Motivation Is The Key To Improvement

Motivation is the key to understanding why human beings stick to certain goals that don’t bear any fruit in the short term. It is the necessary condition to reach our goals, to improve ourselves. But, how to get motivated? Motivation is simply what makes an individual act and behave in a certain way. It is a generic term that applies to a wide range of urges, desires, needs, and cravings.

Most authors usually distinguish between two main types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsically motivated behavior is aimed at the personal interest in carrying it out.

Extrinsic motivation refers to those behavior motivators that come from the outside and are not usually naturally correlated with the behavior they reward. Therefore,  intrinsic motivation is what guides us. Furthermore, in this type of motivation, the reward is inherent in the action itself, in the very enjoyment of it.

In today’s Western society, we live in a constant change of external circumstances that often submerge us in inertia. The path of inertia makes us let ourselves be carried away by circumstances and, thus, we end up acting in an inhumane way. Living without motivation makes us enter a world that makes us mechanical people, where we forget about ourselves and our true motivations.

What motivates us?

Let’s think: what drives us to act in one way or another and what are the real reasons that lead us to the direction we take? Knowing the real reasons that guide us will help us to really know what drives us to make certain decisions  or why we decide between one option and another.

Sometimes we act wrongly or regret our actions because we don’t reflect on the real motivations that drive our decisions. Knowing our motivations is knowing ourselves as people, it is the path towards self-knowledge and self-improvement.

Choosing to live motivated is choosing a more satisfying existence. Motivation is what drives us and keeps us striving for our dreams, despite everything we must face to make them a reality.

Of course, we cannot always be equally motivated, and few are the paths that are completely taken by rose petals, but motivation is the reason why some people achieve what they set out to do while others restrict themselves to living the life they have,  even not feeling satisfied with it.

We can learn from athletes’ motivation

Motivation in sports activity is a determining factor for the good practice of physical activity and for achieving goals in sport. The intellectual, physiological and psychological processes that decide, activate and control our behavior in physical activity are similar, at their base, to those that work with other types of activities.

We are all competitive by nature,  even if some are more than others.  In that case, the psychologist’s job is to take advantage of this trait of human nature and nurture it. This process helps to maintain motivation in the short term, so it is necessary to combine it with strategies that maintain motivation over time.

A scientifically contrasted way to maintain motivation for long periods is   visualization .  Daily, for at least 5-10 minutes, it is good to visualize the procedure and the desired results so that our mind can have certain devices prepared for the task we want to face.

This is very useful for both physical activity and any other goal, especially when we are talking about new tasks or tasks that we haven’t done for a long time. Visualization is also a way to train the focus of attention.

In general terms, to motivate a person – in the same way as an athlete – to improve their performance, it is necessary to evaluate their efforts and their previous accumulated experiences. There are many athletes who, unknowingly, are motivated to a lower performance than their possibilities could develop.

These results often generate anger and sadness because they often ruin hard, constant, and well-done work. An effort that can go down the drain due to a lack of motivation, but also an excess of it. Thus, one way or another, motivation is a relevant factor in the final result and its control can tip the balance in our favor, or drive us away from our goals.