Are you feeling demotivated in life and constantly looking for external motivation to keep going?

Lack of productivity may be one of the things you may be struggling with right now.

Getting the motivation to do the things is the solution you may be feeling.

What if I tell you that you are wrong?

Yes, my dear friend. I have also felt that and was less productive in the first two years of starting my career.

Why do you constantly look for motivation if it is not necessary?

Here, I would like to take one thing I learnt from my favourite book, “The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho“.

Our brain always wants to protect us. I mentioned this in my article on how you can get rid of your habits.

The brain constantly works on protecting you. For that reason, whenever you feel uncomfortable, it starts giving many reasons to stop you from doing it.

Waking up early is good for your health, but it makes you uncomfortable. So, irrespective of how stubborn you are the night before, the brain gives you many reasons.

Some of the reasons are

• You need to sleep for at least 7 hours.
• It is too dark now, what will do you by waking up now?
• Everyone else is sleeping. What will you do by waking up now?
• It’s okay if you sleep for 15 more minutes and so on.

But, consider a scenario where you slept late at night (like 2:00 am), and you have an important meeting with a client at 8:00 am. Your brain won’t give you reasons to sleep some more time. And you will wake up even if you sleep for five only hours.

However, even if you sleep at 11:00 am, if you were to wake up at 5:30 am or 6:00 am, you will find it difficult to wake up.

Early raising is one of the situations in life, to name, but there are many such incidences.

All of this happens because of the way wiring of our brain is.

Why do you feel demotivated?

Let’s say you want to lose extra pounds and joined a private gym. Consider it has no means to check waist size, no weighing machine, no mirrors and no one else except you. You have been going to the gym and doing rigorous workouts for over a month.

What will you do? Suddenly you lack the motivation to go to the gym anymore as you don’t know how many pounds you lost. But if you check your weight, you can notice that you already lost some pounds and everything is on track.

What did you understand from this example?

Yes, not knowing the progress can make you demotivated.

When the journey becomes hard, and you lose track of your progress and the person you become, you find it hard to stay on the course.

The solution to staying on track without losing focus

If you pay close attention to the above example, one more element helps us in staying persistent. — It is validation.

Let’s say you are a content creator and you are publishing videos regularly. And you are expecting people to respond well to your videos by liking and commenting. But you are not getting any reactions. So, you are falling short on the reasons to stay on course.

However, one day you received a comment stating, “I am following you regularly. The first thing I do every day is consuming your video. You are providing immense value with your videos, and I can relate with them better.” 

How do you feel?

Yes, you will be on cloud nine. You also forget all the worries you have.

It is the power of feedback that you are on the right track of adding value to the people.

It also helps you to create more value.

So, you need to create a mechanism to receive more such feedbacks. It will help you to keep going.

At the end of every piece of content you create, you can mention, “share your thoughts on this. It would mean the world to me.”

Also, remember that you need motivation only when you are inactive. However, the reason for inaction is looking for a perfect start. The irony is the perfection comes in iterations.

So, do whatever shit you want to do and focus on improving in future tasks by doing the next project better. — Because there is no better remedy to feeling lost or demotivated than action.

Whenever you feel demotivated, work more, do more. Even though it is uncomfortable, stay on the course by improving the feedback mechanism. It will help you in staying persistent without looking for external motivation. For, motivation is garbage. — It is abundant when you need less. But it can be found nowhere when you need it more.

Final Thoughts

I used to think that looking at motivational quotes will pump me up, and it is the best to grow in life. I used to do the same at the beginning of my career without taking action much. However, I noticed that only when I took action, things started changing.

Also, remember when you are not getting results, but when you stay on the course, you grow internally first and get results in the external world on staying persistent.

Mel Robbins video on Impact Theory is an inspiration to my post.

Did you find value in this post? Please share your thoughts on this post by commenting below. It would mean the world to me.