Sustaining Your Motivation
Have you ever started a great plan or a new resolution and somehow, one morning, it all didn’t make sense to you anymore to continue in that direction. Your energy dropped. You got demotivated. But when you first got a flash of the idea, it was so real you could almost touch the end result. It burned in your heart. You penned it down. You talked about it. You started out well in the beginning, but you had no trigger to fire you up and keep propelling you forward and upward. Or worse, a trigger brought you down.
Procrastination set in and then—its next of kin—laziness. A little distraction here and there. Somehow, as you walk the day, you carry that idea in your head. You know it’s still worth doing, but no more zest to pick up where you left off. Maybe you run into something that reminds you of that original intention and your heart skip a bit. As you postpone, the reality of the dream begins to wane until it’s totally gone.
On your journey to fulfilling purpose, in order to maintain consistency, you need to identify triggers that fire you up and address triggers that bring you down. This will help you sustain your motivation to carry on with your set goals. Ideally, we should all grow to the point where we are self-motivated by God and the Word. But not everyone has that level of maturity. Every now and then, you may need some kind of push to make progress. It may come from the right friends, powerful conversations, listening to audio CDs, listening to the man of God or merely observing the progress and impact of a certain Christian. Never underestimate the power of the encouragement such a trigger may produce. On the other hand, negative triggers such as jesting with the wrong friends, addictions, wrong movies, etc can bring down your motivation.
Assuming Jesus appeared to you tonight and just smiled at you and said, “I love you,” and left, you may almost quit your job tomorrow and go into ministry full-time because of the trigger of that brief encounter. It is unlikely that each of us will have such a supernatural encounter this year, but we do have a powerful trigger with us—the Word of God. Saturate your life and environment with the Word. Get an audio Bible; play it at home, on your phone, in your car. Read it at every opportunity. It will edit your life to press on in the right path unconsciously. Don’t rely on willpower to fulfill purpose. Willpower will take you somewhere, but God’s power will take you all the way. You will always maintain a focus on your essential purpose in life and your results will be clear for all to see.
-Tope S. Aladenusi
