Motivation to Succeed
Motivation to Succeed
Motivation is the key
Identifying what do you want to achieve?
and why?
Being able to keep yourself continually motivated toward your goals on a daily basis is an invaluable skill that once mastered can go a long way to ensuring your success in any pursuit. While motivation is not the be all and end all of success, it’s an aspect that very little can happen without. In actuality we are all motivated in many ways every day. Even if we are procrastinating and putting off taking action we are motivated, just toward a different end.
There are many elements to motivation but in essence, each of us is primarily motivated to taking action in one of two ways. We are either motivated by the thought of moving TOWARD things or by moving AWAY FROM things.
Research has proven that the ingredients to motivation are the same whether the task is to get out of bed in the morning or to go for a run at 6am. Regardless of the desired outcome the same forces of motivation either away from things or toward them, are continually at work. While we each exhibit instances of each kind of motivation, most people will tend to favor one over the other.
Understanding under which of these categories your athletes are essential to keeping them continually motivated.
“Toward” Motivation
some people are motivated by the notion of moving toward things. This group gets excited by the thought of what they might achieve, or the pleasure that will be gained through the attainment of some task in the future. So in the case of sports performance someone who is motivated towards an outcome might be motivated by the prospect of winning a tournament, or getting a contract with a team and being able to buy new car.
Basically they move toward the things they want.
“Away From” Motivation
the other group of people are motivated by the notion of moving away from things are painful or uncomfortable. This group takes action after the consequences of not taking action become too dire and they have to ‘avoid’ some negative consequence. In the sports performance it might be the fear of the possible consequences losing a cup final and never getting the opportunity to play it again or not getting that contract and not being able to pay the bills
Most people would agree the hardest muscle to get into shape
Is the one “between the ears”. So, think of something you are
Extremely motivated to do and you will find that you just start
Doing it. This proves that you do have motivation – the key is
to redirect it towards your goals. One way of doing this
is by associating training with pleasure rather than with pain
– you could ask your athletes: “If you don’t train, what are the
negative consequences?
And if you do train what are the positive
consequences?”
Get your athletes to write a list of the positive and
negative consequences of training and not training. By doing this
exercise you will underpin reasons for them to carry on. Also, get
them to add to the list and revisit their list whenever they feel like
skipping a session.