Brian Wood - Man From Mars Coaching - What Causes Low Levels of Motivation?

Chapter 2: What Causes Low Levels of Motivation?

Some people just aren’t motivated or just aren’t motivated enough. This is difficult to understand for people that always have the motivation and they slap labels on these people like “lazy,” “stupid” or “uncaring.” But there are things that can cause low levels of motivation that have nothing to do with the person’s intelligence or laziness. Most of the time, low levels of motivation can be cured if the right techniques are applied. We know that practice makes perfect, or at least in this case, practicing being motivated will help you be more motivated in the future.

The factors that cause low levels of motivation can be divided up into four categories: habitual beliefs, habitual behaviors, personality quirks and health problems. We’ll discuss each of them in detail, but don’t be alarmed if you feel as if you fall into more than one. Most people do and those people still become motivated and achieve their goals. Let’s get started.

Habitual Beliefs That Affect Motivation Levels

A habitual belief is something that you have believed for so long that it seems inconceivable that it could be false. You might have heard that people say something for so long that they start believing it themselves. That’s how strong these habitual beliefs can be, and they can be a major pain to change. But if you want to increase your motivation levels, you are going to have to carefully examine some beliefs and see if they are causing your lack of motivation. If that is the case, then carefully evaluate them so that you can know whether they are actually true, or whether you have just held them for so long that you believe they are.

Let’s take an example belief so that you can see how the process works. Suppose that an overweight person has these two beliefs: “I am ugly” and “I’ll always be ugly no matter how much weight I lose.” How motivated is that person going to be to lose weight? Why would they give up food – which at times seems like the only friend in the world that they have – for something that that they believe isn’t going to change how they look anyway.

That’s why habitual beliefs can be such driving forces in stopping motivation. But they aren’t always true. In fact, they aren’t even logical in many cases. In the case of the example above, it is quite obvious that losing weight would make nearly every overweight person look better and be healthier, but the belief doesn’t take into consideration those factors. It just stops the motivation in its tracks and turns you towards that piece of German chocolate cake in the refrigerator.

Breaking the Chains of Habitual Behaviors

Habitual behaviors are different than habitual beliefs in that they are not based on any particular belief and don’t really have a foundation, but you have been doing them for so long that it can be almost impossible to break the habit.

I knew a middle-aged man who began to have serious teeth problems when he turned forty. In fact, growing up, his mother and father not only failed to stress how important brushing and flossing was, they actually didn’t believe in modern dentistry. Once he became an adult and realized how important brushing was, he was motivated to brush his teeth and floss every day. However, even though he had strong motivation he found himself hardly ever brushing. He had been not brushing his teeth for so many years that he had to take special care and actually set an alarm twice a day for brushing, for an entire month, before he finally was able to make it a habit.

Habitual behaviors make us a slave to them just as much as habitual beliefs and sometimes we have to take drastic steps to break the habit and form a new one that will help us achieve a goal. For example, if your goal is weight loss, but you have never developed the habit of exercise (or to put it more accurately you are a slave to the habit of not exercising) you will find it extremely difficult to do the first few times you do it and you might have to force yourself to exercise for quite a long time before the habit of non-exercise is broken.

Personality Quirks

Another source of low motivation comes in the form of personality quirks. These are things about you personally that aren’t habits or beliefs and can’t really be changed (although they can sometimes be improved) that affect your motivation in various ways. A really great example of this is the person who suffers from a poor memory. This can make it difficult to get motivated because they cannot remember why they started the steps to achieve the goal in the first place. In other words, they have forgotten the goal.

Health Problems

The last source of low motivation is because of health problems, either psychological or physiological. There are actually a number of problems that can cause low motivation and often, people go through their entire lives undiagnosed and are never able to achieve their goals or do the things that they wanted to do because of this particular problem. Let’s go through them one by one so that you can eliminate these as a possible cause of your low motivation.

Depression: Depression is by far and wide the most common problem of low motivation when it comes to psychological problems. Depression can make people want to stay in bed all day and no matter how much they might want to achieve their goals, they are unable to because of the disease. Usually, once someone is actually diagnosed with depression, getting them on the right anti-depressants is a huge step towards helping them achieve their goals. However, bear in mind that even if a person is diagnosed with depression and benefits greatly from getting on the right medication, they still have a whole lot of habits that they’re going to have to break to get them to where they can achieve all of their goals. 13

Low Blood Sugar: People that have low blood sugar can have physiological reactions that make motivation difficult. A diet that consists almost entirely on carbohydrates can cause a lack of motivation because the blood sugar spike and then crashes, and if this happens for a long time, the brain actually changes and fatigue sets in. Warnings signs are: people who don’t eat breakfast and people who drink a whole lot of coffee or lots of energy drinks.

Brain Inflammation: When you have brain inflammation or “brain fog” your neurons are firing slower than normal. There are all kinds of things that can cause this: autoimmune diseases that target the brain, chronic inflammation and sensitivity to food.

Hypothyroidism: This is one of the aforementioned autoimmune diseases where the thyroid gland is being destroyed by the immune system. If you lose your thyroid gland you are going to experience a number of symptoms like chronic fatigue, depression, being unmotivated and even weight gain.

Sensitivity to Gluten: Not being able to tolerate gluten is a common problem these days and many foods are going gluten-free because of it. Some of the symptoms of having a gluten intolerance, and ingesting gluten anyway include depression and fatigue that can make it difficult to get up and do anything.

Stay tuned for episode 3!

B Wood

How Controlling Your Motivation can improve Your Life with Man From Mars Coaching's Brian Wood

Chapter 1: Introduction to Motivation: How Controlling Your Motivation can improve Your Life

What exactly is motivation? It is a rather slippery term that seems to have a different definition depending upon who you ask, but if you look at psychology, it is pared down to the simple definition of: the force that drives us to act; that means any type of action, including getting a glass of water or eating food. If we had no motivation whatsoever, we would simply die of thirst or malnutrition because we had no driving force to get food and water. Of course, in those cases, the body has certain defenses against starving or dying of dehydration, but the point is that motivation drives everything.

Psychology describes it as the biological, social, cognitive or emotional force that makes us do something. Commonly, people talk about motivation as a compeller to make changes, and that’s basically the definition that we’re going to use in this book. The force that drives us to make changes and do big things is motivation and if you can control your motivation, you can control your destiny.

What is Motivation Made of?

Understanding motivation is the best way to conquer it and that’s why we’re going to break motivation down further into three parts. If you want to achieve a goal, you know that simply having the desire isn’t enough. In fact, achieving your goals require that you maintain your motivation throughout the obstacles that you will undoubtedly encounter. Here are the three separate components of motivation:

Activation

Persistence

Intensity

The Activation of Motivation

The activation of motivation is when you have the desire to achieve something and you take action. For example, if you wanted to lose twenty pounds, you might create a diet or exercise plan over the next few weeks. You are motivated because you have the desire to achieve your goal, and you actually take a step in that direction. This could be anything. In the case of our example, your activation doesn’t have to be making a diet or exercise plan. It could be throwing all of the junk food in your cupboards away, or it could be as simple as stepping on a scale and finding out what you weigh so that you can know when you’ve reached that 20-pound goal. Any step you take in the direction of your goal once you have made it is the activation of motivation. 

Motivation Requires Persistence

This is the part where people usually fail at achieving whatever it is that they set out to do. When you first get motivated, you are excited and can’t wait to start on the steps required. Then, you start doing those steps and you either get distracted by other things in life, or you find that they are too hard, that there are too many obstacles in the way. These obstacles will exist no matter what goal you are trying to achieve, and it is the point when motivation needs to be strengthened by some of the techniques that we’ll cover in this book.

Intensity of Motivation

The third component is intensity and it is best described as the amount of effort that you put into achieving your goal. Although two people can have the exact same motivation to achieve a goal and even have the persistence to make it through obstacles, the intensity is what determines how quickly they will be able to achieve the goal.

Some people are plodders, strong and steady, working towards a goal a little bit each day. Some are sprinters, moving through the steps of achieving a goal as fast as the goal will allow. Neither one of these is wrong, nor is the middle point, which I like to call the jogger. The jogger is what you should strive for. Neither is he racing through the goal so fast he is in danger of burning out or moving so slowly that it could take months or years to achieve a goal that could be achieved within weeks.

The Source of Motivation

There are a couple more things that you should know about motivation. The first is that it can be intrinsic or extrinsic. In other words, it can come from inside of us or it can come from outside desires. Intrinsic motivation means that you do it simply for personal pleasure. An example might be cooking with a difficult recipe just for the challenge or completing a crossword. The main factor here is that you do it not for outside recognition, but internal pleasure. Extrinsic is just the opposite. Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside rewards that you’ll get: recognition, fame, money or respect just to name a few.

The second thing that you should know about motivation is that there are three sources where your motivations come from. Psychologists have debated this issue for quite a while, but over the years, these have become the accepted standard sources of motivation.

Needs: Motivation coming from your needs or drives is one of the theories of motivational sources. Some of these are quite obviously true: eating, drinking and sleeping for example.

Instincts: Instincts are another source of motivation according to psychologists like William James and Sigmund Freud. Our brains come with prewired behavior patterns already included that activate when certain external stimuli happens.

Arousal: This is an explanation of the type of motivation that people experience. A person with low levels of arousal might not be found skydiving or parachuting out of airplanes, but a person with high arousal levels might do exactly this.

Now that you know more about motivation and some of the factors driving it, we can move onto some of the techniques to help you control it better.

Stay tuned for the next episode:

B Wood

Brian Wood's Motivational Tips For Home Business Owners Part 5

Fifth Lesson - Motivation Tips for Home Business Owners

Well, we have come to the final lesson in the Motivation Tips for Home Business Owners Crash Course. I sure hope you have enjoyed your lessons and learned a lot about staying motivated as you grow your home business.

In this last lesson, we are going to go over a few more tips that will help you stay motivated and increase productivity in your business

Anyone can get motivated if they do certain things that help them to stay focused and excited about moving forward. In this article, we review three simple ways to give yourself a boost that will keep you excited.

- Reward yourself

When you attain goals that you set for yourself, or after achieving your dream. Sometimes we neglect to appraise ourselves for the little achievements we make along the way. Remember that many people may not see the small steps you take in life which makes it even harder when people around you sometimes don't appreciate what you do.

Learn to always give yourself a pat on the back. Treat yourself to a movie or some candlelit bath or a sleep in every time you attain your goal. Maintain a reward all the time as this will lead you to getting to your long term goals where the reward is much bigger. This will give you the momentum you need to keep pushing forward.

- Read success stories

Reading the history of people that have overcome huge hurdles in life will inspire you to believe in yourself and understand that if it can happen for them then it is possible for you. This will surely motivate you to keep moving forward. When you think of what others have had to overcome in their journey of life then it keeps you in the mode of moving forward because at times your problems are not as big compared to others.

Get yourself motivational books, DVDs, listen and watch what they say. This messages will keep you excited and in a positive mind. Keep watching as many times as you can as this will cause the brain to digest and understand.

- Learn from failure

Failure can often be a good learning lesson; it doesn’t have to define you or end your dreams. Instead, learn from it and move on to the next step. It only becomes a failure if you quit. Many individuals find it difficult to get over a mistake which is natural for anyone to make but the only difference is how fast you move on. When you take the time to learn from your failure you gain a wealth of experience.

These experiences will often serve some sort of purpose in your life and can help you figure out who you are or who you want to become. Without some failures in life, it can hard to realize your full potential, will power and strength.

When it comes to increasing productivity there are several steps you can take that will help you keep your business better organized.

- List and prioritize

This will enable you to define and prioritize the things you need to accomplish. Break your tasks into manageable parts to allow you to do them quicker. When possible begin with the most difficult task, once completed, you will easily get through the remaining work quickly. You should give your tasks a time limit, that way you will be able to avoid procrastination and get more done.

- Avoid distractions

Email, social media and general browsing in most cases is a huge distraction that can stop you from completing your tasks. Try to avoid them especially when you need to concentrate or complete a task before the set deadline.

If you find this hard to do you can try using an app like Rescue Time https://www.rescuetime.com to help identify and understand your daily habits so you can eliminate time wasting activities and focus on being more productive.

- Stay organized

Even when you work from home it is important to keep your workspace clean and clutter free. Take time to develop a workable routine and use a calendar to schedule everything. It doesn’t matter whether it is paper or electronic. Use a color-coding system to indicate what type of appointments and tasks you have scheduled. When you have a timeline to follow you will find that you will get a lot more done and you will feel less overwhelmed.

As we close this final lesson I would like to thank you again for joining me for this short course. I sincerely hope that you have learned a lot about how to stay motivated as you grow your home business and even though your lessons have come to an end you can still feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I will be glad to help.

Until then,

B Wood

Brian Wood's Motivational Tips For Home Business Owners Part 4

Fourth Lesson - Motivation Tips for Home Business Owners

How are you? We're winding down to the end of this short course. But we still need to go over a few things, so today we are going to jump right in with some quick tips for staying motivated in any situation.

As most people go through their daily activities, they often feel overwhelmed with all of the things they have to do. So much in fact that many people begin to feel like everything is going wrong and nothing is working out, so they just give up. If you have ever felt like you just want to curl up and disappear then you probably understand how this can take a toll your motivation.

When you are running a business you really don’t have time to run away and hide because there are things have to be done whether you like it or not! Your success depends on your ability to power through even when you don’t want to. For that to happen, a few things may need to change in your routine and your way of thinking.

- Mindset

That is why having the proper mindset is so important to maintaining your motivation.  The way you think is a big part of who you are and influences how you react to different situations.

As a business owner, you always have things to do and challenges to face. By learning how to keep a positive attitude through the tough times you will find that it actually gives you more energy to handle the workload and any challenges that arise.

- Rewards

This might sound a bit self-absorbed but you need to reward yourself. When you do all the hard work you deserve a pat on the back. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you that you did a good job. Recognize the milestones you’ve made and be good to yourself.

- Ask for help

When you feel like your energy levels are running low don’t be afraid to ask for help. Working with others to complete a task is a great way to keep motivated because you can push each other to do better and get more done. As a business owner chances are you feel like you have to do everything yourself and have a hard time sharing your workload, but if you can learn to let people help you then you will find that you will get more done, feel less stressed and more motivated. It’s important to try and be a little more patient with yourself because it takes time to accomplish major milestones.

- Take a risk

Don’t be afraid to take risks. There is a lot of inspiration that comes from trying something new and it works out. There is also a certain level of satisfaction that comes from knowing that you made the right call. Believe in your capabilities and trust your instincts. It’s the best way to keep your motivation for moving forward.

I hope today's lesson was helpful to you. Don't forget to keep an eye out for my next email. There will be some great stuff in your last lesson.

Until then,

B. Wood

Brian Wood's Motivational Tips For Home Business Owners Part 3

Third Lesson - Motivation Tips for Home Business Owners   

It’s Brian Wood, with your third lesson in the Motivation Tips for Home Business Owners Crash Course.

Today we are going to talk about how to stay motivated even when you're in a slump.

As we have discussed before there are times when every business owner experiences motivational slumps where they just don’t feel like doing anything, despite the fact that there are goals, schedules, and tasks that need to be accomplished. There is just no drive to keep moving forward.

The good news is that even when there is a lack of motivation there is still that hope and desire to succeed. The trick is to find ways to keep moving forward even when you are feeling unmotivated.

- Positive thinking

One strategy is to try and switch your way of thinking, from the negative to the positive. Negative thoughts don’t do you any good they only hold you back, especially when it comes to running a business. While this may not seem like a big deal, taking the time to recognize negative thoughts and thinking about positive ways to combat them can really help increase motivation and your desire to succeed.

- Commitment

Another good strategy for staying motivated simply requires a commitment to never quitting or giving up on the task at hand. Even though it can be easier to just throw in the towel and give up it is very important to find a way to continue forward even if it takes longer than anticipated. To accomplish this, try to focus on how you will feel after you have reached your goal and it will help increase your motivation.

Even though continually maintaining your motivation will have its ups and downs and can be one of the hardest things you’ll do if you can find the drive to keep moving towards your goals you will find that you are much happier and self-confident.

- Immersion

When you are trying to run and grow a business it’s important to strive for success and one way you can do that is by totally immersing yourself in the task at hand. This is a great way to not only be motivated towards reaching a goal but also an inspirational technique that helps keep a positive attitude even when you are faced with challenges.

- Small steps

Lastly, when you are feeling overwhelmed and less than motivated try taking smaller steps instead of large strides. As we have been learning through these lesson being unmotivated is something that can take a toll on your life and your business. It leads to feelings of inadequacy which only triggers the cycle of self-doubt which is no fun at all and tends to make you feel like doing even less. This sort of mental block can literally make it impossible to think straight let alone get anything done.

By breaking down tasks, taking small steps and doing a little bit at a time you can achieve small goals which will help make you feel more productive, increase your motivation and inevitably make it possible to reach the end result you are hoping for.

That's it for today's lesson. In your next lesson, we are going to go over some quick tips for staying motivated in any situation.

Unitl then,

B. Wood