I have already explained the difference between will-power and motivation. If you missed that blog post, you can find it here.
The next logical question is: How can I develop long term motivation after my initial motivation fades away?
There are various methods for maintaining your motivation that you might find online or in books. Most of them involve a structure
where you set a goal, make a plan and take daily action toward achieving your goal. Personally, I have not found these to be very effective for more than 1-2 weeks. What happens is that I am naturally motivated to do something for the first few days, then for the next few days I am having to use my will-power to actually bring myself to do the task ‘that I am supposed to do’. Take note of the wording: I am supposed to do. By the end of the second week, the tasks to achieve the goal is starting to feel like a chore, a responsibility and I am not looking forward to doing it most of the time.
I recently found a motivation strategy that is working very well for me. To start, I use the typical goal setting steps:
- Determine my end result
- The date I want to achieve it by
- The steps I need to take on a daily basis to achieve it
The next step is creating a vision that is so real you know it is going to happen. It is the type of vision that you can feel inside you. I want you to think about how it is going to feel when you reach your goal and what you are going to be experiencing when that happens. If this step only takes you a few minutes to think about, it is not vivid enough. It may even be something you develop over a few days. Develop your vision while you are naturally motivated within the first few days where you start to take action!
I will share with you my personal goal for learning another language, this is my plan:
End Result: To be able to have a conversation with any Spanish speaker, with any accent, in any type of situation without struggling and without feeling nervous. After this point I will work on improving my grammar and try to improve my level of the language to a higher level.
Date to Achieve My Goal: November 2015 for my trip to Colombia (10 months from the date of this post).
Steps I need to take on a daily basis: Learn something new, chat or talk with a native speaker, practice what I have learned, identify where I need to improve the most and give extra focus to that.
My vision: When I arrive to Colombia in November… I can feel the warm tropical air of the coast as I exit the airplane. When I am taking a taxi to my destination, I can have a pleasant conversation with the taxi driver and listen to him boast about how awesome his country is and why I am going to love it so much. I want to experience shopping at the local markets, be able to ask about the foreign fruits and vegetable and how they are used in cooking. I will have the opportunity to discover restaurants, bars and cultural events that a non-Spanish speakers will never even know about. I want to be able to ask locals about their culture and have discussions with interesting people I encounter along the way. I will feel small experiences during my trip that will fill my days when I move and live in South America.
My moment of recognition for reaching my goal is not going be on a certain date, or a particular number of words I know or a certain ‘level’ of the language that I reached. I will know I have accomplished my goal when I am living out my vision and what I feel in that immersion situation. I want this so badly, there is no way it is not going to happen.
I don’t know if you can feel my vision the way I do, but I have so much motivation when I think about this experience, this vision, that I am unable to stop myself from studying Spanish. I have created a love for the language and a bit of an obsession, really.
The key is to feel your goal. To imagine how much better it will feel to live in that moment I have envisioned. Achieving that feeling that is very far away, beats the procrastination that may be tempting today. In other words, it might seem like a more enjoyable activity to watch a movie or go out with a friend instead of studying but neither of those activities will be as gratifying as taking a step towards reaching a bigger goal. I am not suggesting that you spend every free moment working on your goal, but do not allow other temptations to get in the way of achieving the minimum amount of daily dedication you would like to contribute to your long term goal.
I know that I have so much more work to do, but it doesn’t matter. I know that I have to work at it a little bit each day, it’s not going to happen overnight. This is a big goal and big goals can be very challenging to achieve. I find that each day as I am working towards learning a language, it feels like I am not making any progress. It seems like I am no better today than I was last week. I will share some of the obstacles I have faced with maintaining motivation in next week’s article and share some strategies for overcoming them.
Continue reading part 3 of this post by clicking here.
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