Hi all,
In this article I want to talk a little about “motivation“, that magic word that “coaches” or “trainers” always have. In fact, a long time ago I saw that a girl who was an actress in Venezuela, now has ” motivating” as a profession.
Lately I have seen that many YouTubers speak of motivation as something fundamental when it comes to achieving goals and personal improvement. These are super motivated people who get up at 3 in the morning to do their day-to-day things.
If I am traveling and I must get up at that time to visit someplace, I get up. Not happy, but I get up. But for day-to-day tasks, I don’t think so; Besides, I don’t see the sense of it either. I get up early, but not in the middle of the night.
For as long as I can remember, I have always made my daily to-do lists and I still do today. I have my weekly, monthly and yearly to-do list. What I don’t do one day, I write it down for the next day; so, if one day I don’t do my homework, the next day I have twice as much.
As I have always had everything as “homework“, I have never stopped to think about motivation. And if you ask me at this point, what I feel motivated to do, I will tell you that it is to watch a movie lying in bed and eating popcorn. And I probably would have the same motivation tomorrow.
I think that, in our lives, we have very little motivation for certain things. Imagine working; If you tell people that you give them their equal salary and they don’t have to work if they don’t want to, most of those people, if not all, would stay at home so happy. I am one of that vast majority.
And what about doing sports? I love to do sports and I like to do everything. In my life, sport is essential to lower levels of stress and anxiety. But now that I think about it, maybe half the time, I haven’t been to the gym motivated but because I must go. Who has not happened to be preparing to go to the gym and it seems like the bed calls and seduces you?
I see this with my boyfriend. There are many days that he comes home from work and all he wants to do is go to bed to sleep, so I must remind him that what is not done today, accumulates for tomorrow. And there, he starts to do things because he has no other choice.
With all this I want to get to “discipline“, because I think it is more important to be disciplined than to be motivated. Discipline leaves you with the satisfaction that you did something you had to do, even if you didn’t feel motivated. When I don’t feel like exercising, but I get dressed and go to the gym, that’s discipline!
I think we must set goals and force ourselves to meet them because if we wait for motivation to come, surely, we will not do many things or we will not do many productive things. As we learn to be disciplined, we will gain more and more motivation for those things that we do not feel like doing.
For me the key, as I already mentioned, is to make the lists with my objectives and distribute them over days or months and to put the “check” on the things that I am doing. My boyfriend at first said that he was stressed just looking at the list, but now he has assimilated it and has become a disciplined person and he is much more productive than before. For example, building my website and blog is a motivation; something super cool that I imagine already done in my head. It motivates me to have my blog, but for that you must put discipline to select the photos, edit them, create content, follow the metrics, etc.
In conclusion, first the discipline and then the motivation. What do you think?