The greatest leaders, sports champions and achievers of success in life understand the difference between temporary motivation and permanent habits.
We all experience bouts of temporary motivation…when we are inspired by someone we admire, when we experience an accomplishment, or even when we read about or watch a video that triggers endorphins in our brain.
The challenge with accomplishing anything worthwhile in life though is staying motivated well beyond the initial rush.
Bill Gates, Sir Richard Branson, Martin Luther King, Mother Theresa, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jordan all found a way to transition from temporary motivation to instituting permanent habits which made the difference for them being average players with huge potential to top of their respective games leveraging their tremendous potential.
Indeed, it is the principles of successful people that provided the foundation for the highly successful “Attracting Greatness: 5 Pillars To Achieving Greatness In Your Life” so many have used to blast through limitations people have experienced in their past lives.
For all of us, we have that same potential but most will never truly tap into that potential because we will ride the roller coaster of temporary motivation followed by bouts of procrastination, negative attitude, fear and frustration holding us back from being all that we could be, all that we SHOULD be and all that we were MEANT to be.
Most negative stress in life is caused by this mismatch of not living to our true potential, so not only is learning to move from motivation to habit critical for high achievers, it is also critical for your emotional and physical health.
As we are all aware, the chasm can seem too wide to cross when it comes to turning temporary motivation into a daily practice plan that sees you overcoming procrastination and staying productive day-in and day-out.
Thankfully, there are some techniques that can make permanent motivation through daily practice of habits a reality in your life.
Make Daily Motivation A Planned MUST
Many people believe that high achievers are “special” in some way, that they have some inherent ability to stay motivated without trying to a greater degree than you or I. The reality is that they understand motivation is CRITICAL to their life success and so they plan it each day…feed themselves visualizations, affirmations, books, videos, coaches and inspirational material that ensures they program themselves daily into a state of permanent motivation. In other words, they make motivation as much a daily habit as washing, brushing their teeth or breathing!
While most of us wait to be inspired, successful, driven people motivate themselves – and it is no accident.
You want to come up with your own action plan for how you MUST fit 15-minutes of activity in the morning and 15-minutes in at night specifically focused on feeding your motivation…just as you would exercise, eat or sleep – motivation must become a daily habit.
Have A Big, Emotionally – Charged WHY!
Motivation and dedication to action do not happen without purpose.
When you learn how to ride a bike it is because you want to keep up with your friends, the social stigma of being the only one not being able to be with your friends drives you through the days of practice and pain it takes to learn to ride your bike.
Learning to speak in public by those who push through and practice to be good at it, is usually driven by very emotional reasons including being recognized in their market, getting a promotion or keeping one’s career, job or business.
So, whatever it is you decide to embark on in life, you MUST make sure that you take the time to link highly emotional reasons for such a pursuit. For some of you reading this, you are on the wrong path (meaning that your path means more to someone else than it does to you), for others, you simply need to rekindle that passion by clearly focusing on the purpose and emotional triggers behind what you are doing so you can once again be driven to act each day.
Stick With It
Habits form over a 3-4 week period, yet many of us quit practicing consistently after just a few days.
Forming a habit from a passing activity, desire or dream means having the faith that 3-4 weeks of consistent action (no matter how hard, challenging or painful) will result in that activity becoming easier and easier until it finally becomes a natural habit that you practice daily.
The challenging part about habit formation is that the first couple of months, habit formation is an extremely fragile process.
While it takes consistent daily commitment over a 3-4 week period to activate a habit, it only takes a very short period to interrupt and stop activation…missing 1-2 days of consistent habit formation can derail your entire process whereas commitment to 3-4 weeks is required to form the habit.
The good news is that once a habit is firmly established over a number of months, you can slip once in a while with little or no impact, but during the habit formation stage, the smallest miss can turn into major impact.
Work on your belief that sticking with the practice of building a habit for 4-weeks will be well worth the pain and commitment as that new habit will manifest itself into years of high returns in your life.
The key to living a life that you dream about, that you want and that you deserve is understanding the role of motivation versus the role of habit and how turning temporary motivation into regular habits is necessary and possible in your life.
Do you have a habit you know would benefit your life but that you so far haven’t been able to turn into reality?
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