Motivation Monday – Remember Why You Started
I often get asked, “How did you stick with it?” [Referring to the craziness that was my corporate finance life, training 80-100 mpw, with a long commute]
The answer was, and still is, simple: I want it. I wake up every day and truly want it. I want to prove to myself that I am capable. That I am strong. That I can do something impossible.
At a lot of the presentations I give, I hear so many people say that they’ve tried a million times to start exercising, eating healthier, losing weight, to stop smoking or another bad habit… the list of resolutions is endless. How will this time be any different?
My advice? Spend some time to define your true goal and what motivates you to get there. Can you find a motivation or multiple reasons in you that is so strong that you’re willing to trudge through a hundred bad days before you start seeing progress? That even on the 100th bad day, you’ll still wake up and still just want that goal?
Define why you want to start, so that when the days and the journey get tough, you can remember why you started.
What’s your motivation? What keeps you going?
Oooooh – I got chills on this one! That really resonates with me – "I want it". I think that thought on every morning my alarm goes off at 4:15am and it's 20 degrees on my run. I think about that when I fix salad for lunch AGAIN 🙂 and I think about that on those days when just getting out the door seems like a Herculean effort. I want to prove that I'm not too old – that I CAN improve. That despite not running in high school or college, I can be competitive in my age group. My motivation seems to be proving to myself (and others) that I can do hard things – that I can succeed not by a "natural talent", but through hard work, a positive attitude, and sheer grit and determination. One of my favorite sayings is "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard." – That just about sums me up. 🙂 Thank you for this post, Nichole!!!