How to Get Motivated in 30 Days

Have you found yourself ever saying ‘I just can’t seem to get motivated’? If you have, this article will support you in examining the goal that you’ve been trying to rally around, in identifying your reasons for success, and it outlines a foolproof way to get motivated in 30 days.

Love it or Dread it? What’s the What?

Before explaining the simple answer to the question ‘how’ to get motivated in 30 days, lets take a look at ‘what’s the goal’ and ‘why’ you should. What is it that you’d like to be doing that is different from now? What kind of goals are you creating? Do these excite you? If you dread what you think you ‘need’ to be doing, then forget it right now. Over the long term, how can someone get motivated for something they simply don’t want to do? You’re setting yourself up for failure from the start. If you feel this way, ask if you are being true to yourself by setting the goal you are considering.

Let me provide you an example. Say for instance you want to drop 20 pounds, but you dread going to the gym. Where is the focus of your attention? It’s on the dread of going to the gym. How can you get motivated to do this? You can’t if your mind stays focused on your distaste for the gym. On the other hand, how would it be to lose that 20 pounds? Would you have a revitalized sense of energy, would you date more easily, would you have a newly inspired sense of confidence? Create this vision, focus on what you love about the task at hand and you’ve got a fighting change to become motivated.

Let me provide another example from building my private coaching business. I absolutely dreaded making what I felt were ‘sales calls’ (even though I was calling people that expressed interest in my services). When I focused on the 1-2 hours worth of calls I’d have to make in any given week, my motivation dropped to zero and after procrastinating for days, I’d reluctantly roll through the list of calls I ‘had’ to make. However, when I shifted gears and was aligned with my greater vision of building a successful coaching practice, the outcome I envisioned made this process much more tolerable. Eventually, I shifted away from marketing the private business and have focused my efforts on building The Personal Growth Network. I’ve learned to take that aspect of dread outside my business expansion and my actions are now much more aligned with what is important to me. Perhaps if you are dreading the gym, there’s another way to get to the same outcome you seek by journeying down a different path to get there.

Is it Really Important? What’s the Why?

So far you may be reading this and thinking that you’ve already thought these thoughts 100 times before and even when I think about the big picture, I just cant seem to start the process. Have a heart to heart with yourself and truthfully examine your current belief structure. Why do you want to do what you say you want to do?

If you find yourself thinking, something along these lines, look deeper ‘Everyone wants to get healthy – don’t they?’. These surface level answers don’t call out to you now, and they won’t in the future. Stop beating around the bush. Perhaps you’d like to get healthier, but really you think that you’ll live another 30 years anyways so its not worth it. Maybe you think it would be great to start your own business, but you’re fairly comfortable where you are at now. It could be that while you’ve got an inspiring goal (like to own a vacation home in the tropics), you feel like its just too much work. The threshold of pain for the current outlook is just not that high. Face the truth such that you can consciously decide to dismiss these crazy thoughts, or to accept that this isn’t the right goal. Another way of putting it – become conscious.

A simple step by step guide to getting Motivated – How to do it!

So here it is – a no frills, simple way to get motivated in 30 days. I’ve heard that it takes 28 days to form a habit, honestly I’ve got no idea on how true this holds for most people. From what I’ve seen, habits seem to come and go with the passing of time, and anything worth pursuing takes continual effort. The 30 day get motivated steps outlined below are designed to be the motivational kick start that will get things moving in a direction you want. The only guarantee is that you will see progress towards whatever your goals are in this time and that progress is typically enough to shift the motivational momentum towards the longer term arena. Ready to get started?

Create a 30 day goal attainment document that you can reference daily. On it you should have a space on top to write out your goal/vision, then 30 lines to record the activities for the days.
Create your goal or vision and write it down on the get motivated handout. This should not be what you expect to have in 30 days, rather its the overall driver that will keep you motivated towards the directed outcome. For example, my goal is to be writing personal growth content from a tropical getaway home. This excites me.
Post your goal/vision in a visible location and consciously read this daily for 30 days.
Commit to one action for the next 30 days that gets you one step closer to the goal you’ve written down. It does not matter how long the action takes you to complete. Even if it takes only 2 minutes, this action is getting you closer to your goal and it shifts motivation in your favor.
For the next 30 days, write down the action you took each day (again if you use the handout provided that should be easy), and the result that you gleaned because of this action. I ask you to write out the result (not only the action) because the result is really what is of value. For example, an action of browsing the internet for one hour may lead to no result whatsoever. Commit to actions that have an identifiable result or are clearly leading towards your goal.
Enroll an accountability buddy. For best results tell a friend. They should be excited to provide you accountability as they will see how inspired you are to get motivated. This step is not a requirement, but if you’ve truly been struggling, having a partner that can hold you accountable can be huge. Make sure that this person is not someone that ‘gives in’ easily. Or will sympathize with your excuses. Ask them to be firm, and if you haven’t taken at least one action in a day to call you on it. Sometimes enrolling someone that is not as close to you as a parent or spouse is a better idea.

Voila. Its that simple. One action that leads towards an identifiable result for 30 days. Given the extent of the size of the goal that you are creating, this seems pretty darn easy huh? If you’ve come up with the right goal, this method will kick start you into full gear towards making it happen.

Time to Move On

Does even this seem too hard? There does come a point when its simply time to move on. If you’ve been talking about a goal for weeks, months, years, and have never done anything about it then its time to face reality and admit that this is nothing more than a fantasy than you are paying lip service to. I’ve met with far too many people that say they want to do something over and over but the reality is that they’ve got no intention in changing. When they talk about their goals they become frustrated at the lack of success. They’ve been lying to themselves for too long now, and the truth is that this constant denial of what they truly aspire for (settling for a lesser accomplishment than what they are talking about), is downright unhealthy. They’d be much better served by becoming happy with where they are now, then to aspire for a life that they will never have because they refuse to take action.

This may sound harsh but as a coach I’ve made the mistake of being too soft with people that are simply lying to themselves and would be better served focusing their attention towards more positive and self serving goals. Rather than putting your goal into a never ending procrastination cycle that is full of frustration and worry, face yourself with the truth of the matter and consciously choose to drop or put the goal you’ve been paying lip service too on hold. Its probably not what you’d expect to hear in a get motivated article, but being truthful with yourself may inspire you to get motivated in other ways. To fully experience what its like to move in a positive direction. Once you’ve got the hang of it, you never know, you may decide to revisit that other goal you’ve been paying lip service to and put it to the 30 day motivational challenge test.