Investing in Your Motivational Dollar

Guest blog by Leigh Peele - NASM Certified Personal Trainer & Fat Loss Expert
--(http://www.leighpeele.com/)

Motivation is a living thing. It breathes, it eats, and it begs of you everyday to help drive it. The biggest mistake that people make when thinking about motivation is that it does all the work. Let me give you an example.

Darren is 35 years old. His story is average, his pains are average, and his dreams are average. He is stuck in the world of trying to be realistic and getting by. Everyday he goes to work, and everynight he comes home. Perhaps 1 out of every 50 days something happens that is worth remembering to Darren. Sometimes that 1 day ends up being a bad thing, not a good one. He says to himself “If only I were motivated by something! If only there was something out there worth being excited about and worth working towards!”

Darren doesn’t work for motivation, he expects it to just be there. Like they say in business, “you need to spend money to make money,” the same is true for motivation. Sometimes you have to spend motivation to make it.

Motivational Currency

A few weeks ago I saw via email, twitter, facebook, blogs, forums, and TV the tail of the frumpy woman who stole the hearts of the world while singing on Britain’s talent show. You will never find a negative story being passed around in the same manner. You will never find a mediocre story passed around in the same manner. The value of the dollar, euro, franc and yen is dead. The stock in motivation is the highest it has ever been.

Why?

People put their motivational hopes in others. They hope, like a virus, they will catch some small part of that magic. Like in the movie “Outbreak” it will go airborne and through osmosis that woman will be enough motivational currency to get us out of debt.

25,000 Mornings

They say the average person has 25,000 mornings to a lifetime. Some more and some less, but overall that is our average. How does reading that make you feel? I don’t know about you, but that scares the sh*t out of me. I see that number, I think about my mornings, and I think “Have I done enough? Have I made my mornings worth it?”

If the answer is no, then the immediate question should be, “Why didn’t I have a great and memorable morning today?”

How many mornings are you in debt?

Everyone has different reasons for missing the chance to change their lives. The top reasons are…

• Fear
• Un-education
• Laziness
• Apathy

There is one common thread among those 4 reasons. Can you guess what it is?

Laziness

Education can be gained.
Apathy disappears with expenditure.
Fear usually dies in the hand of education

Laziness is the killer of motivation. Most people think it is the other way around. They think we are lazy because we lack motivation. This is the furthest from the truth. You have to work for motivation.

3 Steps to motivating motivation

#1- Balance out Negativity

This might sound negative, but I see positive people screw up positivity all the time. They seem to think that if you ever think a bad thought, or have any kind of quality control or selectivity, that you are welcoming negativity. It doesn’t work that way, and 100% goes against balance.

Then there are the other people who think that thinking positive is for new age people who are naive and don’t understand the real world. They think that being positive, means being unrealistic.

Balancing out negativity means that for ever negative thing that occurs in your life that you balance it out with a positive reaction. The catch is that the positive has to be stronger than the negative. Think of it as a 2:1 ratio of positive to negativity. Here are a few examples.

• For every bad news you happen to cross, find two pieces of good news.


• For every time you eat badly, eat twice as good.


• For every one workout you miss, make two.


• For every bad thing you say about someone, say two nice things about someone else.

#2- It isn’t just a goal, its your life

Motivation shouldn’t waiver unless your love for the life you live does. To some degree, the less motivated and inspired we are, the closer to death with live. Since I believe in that message, I believe that everyday is a day worth of having motivation.

When you pin your hopes on one goal only, that hope will die when the goal is achieved or changed. Instead of doing that, your need to make your life a constant motivation, constant new goals, and constant test grounds for those goals. In doing that you end up living a life of motivation.

#3 Like attracts like

Here is a sad, but true statement. Most people don’t have the friendships and partners they desire to have. People settle for what is there, instead of reaching for what could be. We settle in friendship, in romance, in jobs, etc. We do this all in fear of not being alone, or rocking the boat too much. You have to change this pattern as soon as possible. I assure you that good people are always looking for more good people. I also want to assure you that misery loves company.

Which crowd would you rather hang with?

This article isn’t about putting a picture on your fridge or hanging up the clothes you want to fit in. This is about going deeper and becoming inside the kind of person that will achieve their dreams. Not once or twice on a fluke, but for life because they are rich with motivational currency.

-AR