What is motivation?
This is truly not an easy question to answer. If you have a look on how is motivation defined in psychology, we can say that it is a form of internal desire, force or process that lead us to achieve our goals. But I don’t want this site to be full of academic definitions and terms that have no practical use for our life. Let’s have a practical look on motivation and how can we strengthen the benefits that it has for us.
Let’s start with more deep analysis what motivation is and how it works. According to several resources, motivation can be seen to have three major components:
Activation
This is where it all starts. It is a start of behaviour that can lead to goal achievement.
Persistence
Persistence can be defined as continual process or effort to achieve our goals. This can be seen as critical part of the whole motivation process
Intensity
You can imagine intensity of motivation as a level of engagement towards the goal we set up.
This all is very nice, but what to do with that?
Actually, it is very important to know, how motivation works and what the most critical parts of the process are. As you can see from above major motivation components, the most critical part is probably persistence. If the activation part of the process wouldn’t happen, we are probably not at the stage of our live when we need to change something and achieve some new goals. Therefore, the activation part of the motivation process is important but it is not critical for goal achievement. Intensity of the motivation can be very important because it determines level of our engagement toward achievement of our goals and therefore it also most probably shortens the time that is needed to goal achievement. But there is a lot of goals in our life that are not easily achievable within a few days our months and this is exactly the point where persistence is most crucial.
Persistence as a critical component of motivation process
This is probably the place where all contradictions begin. The ultimate goal of current modern human being can be seen in having all immediately and easily. But what happens if the world goes in different way? What if there are some obstacles that exist and prevent us from our goal achievement? What happens with our motivation in these cases? And why different people act differently in such situations?
These are definitely not easy questions to find answers to them but, on the other hand, there is no need to find general answers to these questions, more important is to look inside of ourselves individually and find out how it works inside of us and if we need it, try to change it.
Can we change ourselves?
This is one of the ultimate goals that I set for myself for the following years. It doesn’t mean to change everything about myself, but I am sure that a lot of us want to change something about ourselves.
Most of the rich, famous or successful people would definitely agree with the fact that they don’t see obstacles but only challenges. This is exactly one of the starting points where we can try to change our mind and our approach to world.