I’m more an auditive person, so there’s some music that helps me keep motivated. Mariachi Music is my personal favorite.

When I read your article for sustaining motivation, I realized it’s important to develop an INTERNAL motivation rewarded by our intrinsic nature to feel good about ourselves. Many times people will have great ideas-start a business, a book, lose weight. But at the heart of it, they might be doing it to impress “someone else.” To get a reward from someone else. To hear “WOW great job!” from another person. These are usually subconscious thoughts which give a “High” on motivation that eventually dwindles down.

Sustain motivation by pursuing YOUR goals. Don’t pursue ACCEPTANCE from others, because then it’s not about YOU.

One thing that can help motivate is to start off small, or with a checklist of easy things to do. I organized my office filing cabinet after finally getting some hanging folders, I figured out how to manipulate a broken elliptical machine (that I shorted out myself without knowing it) so now we can use it again, and I installed a program that will help me keep notes organized.

And now, i’m going to complete my day by doing the dishes, lifting some weights, and coming back to the computer to get started on my flyer for teaching people about technology in order to hopefully get some biters and bring some income my way.

As a last thing to think about: Save your heavy projects for the day after you complete multiple smaller tasks. Take breaks in between, and keep making progress and if you finish in the same day, what a great feeling of accomplishment! It took me three days to figure out how to setup my own server for my home network and once it was fully functional it was amazing and now I have so much more work to do – which is another thing to look out for! Once you complete something that large which generates four times the amount of work, make a list of those things and fit it into your schedule when you have some time to dedicate to it and things should go smoothly. (I need to install 2 programs over the network which is going to take me an entire day each to successfully complete, longer if I run into problems.)

If nothing else motivates you, just look around and ask yourself what minor changes you can make to help make life easier – install shelves in rooms for more space, buy some cheap laundry baskets to have around the house to dump your clothes in instead of onto the floor, replace lightbulbs with more efficient ones, get your car an oil change – doing little things can show you how much of a difference you can make in your own life and others.

Take things one day at a time, and if things get you down, just think of the future. (i’ll probably never come back here, I googled, but thought I should provide my wisdom for those that do. I’m 23, and I think for myself, I blaze my own paths, and one day i’ll be somewhere. But until then, all we can do is hope.)

-A hopeless romantical optimist

Great advice too on the breathing technique. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Eric

Jonathan, thanks for the reminder about visualisation. I find that this works well for me in conjunction with other methods — visualisation alone doesn’t tend to do it when I’m feeling really lethargic about my goals!