Top 5 Things That Can Steal Your Motivation (Immediately)

Motivation is central to creativity, productivity, and happiness. 

It is what causes us to act, and when we act, we create movement, growth, and change; we feel involved and significant; we feel powerful and we create more of what we love in our lives. 

All of this gives our lives purpose and happiness.

But sometimes we’re accompanied by demotivation in many stages of life under different circumstances․

Demotivation is a category of problems, containing much imbalance. 

It’s about not fully committing to act, and there are many reasons why you might be in that position. 

Having more ways to categorize your demotivation will help you identify the real reasons for your unwillingness to move forward. 

Here are 5 types of demotivation and the strategies that will help you find your fire:

1. Fear

When you’re afraid, even if you’re entering the place that you’ve chosen to move into, a part of you is determined to avoid going forward. 

Fear slows you down and makes you hesitant and careful, which may be beneficial to you, but sometimes your fears are based on your imagination rather than on an accurate assessment of the risks in your reality. 

If your fear is big enough, the part of you that wants to keep you safe can successfully prevent you from going forward into territory that’s both desirable and safe.

To get motivated again, you should deal with your fear. 

You should start by naming your fears so that they’re out in the open. 

Question your fears: “Why am I afraid of that happening?” “What are the chances that would happen?” Some of your fears will probably slip away.

2. Wrong Goals

Researchers explain that we have an Essential Self and a Social Self. 

Our Essential Self is the part of us that’s spontaneous and creative and playful, the part that knows what’s most important to us. 

Our Social Self is the part of you that has been developing since the day you were born, learning the rules of the tribe and working hard to make sure that we’re safe by making us follow "the rules."

When we feel unmotivated, it’s because we’re setting goals based purely on what our Social Self wants and this is pulling us away from the direction your Essential Self wants us to take. 

Our Essential Self uses demotivation to slow us down and to detach us from the toxic goals we’ve set.

To get motivated again we need to take some time to review our goals. 

Since our Essential Self is non-verbal, we can easily access our Essential Self through our body. 

When our body shows signs of tightness and constriction, that’s a pretty good indication that we’re trying to follow toxic goals. 

If we get a constricted reaction, we need to scrap our current goals and question all our stories about what we “should” do with our life. 

3. Lack of Clarity

When we haven’t consciously and clearly articulated what we want, our picture of our future will be vague. 

We like what’s familiar, so we resist what’s unfamiliar and vague and we stay with and re-create what’s familiar to us. 

If we’re not clear about what we want to create, then it makes sense that we’ll lack motivation because we’d rather stay with our current familiar reality.

To get motivated again we need to know what we do want, and we need to articulate a clear and specific vision of what we want to create so that we can become familiar with that new outcome and feel comfortable moving toward it. 

4. Values Conflict

Our values are what’s important to us in life. 

If we have a values conflict, it means that there are two or more values that are important to us but we believe that we can’t satisfy all of those values in a particular situation.

This situation causes us to feel conflicted and pulled in different directions as we try to find ways to get what’s important to us.

To get motivated again we need to unpack our values conflict and play mediator. 

We have to get the parts of us that are advocating for different values to play on the same team again. 

5. Lack of Autonomy

We thrive on autonomy. 

We all have a decision-making center in our brains, and this part of us needs to be exercised. 

Studies have found that this decision-making center in the brain is under-developed in people who have depression and that if we practice using this part of the brain and making decisions, depression often clears.

Research shows that when it comes to doing creative work, having some autonomy to decide what we do, when we do it, how we do it, and whom we do it with is core to igniting and sustaining motivation and productivity.

To get motivated again we need to consider how much autonomy we have about the goals we’ve been trying to pursue. 

Are there areas where we feel constricted and controlled? 

We should consider how we could gradually introduce more autonomy in our task, time, technique, location, and team, and then, if we’re employed, have a discussion with our manager and ask for greater autonomy in a few specific areas of our work.

Conclusion

There are plenty of things that are waiting to grab your motivation straight out of you. 

You need to kill them at every turn and every situation.

Sometimes they come in the form of shitty people, sometimes they come as failures or something as sneaky as the absence of action.

The most important thing you should learn to do is trust yourself. 

Always listen to yourself and observe your motivation. 

When are you most motivated? What activities are most motivating to you? What people around you motivate you the most?

Kill the “Motivation Murderers” and realize that the only person who can ever rob you of your motivation is you!