Make a change, create habits, just do it, find your motivation. All of these are undoubtedly not unfamiliar to you.

If you haven’t heard on the worldwide web grapevine, making changes or creating new habits is the new black and if you are not doing it, you are soooo last season.

The thing is there are lots of different plans, templates you could use. Yet, when we try to make a change what usually happens is we sit down, grab a pen and open the shiny new notebook we vow to use to record all of our brilliant next-big-thing-ideas and we jot down a couple of lines.

Perhaps it looks like this:

Yes, we may even use the ruler that was newly purchased in conjunction with said notebook and draw neat little boxes to fit in our neat little goals and ideas.

So, we have now completed our neat little tables full of goals. What happens next?

The notebook gets lost somewhere with all the other notebooks that you bought the last couple of times you read 4-hour Workweek and was determined to live the life of the “New Rich”. Ha!

Meanwhile you keep thinking to yourself, I will start achieving my goals, start making these changes I need in my life when I am motivated and then you sit back and wait for the motivation to hit you. And you wait, and wait, and wait….

And nothing happens.

What the hell happened here?

You have made the number one mistake that many have made when making a change in their lives.

You think that motivation comes knocking on your door like vacuum cleaner salesmen.

That’s right, motivation does not look for you. Motivation is what you feel after you have started on the path to creating change. Most of us make the mistake of trying to get motivated first then “try” to create change.

Let’s look at some examples of how many of us do this:

Betty wants to lose 10 pounds but gives up after “trying” for two weeks because she just cannot find the motivation to workout.

John wants to become an entrepreneur because he hates his job and he “tries” to start something for two weeks and decides he is simply not motivated enough to sit down and put in the work.

Sounds so familiar and yet it does not really compute does it? Here’s how it really goes.

You need to create the momentum for motivation to exist. Motivation to change does not exist in vacuum. It comes from doing awesome work through doing things over and over again. What other name does repetitive action have?

You know it. Yes, it is also known as practice.

Change starts from practice and change usually occurs after your practice becomes a habit.

And what is a habit?

A habit is something that you do without thinking. An action that you take daily without effort. Can you think of things you do without effort?

1. Brushing teeth
2. Smoking (for some)
3. Making a cup of coffee in the morning (it is far easier to sit down and wait for someone else to make it)
4. Taking the same route to work.
5. Buying your breakfast at the café.

These are normal daily routines and habits that we have. We seldom think about the effort that goes into it and we simply do it.

To put this into action, let’s think about a smoker who quits smoking.

Smoking is the habit that this person has at the beginning. He then starts to practice to not smoking by well, not smoking (maybe he chews gum or takes a walk instead). He repeats this action daily, many times daily and in a few weeks or even days he becomes a non-smoker because he is now in the habit of not smoking.

Working out or creating businesses starts with same idea. You don’t sit around and wait for motivation before you start. You just start doing it, then rinse and repeat till one day you are auto-piloting your (now much smaller) ass to the gym and not even think twice about it. Ta-da, it is now a habit and you have started to create that change in how your body looks and feels.

The more of something you do and the better you get, the more motivated you become to do it.

If you think about it, nobody dreads doing something they are good at especially when they have just gotten good at it. When you start dreading it, it may simply be because you need to switch it up but that’s a topic for another day.

So there you have it, the no-nonsense way of getting motivated to create change. You simply start practising whatever it is you want, with time the practice becomes a habit and once you begin to get better at your practice, the motivation automatically flows out of you to push you to do more and the change begins.

What are your thoughts on motivation? Have you spent far too much time trying to “find” motivation? Let me know, I’m listening reading. 🙂