How To Get Motivated When Times Get Tough

Wondering how to get motivated? There’s a few answers that may surprise you.

Sometimes it’s tough to get out of bed, even if we know we need to. Whether that’s to go and make money or do something else, understanding a few tricks can help you get there on down-days.

These range anywhere from listening to audio recordings to repeating your goal over and over in the morning. Let’s look at how to get motivated when times get tough.

1. How to Get Motivated: Make Your Bed In The Morning

It’s probably hard to believe that something as simple as making your bed in the morning can make such a big impact.

However, some pretty accomplished people stand by this idea. One strong supporter of it, Naval Admiral William H. McRaven, said in a speech to UT Graduates:

“If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride, and it will encourage you to do another task and another and another. By the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that little things in life matter. If you can’t do the little things right, you will never do the big things right.“

If you want to start to learn how to get motivated, start by making your bed in the morning. From personal experience, I can confirm this helps for getting things accomplished.

2. Wake Up At The Same Time

Few actually do this. Many of us (and I’m guilty of it too) wake up to an alarm and take a while to get out of bed.

It isn’t good. Even laying in bed for 20 or 30 extra minutes past the normal time you wake up can be detrimental to your mental health.

Having irregular sleep patterns hurts your Circadian Rhythm. That’s what helps to make sure our mental and physical systems are coordinated during a 24-hour period, according to the Sleep Foundation.

Keeping your mental health consistent is an awesome how-to for getting motivated.

3. Draw Motivation From Influential People

Leveraging other people can help you to get your mind in the right place. It doesn’t even need to be people you know in real life.

As long as you feel inspired by someone, you can use the idea of achieving their level of success as a strategy for how to get motivated.

There are tons of entrepreneurs who I look up to that have made a name for themselves at some point in the last 100 years. That’s anyone from Henry Ford making the last three cars that I owned to Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers.

Steve Jobs had a really important quote in a 1995 interview that went:

“When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact, and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.”

It’s true, so lean on those other peoples’ stories and understand that you can accomplish just as much as they did.

4. How to Get Motivated By Repeating A Goal

This one dives into meditation a little bit. It’s called an “affirmation” when you repeat the same word or phrase over and over again.

These should be simple and quick, like “I will be motivated today or I will make xx amount of money by (month).” Wake up in the morning saying that and it should stay top-of-mind during the day.

What I’ve noticed is that when I do it, I’ll hear my affirmation later in the day if my mind ever goes idle. Sometimes it just pops into my head anyway.

You can really stick things into your mind and then use your brainpower to find solutions to problems with this technique.

Tying It All Together

Sometimes, it’s hard for us to figure out how to get motivated. If we’re not careful, it’s easy to mope around and be unproductive all day. However, if we take a few easy steps in the morning, that can make a world of difference.

From making the bed to just repeating what we really want, there can be really positive results. Doing these things isn’t necessarily a silver bullet, but they do help. Other areas to keep an eye on are diet and excercise, since they can play a major role as well.