14 Easy Ways to Get Extremely Motivated!

With the start of every new year, it’s commonplace to set new resolutions in both our professional and personal lives. Unfortunately, many of us tend to start strong but lose momentum before we know it. In order to provide everyone a little inspiration, here are 14 quick strategies to get (and stay) motivated this year:

1. Condition your mind. Train yourself to think positive thoughts while avoiding negative thoughts.

2. Condition your body. It takes physical energy to take action.  Get your food and exercise budget in place and follow it like a business plan.

3. Avoid negative people. They drain your energy and waste your time. Spending time with them is the equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot.

4. Seek out the similarly motivated. Their positive energy will rub off on you and you can imitate their success strategies.

5. Have goals–but remain flexible. No plan should be cast in concrete, lest it become more important than achieving the goal.

6. Act with a higher purpose. Any activity or action that doesn’t serve your higher goal is a wasted effort and should be avoided.

7. Take responsibility for your own results. If you blame (or credit) luck, fate or divine intervention, you’ll always have an excuse.

8. Stretch past your limits on a daily basis. Walking the old, familiar paths is how you grow old. Stretching makes you grow and evolve.

9. Don’t wait for perfection. Perfectionists are the losers in the game of life.  Strive for excellence rather than the unachievable.

10. Celebrate your failures. Your most important lessons in life will come from what you don’t achieve. Take time to understand where you fell short.

11. Don’t take success too seriously. Success can breed tomorrow’s failure if you use it as an excuse to become complacent.

12. Avoid weak goals. Goals are the soul of achievement, so never begin them with “I’ll try…” Always start with “I will” or “I must.”

13. Treat inaction as the only real failure. If you don’t take action, you fail by default and can’t even learn from the experience.

14. Think before you speak. Keep silent rather than express something that doesn’t serve your purpose.

What other methods do you use to keep yourself motivated?

SOURCE: Geoffrey James, Inc.com “Sales Source”

Make Your Cubicle (or Office) a Better Place to Work!

 

Is your workspace at your office working for you? When you’re there, do you feel energized and ready to excel? Is it a comfortable and pleasant place to be? If not, you can use research from a little known branch of psychology to improve it.

Environmental psychologists study how people live in the physical world. They investigate the psychological implications of sensory experiences: how colors influence lives, what sorts of furniture arrangements are best in various situations, our relationship with the natural world, and so on. What they’ve learned can help you create a workspace that makes you feel secure, calm, and capable – a place where you can accomplish your best work.

Sit so your back is protected.

Research consistently shows that humans can be uncomfortable sitting with their backs facing other people passing by. If you currently sit so that your back faces the entry into your workspace, pivot your desk chair and use a different section of your work surface (if available). Find a way to sit so that your side is to that entry and not your back.

Minimize the amount of red you see as you work.

Research by Andrew Elliot and his colleagues found that people do not work as well cognitively when they see red, even a small amount for a short time. These scientists believe that this may be because teachers use red pens and pencils to grade papers, and seeing red brings the idea of failure unconsciously to mind.

Make adjustments.

Solving small discomforts yourself will help you feel in control of your physical environment. Whether it’s adjusting your desk chair, adding a light to your workspace if it is a little dark, or bringing in a small fan from home if it’s a little warm. That feeling of control has been linked to individuals being more satisfied with their jobs.

Tell your story.

Make sure that visitors to your workspace leave knowing a little about whom you are and what’s important to you. We are more comfortable with other people when we know they understand who we are as people. In return, they are more relaxed being around us when they have a better idea about what we value. People who personalize their workplace are more satisfied with their jobs.

Organize and declutter.

We are at our best psychologically in environments with moderate levels of visual complexity. This means that the clutter of papers, pens, and coffee cups on top of your work surface needs to be tamed and organized. On the other hand, very little visual complexity can be just as jarring as too much. If the décor at your workplace has been pared back to almost nothing, don’t be quite so hard on your own clutter. If you’re working in a space with a “nothing-goes” look, add a painting or photo to your workspace. Research shows that images of nature help to restore cognitive performance.

The suggestions above will get you started, but don’t hesitate to move beyond them. Sit in your workspace and take a sensory inventory of what it’s like to be there. Deal with any negatives and take actions to enhance your daily office experience. If you take inventory and act, you’re only taking steps towards improving your own work performance.

SOURCE: Sally Augustin, Harvard Business Review

A New Year = New Opportunities!

With this year coming to an end, now marks a perfect opportunity to look back on the past 12 months and reflect on the accomplishments, both big and small, that allowed us to prevail on both a personal and business level.

While a rewind of our past year’s hard work and success should give us a sense of pride, we should also use it as a reminder that there’s always room to grow and better ourselves alongside the brands we represent. While we all visualize monumental success for our companies, we need to realize that smaller attainable goals are the building blocks to success.

All too often, we tend to “shoot for the moon when a few stars would do nicely.”

This coming year, try to confine your resolutions to areas that are manageable. They don’t have to be large projects. Believe it or not, taking care of a few small areas will produce big results in your overall operation.

Here are three resolutions that are both realistic and manageable for just about any company:

1. Resolve to develop a written marketing and/or business plan, if you don’t already have one. It doesn’t have to be lengthy or scholarly. It needs to be simple enough for someone else to understand it. You wouldn’t leave on a trip to a new territory without a map, so why not give your business the same edge?

2. Resolve to get help when you need it. For many of us touched by the entrepreneurial spirit, it is often difficult to call for help. We seem to see it as an admission of failure. Most of us are great at preaching “teamwork” to others, but we seem to forget that we also need teammates.

3. Resolve to “get out of the box”. Are you operating under the premise of “that’s the way we’ve always done it”? All too often, we become paralyzed by our own habits. It’s time to break those old chains! Make a real effort to introduce new methods and fresh thinking into your daily routine, both business and personal.

Last but not least, resolve to evaluate your progress throughout 2012.

Happy New Year!

SOURCE: Jim Lynn, showsell.com