6 Tips for Increased Motivation and Career Prosperity  

Did you leap out of bed this morning, excited to start the day? Or did you hit the snooze button three times before crawling out of bed and wondering why you weren’t born independently wealthy?  It’s okay if you snoozed. Even the most successful people sometimes grapple with a lack of motivation. Motivation is the carrot in the horse cart of life. Lose motivation and the horse stops, waiting for someone to dangle a new carrot. Motivation, the reason or desire to do something, can be intrinsic, coming from inside oneself, or extrinsic, provided by an outside force. Extrinsic motivators such as money, power and a windowed office are offered infrequently and usually short-term motivators. Most of the time, you’re going to have to dangle the proverbial carrot for yourself with your intrinsic motivators.

If you are in a leadership position, you also seek ways to motivate or inspire those you lead. Who doesn’t want to follow an excited, motivated leader? As much as any leader desires to motivate their subordinates, one fact remains: you can’t start a fire by blowing on sticks—no matter how hard you blow or how badly you want a fire—unless there’s already a spark.

Identify Your Values
What do you value? Perhaps you haven’t given this much thought. The answer varies, of course, for everyone. One person might list personal freedom, family, and being appreciated. Another person might value physical evidence of a job well done, such as an architect watching a building she designed rise above the skyline. Some people value creativity and flexible work hours making them thrive in freelancer roles, while others cherish the security and stability of a salaried position. Values help people make judgments, including how they feel about and the effort they are willing to expend on their jobs. When career motivation lags, re-examine your personal values and their alignment with your current position. When the projects on your plate really require a 5-person team to complete, and there’s only you to complete them, reminding yourself that the company’s values align with yours encourages you to keep going. If, on the other hand, what you value is not a core company value, you may have reached an impasse and it is time to look for greener pastures. Either way, your core values keep you moving in some direction.

Evaluate Career Goals
Remember the interview question, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Companies ask the question to determine the type of person sitting in front of them. You might have rattled off a beautiful five-year plan during your interview and never gave the plan another thought. If that interview was five years ago, have you compared your life with your plan recently? Each milestone passed in your career or personal life necessitates the formulation of a new plan. For example, if you attained your “dream” job only four years into your career, you’ll obviously need to adjust your 5, 10 and 15-year plans to include new goals and steps to achieve them. Suddenly, you’ll have an abundance of carrots dancing before you.

Take Risks
“Do one thing every day that scares you,” said Eleanor Roosevelt. Risk taking is one way to increase your motivation. You don’t have to parachute out of a perfectly good airplane to prove you can take risks, either. Consider the calculated small risks you haven’t taken that might be keeping your career in a holding pattern. What would you lose if you moved past your fear of failure and asked to head that a new project? More important still, what might you gain? Each time you take a risk and do something you fear, you motivate yourself to surpass an internal obstacle that you might not have recognized was holding you back. Risk doesn’t necessarily mean putting yourself in harm’s way. Asking for greater responsibility or negotiating a higher salary will feel like a huge risk to some people. But willingly taking those risks is a motivator because it forces the participant to move forward regardless of the outcome.

Cultivate Confidence
Realistically, failure is unavoidable. Despite knowing that some failure is inevitable in a career, each failure dulls confidence like hard water on a porcelain tub. In some people, repeated failure can lead to anxiety, further limiting the motivation to press on. Cultivate confidence to restore the luster to your career. Focus on your talents. List the things you are good at and how those skills benefit you in your work. More than likely the things that you excel at outweigh the areas in which you could use improvement. If you’re in the middle of a particularly bleak period in your career and you are having trouble identifying your talents, ask a friend. Your best friend can probably list 50 of your talents in under 2 minutes, in the same way she listed all the reasons your ex-fiance was crazy for breaking up with you. Next be grateful. Be grateful for your skills, your experience and for the people who recognized your talent and hired you. Sure, you lost the $3 million contract you worked on for six months, but you should celebrate the other five accounts you landed whose combined contracts equal $3 million. Gratitude is a friend to confidence. Together, they motivate you to step forward in your career, even if the next ten steps are on a steep incline.

Learn New Skills
If you aren’t learning, you aren’t growing. Adding fresh skills motivates you to try new things. You certainly wouldn’t earn an MBA and not apply that knowledge to improve your job performance. Additional education encourages fresh ways of thinking, expanding your mind and career, but it isn’t the only place to find fresh ideas. You can acquire additional skills through volunteer work with a non-profit organization. Everything you learn through volunteer work becomes a notable skill on your resume. You can learn management skills by managing other volunteers. Master event planning basics by organizing everything from membership luncheons to national conventions. You can practice social media management by coordinating a charity’s social media presence.

Envision Financial Milestones
Although money is generally considered an extrinsic motivator, the drive to reach financial milestones definitely comes from within. For women in particular, the motivation created by income alone is short-lived. This isn’t to say that women stop pushing themselves as soon as they achieve a comfortable salary, it actually suggests that women’s views of money are more complex than that. The thrill of reaching a financial milestone, such as saving enough money for a vacation to Bora Bora or prepaying college for your children, can spark enough motivation to get you out of bed before daybreak.