How many times have you had these thoughts: “I need to go out there and do it” or “I should go to the gym more than once a week” or “I ought to wake up thirty minutes earlier to revise my presentation” or any other ‘could’ve’, ‘would’ve’, should’ve’?

If you’re like me, you’ve probably had many of these thoughts. But how many of them did you actually commit yourself to in the long term?

More than likely, not enough!

You know you should go for this, you ought to do that, or you would like to do the other. But the ‘knowing’, the ‘ought to’ and the ‘would like to’ are not going to make things happen.

Why haven’t things changed the way you wanted them to? Why haven’t you committed to going to the gym more than once a week, or why haven’t you gotten up thirty minutes earlier to revise your presentation?

The answer lies in motivation: The skill of getting yourself to take action to achieve your goals, no matter what.

The great thing about life is that you can learn, develop and master the skill of getting and staying motivated, so you can accomplish the things that you have always wanted.

Feeling more motivated, you will become more energetic, more willing and capable, stronger to face any of life’s challenges and hurdles. With enthusiasm and motivation you will take on everything and anything and you will continue moving ahead until you have accomplished what you set out to do; where you will happily and eagerly look forward to your next gym visit, or getting up early to revise your presentation.

No more excuses!

And what is the power, the motivating power that can keep you going on and on until you’ve fulfilled your true potential?

In one word, it is passion.

I am not talking about a mere wish, a simple want or a plain request. I am talking about a resolute and tenacious desire, a true passion, where you do whatever it takes for you to achieve what it is that you seek.

The more you are passionate about what it is that you want – your resolute desire – the stronger your motivation is, and inevitably the more successful you will be.

Once you have found your passion, motivation is effortless.

Your intense desire, your fervent passion is what fuels your core and inner motivation. This motivation will bring about inspired action to make things happen.

Motivation and intense desire go hand in hand. This desire, your compelling goal or passion, is your journey and motivation is the fuel that will get you there.

Turn that desire into a firm goal and allow motivation to get you there, one step at a time. One step today, one step tomorrow, the day after, every day, every week and every month until you achieve your goal.

More often than not, it is the first step that is the hardest. And it is only after you have made a series of steps, even a series of small steps that it gets easier.

Here are three potent ways to put a fire under your motivation:

1.    Know your desire. Your first step is to measure the strength of your passion. Is it a solid desire that you really want? Is it something that you excites you? This means looking at yourself through a clear lens and finding out who you really are. What makes you tick? What makes you happy and fulfilled? Often we are bombarded by many external factors telling us what should make us happy, what should define us as successful. The fact of the matter is only you can know what makes you happy. Take the time to honestly strip away all of the societal layers and pressures and really see who you are. The world doesn’t define you, you are the creator of your own world. You are responsible for your own happiness and productivity. You will not find this happiness, productivity, motivation or inspiration if you are trying to achieve things based on others’ standards.

Once your passion is clear-cut and compelling, deep-seated in your thoughts, it becomes very easy for you to keep it at the forefront of your mind. Given that this passion is so important to you, it will be effortless for you to keep a clear image of your desire, passion or goal.

2.    Know your benefits. Your second easy step is to ignite that passion even more. Get yourself a journal and make a list of the benefits that you will attain on the journey as you pursue your passion and the benefits that you will get when you achieve each passion or goal.

At this point, it is important that you involve your four senses as best you can. When you write a benefit, close your eyes and measure the strength of it. If it does not excite you, it is not powerful enough. Rewrite each benefit until it electrifies you.

It is essential that you involve your senses. See the benefits, hear the benefits, smell the benefits and touch the benefits.

3.    Know your action steps. This last step will be remarkably easy for you. Why? The sheer power of your passion and the mighty energy you feel from seeing, hearing, smelling and touching the benefits will have incredible and stimulating clout that will motivate you into action.

When you are so passionate about your goal, when your desire has great influence over you, you will inevitably take action to make that passion a reality, even when you are not in the mood, tired or it’s late at night.

There will be no excuses! Your motivation will incite action. It will automatically spur you on.

Keep seeing, hearing, smelling and touching your passion to maintain your motivation level at a height you never thought possible.

Rekindle the fire under your motivation by reviewing your desire, your passion and goal, and you will be able to go ahead and achieve with very little effort.

Learn how to eliminate the limiting beliefs that keep you stuck where you are. Download the free book Establish Powerful Self-Enhancing Belief and start achieving today.

Hani Al-Qasem is a published author and personal growth specialist. He co-authored Self-Confidence Building in 7 Steps and Establish Powerful Self-Enhancing Beliefs.

When you’re trying to live a full, productive and effective life, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to do it all yourself. Whether this means micro-managing at work, or dealing with every little thing at home, it can initially seem like a way to make sure things are done properly.

Before long, of course, you end up feeling frazzled. You’re spending a lot of time on low-level tasks, you’re overworked, and you don’t ever seem to get a chance to pursue activities that really excite you.

If you’re someone whose mantra is “if you want a job done well, do it yourself,” there are two crucial ways to reduce the burden: you need to eliminate and delegate.

Eliminate

The first, easiest, way to get rid of stuff that’s filling up your life is to eliminate it. If you start on your to-do list before breakfast and still have loads to do at bedtime, you’re trying to pack too much in.

Here are some good questions to ask yourself when considering what to eliminate.  Work through the questions in order for each big commitment you have in your life; if you hit a “no” answer, stop reading and start thinking about whether you can eliminate it.

•    Do I want to do this? If not, why am I doing it? Is it because I feel obliged? Can I remove or at least reduce my commitment?
•    Does this need to be done? If not, why do I have it on my to-do list? Is it because someone has told me I should do it? (E.g. parent, society at large.)
•    Am I learning anything from doing this? If I used to learn from this, and no longer do, is it time to move on?
•    Would I feel at all sorry to give this up?

Many of us have great trouble saying “no” to people. If you’re asked to take on something that you don’t want to do, or don’t have time to do well, then learn to say “I’m sorry, I can’t commit to that at the moment.” If you’re pushed, simply repeat yourself, and add that “I won’t take on something where I know I don’t have the time to do a good job.”

If you really can’t think what you might eliminate, ask “what’s the worst that could happen if I gave this up?”

Delegate

Some jobs do need to be done, however boring or tiresome they are. Perhaps you hate doing the dishes, or doing your taxes. Whether it’s a personal or work task, look for ways to delegate:
•    Pass on low-level work tasks to junior colleagues (invest some initial time in teaching them how to do the job well – don’t just dump a task on them and expect them to figure it out).
•    Teach your kids how to perform basic chores. You might consider offering a small amount of extra pocket money in exchange.
•    Hire someone to clean your home once a week.
•    Let your spouse or older kids take a turn at cooking. It may not be up to your gourmet/macrobiotic/frugal standards, but praise the results and the effort that went in.
•    Pay an accountant to do your taxes for you (a good accountant will save you more than his/her fee).
•    Outsource very simple and routine tasks, like data entry, to a virtual assistant firm or individual – R3R has a number of reviews of virtual assistant firms and sites.

If you manage a group of volunteers (eg. in a church or community setting), this is another good opportunity to delegate – especially as it’s likely that the group will consist of people with a number of very different skills. Get people to list what their areas of expertise are, and play to those strengths: for example, you might find that someone who’s worked in events management can organize the annual gala, whereas an English major might be just the person for writing the monthly newsletter.

Do you have any tips on how to effectively eliminate or delegate tasks? Are you someone who needs to “do it all”, or are you realistic about how much you can take on?

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Image courtesy of Arwen Abendstern

Do you find yourself consistently miserable and stressed? I used to but now even my infamous ‘grumpy-old-man’ moods are underpinned by a strong undercurrent of contentment and joy. Why? Because along the way I have learned some awesome ideas that helped me to discover deep and lasting happiness. Here’s 7 of them…

1. Stop Looking for Happiness

When I was growing up my mother was often depressed. At the time I had never experienced this (it came later) and I didn’t understand it. By the time I was about twenty I figured out one reason why she was so regularly unhappy: because she was focusing on wanting to be happy too much.

I gave her a cheesy embroidery piece in a frame (warning: cheesy, but actually works) which said:

“Happiness is like a butterfly: If you chase it, it flies away, but when you turn your attention to other things, it comes and quietly lands on your shoulder.”

I have no idea if she ever really got anything out of that, but soon after she started to study accounting, and went on to become a practicing accountant. She had always enjoyed numbers and so she was quite happy with this career path, which was her first ever full-time job outside of the home.

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Would you like to become more productive by doing less? Would you like to be capable of solving complex problems with sudden bursts of insight? Would you like to learn how to apply consistent effort to complete the most daunting of tasks? Great! Do a jigsaw puzzle.

Wait…What?

Recently, on a whim I purchased a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. I’d never completed a jigsaw puzzle before but I do enjoy all manner of mental stimulation. Interestingly the experience turned out to be unexpectedly instructive. As the pieces came together over the next couple of days the process of joining 1,000 pieces just so revealed a number of important lessons in productivity and the power of perspective and consistent effort.

Increase Your Productivity by Taking Breaks

As pieces of the puzzle began to come together there were times where I was engrossed for hours on end. The going was easy and the time spent productive. But then, suddenly I would hit a wall. No piece could be made to fit and for the life of me I couldn’t see where certain pieces should go.

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Who’s in control of your life? Who’s pulling your strings?

For the majority of us, it’s other people – society, colleagues, friends, family or our religious community. We learned this way of operating when we were very young, of course. We were brainwashed. We discovered that feeling important and feeling accepted was a nice experience and so we learned to do everything we could to make other people like us. We didn’t want to be singled out by the crowd for being different because this wasn’t such a nice feeling. We learned this way of being so well that, as adults, we continue – mostly through mutual peer pressure – to keep each other in check. Like sheep without any need for a sheepdog, we keep each other in line.

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Some people consider worldly success, such as success in entrepreneurship, to be incompatible with spirituality.  “It’s a dog eats dog world.” they’d say, “If you want to succeed, you do whatever (dirty things) you must do. Then you dress up and go to church on Sundays.  If you want to embrace spirituality full time, stay in the convent, or at least stay in the clean low-paying job.”

I disagree.  In this article, I want to show you how spirituality can help new entrepreneurs in two major challenges they face in starting their own business.

For the purpose of this article, I am defining spirituality as our awareness of higher purpose and power.  That invisible something that transcends us as individuals.  I am not affiliated with any organized religions.

Spirituality offers sustainable motivation

I find it quite dangerous that so many people want to become their own boss because they hate their current jobs.  They want to escape from what they hate, be it the boring job itself or the demanding boss or the work environment.  I don’t say this is no good for moral reasons.  If you don’t like something or someone, then it is so, it’s not good or bad.  I find it dangerous because the escape mentality doesn’t offer any sustainable motivations.

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There’s a lot of talk about what you should do to become successful, but I would argue that it’s more about who you are that makes the biggest impact.  It’s the decisions we make on a daily basis, the habits we naturally form in our lives that determine the level of success we can achieve.  Who we are determines how we react to life, even when we’re not consciously in the act of ‘being successful’.

So here are 10 traits that I’ve seen as essential for obtaining lasting success in any endeavor.

1. An Independent Nature

If we rely too much on those around us for assistance and/or support we will be setting ourselves up for disappointment in the future.  This is not to say that we shouldn’t look to others for help when the time is right, but crafting our pursuits in such a way that requires the intervention of another is like handing over the keys and getting in the back seat.  Our friends and colleagues may help open the doors of opportunity, but it is our own responsibility to take the wheel.

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Right now, the news coverage is overloaded with stories about the economy.  This is completely understandable, because recently there have been some very interesting developments in the global economy.  What’s unfortunate about the media coverage is that the majority of it is focused on trying to “make sense” of the current situation. Sadly, that approach just seems to be causing more and more confusion and panic. Personally, I believe in the concept that one should focus 10% on the problem and 90% on the solution.

Crystal Ball Gazing

We have “experts” looking at the past, comparing it to the current situation and then extrapolating what this will mean for the future.  I find this approach very interesting because almost every financial prospectus comes with the fine-print warning that past performance does not predict future results. Just because something happened in the 1930’s does not mean that it is directly relevant to our present-day situation.

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It is a common occurrence when someone is trying to take a step up in terms of their diet or exercise regime for unexpected saboteurs to appear. Most often the source of the sabotage is those who we had expected the greatest support from. This includes our partner, our mother or our best friend. Usually they do have our best interests at heart. Regardless, they often advise against what may appear to them to be an extreme or unusual path that we have chosen.

The result of this sabotage is doubt. We begin to question our own decisions. Perhaps I shouldn’t push myself quite so hard when I exercise. Maybe it is ok to break out of my dietary plan every now and again. Do I really want to continue with this fast? I’ve seen it happen and experienced it myself on numerous occasions. The disapproval of others, particularly those closest to us, however misguided and uninformed, can take the wind right out of our sails.

While this issue rears its head most often along the path of physical health it is also not uncommon on the journey of personal development. If you have experienced this problem you should know that you are neither alone nor is it a new problem. The ancient philosophers in their love of wisdom (the definition of philosophy) observed its occurrence in their own time.

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 until his death in 180. A great thinker, Marcus embodied Plato’s ideal of the philosopher king to a considerable extent. He was a strong emperor, engaging in various wars in defense of the Roman empire for his entire reign, but he was also greatly concerned with social justice and welfare, even going so far as to sell his own possessions to alleviate people’s suffering from famine and plague (from which he died).

Marcus left behind a corpus of writing which, despite it’s antiquity, offers us some truly timeless wisdom. Here are six lessons we can learn from his observations on life.

Lesson #1: We Are Responsible for Our Own Experience of Life

“Such as are your habitual thoughts; such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the color of your thoughts.”

Much has been made recently of the (so called) ‘law of attraction.’ Before ‘The Secret,’ a wealth of writers had tapped into the idea that what happens in our mind is the most important thing in shaping our experience of life. From Norman Vincent Peal’s ‘Amazing Power of Positive Thinking,’ and Joseph Murphy’s ‘Power of the Subconscious Mind’ to

Wallace Wattles ‘Science of Getting Rich,’ all were taking about a truth which Marcus understood so may centuries ago.

Viktor Frankl said that between what happens to us and our response to it, there is a gap, and in that gap lies our whole experience of life. Steven Covey, in his ‘Seven Habits’ called our ability to widen this gap ‘being proactive.’ It is the first habit of a highly effective person to cultivate an awareness that s/he is in control. To coin a phrase, life is what you make it.

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