You need to take stock of your life right now. You need to look around your life and consider what results you’re currently getting. Are you happy with your life and your results? Is it good? Bad? Indifferent? Appalling? Are you pleased? Displeased? Just satisfied? Not satisfied? Unhappy? Disappointed?

Without acknowledging where you are right now you have little to no chance of improving things.

Your life might be at the top of a mountain peak right now but are you looking forward to scaling further heights or are you threatening to throw yourself off the highest peak? You might be sat comfortably in your canoe but unbeknown to you, you may be careering towards a perilous waterfall. Unless you sit up, look around and acknowledge what’s going on in your life right now you can’t doing anything about it.

Most people do nothing about their lives until it’s too late. They carry on under-performing in their jobs until they are made redundant because of “poor market conditions”. They eat unhealthily until they get taken ill and then they blame “their genes”. They spend little or no quality time with their children until their children disown them and then they blame the “bad crowd” that they got in with.

Taking stock means taking stock of what is. Be honest. Look around. Take it all in. Imagine that you’re a visitor to your life. What would you see, think and feel about this life? Would you see this person as successful or not? Would you want their life for your own or could they keep it? What advice would you give to them?

Honesty is critical for the success of this exercise. If you’re not honest with yourself, what chance do you have? Let’s face it if you aren’t honest with yourself, can you really expect anyone else to be?

You’ve probably seen The X Factor on television. It’s one of those programmes that I sometimes like to like and that I sometimes like to hate. I dig the competitive element of it and the fact that you only get through to the later stages if you really are good. Life is like that; watch it and realize the truth.

If you don’t step up and take action, if you don’t step up and perform, you will be wiped out!

But then there are the people who cannot sing. Some of them are clearly disturbed and need psychological help. I don’t think that’s funny. We shouldn’t laugh at people less fortunate than ourselves.

But there is a third group; people, who in other areas of their lives are probably perfectly well grounded but who have a delusion that they can sing. For many people, their own voice is the sweetest thing that they will ever hear so it is not surprising that they think that they sound like the next rock star!

What is more worrying perhaps is that their friends, family and peers never told them that they sounded like an asthmatic tom cat on the prowl before they entered the competition. As I said before, few people in life will be honest with you. Few people will tell you that you suck. Few people will tell you that you are not motivated and that you need to give yourself a resounding kick up the ass.

You have to be honest with yourself or you have no chance. Go on, take a visit with yourself right now. Take stock of your motivation levels. If they’re not up to scratch join me in looking at what you can do to motivate yourself more consistently right now…

When I talk to people about what I do people always ask me the same question, “How do I motivate myself to…?” It seems that motivation, or lack of it, is one of the core problems that people have with their lives.

They want to know how to motivate themselves to do things that they struggle to motivate themselves to do…

“How do I motivate myself to go to work earlier?”
“How do I motivate myself to study harder?”
“How do I motivate myself to go to the gym?”
“How do I motivate myself to lose weight?”
“How do I motivate myself to earn more money?”
“How do I…?”

The subject matter changes but the question itself always stays the same. Motivation is key to success however you define success but to most people motivation is something intransient, something that they cannot put their hands on, something intangible and most definitely something outside of their control.

“I’m just not motivated” people say. They return home from work or from their football practice and they repeat the mantra, “I just wasn’t motivated today”. They might as well say, “Lightening didn’t strike today, it just didn’t happen.”

For most people, motivation is a lottery. It happens or it doesn’t, you are or you aren’t, you can or you can’t.
Unfortunate! Motivation of this kind is hard to control, hard to harness and hard to leverage. With this kind of motivation, the results that you get in your life are going to be patchy at best. Probably worse.

The second issue with motivation is that many people say that they are motivated when they aren’t. They say that they do not need motivation. They say that motivation is not a problem for them. They say that they are up for it. They tell their boss, their family, their friends and their peer group that they are motivated…

How many people do you know or manage who say that they are motivated  to do their jobs well or to earn big money yet they go home early, they don’t focus and they get distracted easily? They’re so clearly not passionate about what they do. They’re so clearly not motivated in their lives, their pursuits and their activities.

Let’s face the truth; most people aren’t that honest about motivation. Few people admit that they’re not motivated yet most are exactly that; not motivated enough to do the things in their lives that will bring them the successes that they desire.

Knowing how to get and stay motivated is essential if you want to achieve more in your life. Motivation is essential if you want to live an extraordinary life. Motivation is essential if you want more for yourself, your family and your loved ones.

In my next post we’re going to look at the first of many strategies for getting more motivated… the importance of taking stock…