, and prestige. An ability to have and maintain self-motivation is extremely important and allows you to achieve your important goals. You know yourself better than anyone and can probably identify two or three things that help motivate you. Choose one of those for an experiment and see if it is effective; if not, perhaps try another one. When you find the one that works the best for you, try it out for a solid month. By that point, it may have already developed into a habit and you are off and running.
- Give advice to others about work/school goals
As odd as it sounds, motivation is increased when we give advice to others about achieving goals. What happens is that it helps raise our confidence and we tend to become more committed to achieving our goals and thus become more motivated. When we give advice, we often create kind of a road map for the other person. In doing this, we follow those suggestions ourselves and we are more focused.
- Surround yourself with positive people
If you have co-workers/classmates who constantly complain, look for the negative in everything and make you stray from your goals, it will help if you don’t engage with them. Staying around positive people and those who are goal-oriented will have a better effect on you.
- Think differently about the progress that you’ve made
When you stop and notice that you have already made significant steps towards your goal, you realize that it seems within reach. This has a psychological effect of making you want to keep working towards the finish line. Notice it and be grateful for your progress. Spoken gratitude has a positive effect.
- Break the large goal into smaller bits
We have all heard the question about how to eat an elephant and the answer is tried and true. When you break your big goal into small goals— say, weekly instead of semester-long targets— there are more celebrations of achievable goals and fewer feelings of having the weight of a massive project on your shoulders. The other important strategy is to do the least desirable bit of work the earliest in the day so that it is checked off. Your remaining tasks will seem enjoyable in contrast
- Make and maintain contact with the person over you
Check in regularly with the person who evaluates you – be it the department chair, supervisor, professor, etc., and let them know about your achievements, goals and stumbling blocks. Hopefully your relationship with them is strong and they can advise you with good feedback as a good mentor would.
