A solo talk on what keeps people moving toward goals. Murray Johansen defines motivation as the reason for action. Positive motivation sustains progress better than negative, and internal beliefs matter more than external circumstances.
Welcome back to episode two of the Power of Motivation. In this episode we will look at the source of motivation and its impact in reaching our objectives or our destination. Let's take a quick look at a definition of motivation by Murray Johansen. He says this motivation is the effort, the drive, the desire and the energy a person uses to activate and maintain goal driven behavior. That's Murray Johansen. So let me ask you a question. What is it that motivates when you think about an objective or a destination, a vision or desire, a place that you want to head in your life? What motivates you to get there? Is it, as we mentioned, a positive motivation or is it based on a negative motivation? The negative motivation may get you started, but only the positive motivation is going to keep you going and see that you arrive there successfully. And then let me ask you another question. What robs you of motivation? What are the things that steal your joy or your motivation as you're moving towards those objectives? And it's important that you answer those questions in your journey or your roadmap to your significant life. So we mentioned the types of motivation. We talked about that positive and negative. There's also two sources of motivation. The first one that I want to mention to you briefly is external motivations. These are the things that we can't control. They're the things that take place in the world around us, Circumstances that we didn't plan for, people or relationships, job, economy, natural disasters. These are all things external to our ability to control. And yet they impact our energy and our passion, our motivation to accomplish or achieve or reach our destination. The second source of motivation, and this is the one we could spend a whole lot of time on, is internal motivation. These are the things that no one sees and no one knows except us. And there's really two types of internal motivation that we wrestle with. For some of us, we've had people who have spoken life over us our entire life. They've declared what we're capable of and our possibilities. They've built confidence and spoken to our identity. And those internal motivations, those internal mindsets and beliefs that we've grabbed to from that conversation, from people speaking life over us, it drives us, it fuels us, it moves us forward because we believe that we can do anything we put our mind to. But the truth is for many of us, we run into a wall trying to reach our destination or accomplish our objectives because we have some internal motivations that were birthed in and found in things that were spoken over us that weren't true. That we embraced. Lies that said we're never going to be good enough. We can't. We're not smart enough. Those are internal, that no one sees that somewhere along the line we've believed these lies. And these lies now motivate us to freeze in our tracks, to stop before we finish, to not press through when things get difficult. This is the place that the real work gets done in our lives when we tap into these internal motivators to find out if there's anything that's blocking our success or our achievement. Internal and external, positive and negative. Join me next week as we wrap up this series on the power of motivation as I share with you practical ways to identify and tap into what motivates you.
