How to Stay Motivated and Inspired?

Staying motivated can be tough sometimes. The biggest questions that millennials face is ‘How to stay motivated?’ I believe motivation is not magic. You need to work hard for it and it does not come in a bottle.  Every inspirational author, speaker and life coach has his or her own tips, but over my decades of observing people, I have come up with a list of few things that are fundamental to sustaining motivation:

1. Read and listen to positive information: If you fill your mind with uplifting and inspiring information, it will keep you motivated. Go to the bookstore or library today and find at least one book on a positive topic that will give you a boost. You need constant reminders telling you that you are capable of achievement.
2. Create a proper vision: If you want to win, you must form a proper vision, something which you can relate to. If it is not embedded in your heart, it won't motivate you to stay on target. Create the highest grandest vision possible, because you can achieve only what you see.
3. Be with positive people: Negativity can make you focus on all the wrong things and take your focus from the goals. Seek out positive people and don’t engage in negative conversations. Instead, choose to remain neutral or just don’t participate at all. If you think you are caught in the middle of a negative conversation, change the subject to something productive. Try to say something like, “I am focused on finishing this new project. I’m really excited about it.” If you are stuck on the phone with a negative person, you could cut it short by telling them, “I have an important appointment/meeting/conference call in five minutes and I need to finish preparing for it now.”
4. Exercise: Some highly creative ways to find inspiration are get outside, move your body, and get fresh air. If you are working, your mind is only focused on the task at hand, which leaves very little room for your right brained activities such as inspiration to come forth. If you are exercising, the left brain is distracted by the task of exercising, allowing the more right brained emotions and ideas to come through. Further, when you push yourself physically you learn how strong you are emotionally, and this helps to keep you inspired and believing in your capacity to continue pressing forward.
5. Recognize your progress: Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress. We track our progress automatically with most activities. But to stay motivated, you need to recognize your progress, not merely track it. 
6. Appreciate and reward yourself: Rewarding yourself is always pleasant. According to experts, this is one of the easiest and at the same time most powerful ways to stay motivated. Right from the beginning, agree on some deliverables which will justify yourself getting rewarded. As soon as you get one of the agreed results, take time to reward yourself in some way. The more you reward yourself for the honestly made progress, the more motivated you will feel about reaching new milestones, thus finally accomplishing your goal.
7. Cut out distractions: An important part of staying motivated is to limit the distractions. An infectious and positive attitude can shift your entire life. TVs, mobiles, games and excessive socializing can count as major distractions. If you’re serious about your goals, then you have to get serious about just how you use the time that you do have. Create blocks of time where you decide to turn everything off. This includes shutting down the smartphone, home phone, Internet, and anything else that can interrupt you. This also means you have to limit some of your social time. We can’t stay motivated if we’re constantly engaging in activities that don’t help to move us towards our goals.

Feeling your mind with positive thoughts can produce more positive results in your life. To break into making what you’ve only dreamed of and wished for, you must start thinking, believing and speaking like you’re already worth that number! Purposefully infusing your life with a positive perspective will keep you motivated and eliminate all negative sources out of your life.

Remember, motivation starts within. Find it, keep it and make it work for you.