Let me ask you a very direct and blunt question. Why do you need help on how to motivate yourself - why can't you just decide to do something and then just do it? What's stopping you?
The internet is saturated with "self-help" materials on "how to motivate yourself". There are endless advice, tips, tricks and lists of "self motivation tips". The "self-help industry" generates billions per year, and many of us buy books and attend courses on how to "improve" ourselves and on self motivation tips. Yet most of the time we don't change. We can't change.
However, based on my own direct lived and observed experience, most of this completely misses the point. There is an "elephant in the room", and it's this: if you can identify and deal with whatever it is that's stopping you then you won't need self motivation tips.
To change you have to do some work on yourself - identify and address your root cause resistance and this goes beyond being informed about it and means engaging directly with it - that is, actually doing something about it.
In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don't change. Most people reading this won't change because they don't really want to change. You may on the surface - consciously - believe that you want self motivation tips to change, but there is usually another hidden belief or assumption that will resist your apparent desire to change.
Most of us are so attached to how we are - at an unconscious level we feel safe with how we are (even when it so obviously isn't working) - that in practise we would rather die than change (and we usually do).
Here are the 3 fundamental reasons why you resist change and are looking for self motivation tips, and if you work on these you will never again need to go reading "self motivation tips" articles like this one.
The simplest and easiest metaphor for explaining this is to think of your desktop PC (or your laptop or blackberry):
[1] The hardware of your brain - the simple physiology and neurology of how your brain functions
This is all to do with evolution - or more precisely, the current stage of the neurological evolution of the "average" or "normal" human brain - which is that (what is conventionally and colloquially referred to as) the "left brain" and the "right brain" do not communicate easily or much at all.
The same is also true for the other 2 major brain centres (conventionally and colloquially referred to as "the emotional centre" and "the reptile brain" or the survival instinct).
The lack of communication between these 4 major brain centres, or to express it another way the lack of brain balance, is the underlying evolutionary and neurological reason why we feel the need for self motivation tips; why we experience life the way we do; why we suffer so much, and as a species why we inflict so much suffering on each other.
This lack of "brain balance" is also the root cause of all of our personal internal conflict and inner resistance or immunity to change
So improved and more frequent and conscious communication between these different brain centres is the route to peace, insight and overcoming your inner resistance. Meditation practises, mindfulness practises and brainwave entrainment resources will, over time, facilitate this process.
[2] The software running inside your head
For the sake of brevity let's call this your "inner map" of reality - or your "operating system". We are all the product of our own ethnic, national, social and religious backgrounds, and we each have an inbuilt operating system (or inner map) that sees life from the perspective of that background. This operating system applies a whole range of filters related to the characteristics and profile of our broad environmental background.
Here's the big picture summary of how your internal map of reality operates to generate your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours:
First, you experience something through your senses. You see something, hear something, touch or feel something, smell something, or taste something. In other words, you have an experience.
These sensory impressions first pass through a number of filters, which delete huge amounts of it, distort it in various ways, and create generalisations. These filters are hugely important in determining how you create your reality.
With what is left after this filtering process, which happens almost instantaneously and almost totally unconsciously, you then create some sort of internal representation of reality.
This internal representation is really a pretty impoverished copy of reality, because much of what came in through your senses has been deleted, distorted and generalised in a number of ways. You've made a map that represents reality, but it isn't reality, and it isn't really very accurate - which is partially why you feel the need for self motivation tips.
If you can learn how to take charge of these things, via meditation, mindfulness and cognitive practises and tools that considerably increase your self awareness, you can choose how you do these things instead of having them just run on automatic pilot.
Gaining this insight and mastery into this can enable you to facilitate and participate in huge changes in how you experience life and what kind of outcomes you get.
[3] The operating environment - struggle and suffering
At the "bigger picture" level there are those who believe that mankind is moving towards a "new era" of peace and goodwill and raised consciousness etc. That may or not be true, but the present lived experience of reality is that struggle and suffering are unavoidable and integral aspects of life on this planet.
There are many people who see suffering and struggle as things to be resisted, that "shouldn't" happen and that are "wrong".
At the personal level this is often expressed as "if only" or "why me" or "it isn't fair" etc, and is another form of resistance - based around our refusal to accept how things are when things don't happen as we want them to or feel that they "should" - and this then creates the desire for yet more self motivation tips!
Without getting too philosophical in what is intended as a brief instructive article, in my view all of the evidence suggests that suffering and struggle are inbuilt into the way the universe runs - not by accident but by design.
If we can drag our attention beyond the horror, unfairness and sheer "unacceptability" of it all and focus instead on the intention behind all this inbuilt suffering and struggle - we eventually and paradoxically find that its true purpose is constructive and transformative.
In the natural world, there would seem to be extensive evidence for the transformative and evolutionary processes conventionally understood as "natural selection" via a competitive process of "survival of the most adaptive".
An adaptive response to our "operating environment" of imposed change, struggle and suffering is possible when we either have evolved and developed the personal capacity to do this, or at least when we have the resources to help us.
