How to have more energy and motivation with 9 simple steps:
- Be proactive and intentional
- Get your health and wellness dialed in
- Take stock of where you are
- Understand your goal
- Make a plan and break it down
- Try to acknowledge, face, and solve your problems
- Nurture your own mental health
- Cultivate hope for yourself
- Find an accountability partner
We all have things that we want to accomplish in life.
But if you’re struggling with energy and/or with a lack of motivation, then you’re going to find it difficult to get from where you are now to where you want to be in the future.
Personally, I used to struggle with this a lot.
I used to really struggle to get motivated, and I often felt like I had zero energy levels to pull from to accomplish all of the stuff I needed to do.
But as of today, I’ve solved about 95% of this problem for myself.
Here are the 9 steps that I took to stay more energized and motivated in my daily life, on a consistent and sustainable basis.
Note: If you’re interested in the content matter of this post, then you’ll definitely be interested in our master guide to embarking on your hero’s arc. Make sure to check that out to get a full rundown of the entire process, from beginning to end, along with a full list of resources and other guides.
9 Steps For How To Have More Energy And Motivation In Life
1. Embrace The Alpha Mentality
This is really where it all begins.
Here’s what it means to embrace the alpha mentality:
The definition of alpha mentality: Being ‘alpha’ means: to take action-oriented, intentional control of your life energy, resources, and strategic trajectory—embracing radical self-responsibility, shirking victim mentality, and determining to utilize your time and resources wisely to proactively create a meaningful, significant destiny and lasting legacy of greatness in the world.
You could summarize this a bit more simply by saying that being alpha means being intentional, living with a purpose, and always seeking to be the highest-value man or woman in the room.
When we make a commitment to be proactive and to take action in the world, we set ourselves up to take our power back from the chaos and create our own destiny.
And this helps to create energy and motivation—because deep inside of yourself, you’ll start to believe that you actually have the power to create positive outcomes for yourself.
And this is a crucial, foundational pillar of success.
2. Get Your Health And Wellness Dialed In
Taking care of your mind and body is crucial to staying energized and productive—and honestly, this is non-negotiable for your lifestyle if you want to stay energized and motivated.
The most fundamental basics to cover are:
- Get adequate sleep
- Consume a healthy diet
- Drink plenty of water
- Adopt a consistent workout routine
Some fundamental things to avoid are:
- Drinking
- Smoking
- Eating junk food
- Being ‘sedentary’
3. Take Stock Of Where You Are In Life
Oftentimes, we struggle with energy and motivation because we either don’t like where we are in life, or because we don’t believe in what we’re doing.
Maybe you’re bored with your current work, or maybe the stuff you have to do is so big and overwhelming that you just mentally burn out before you even get started.
But taking a focused and intentional closer look at the stuff that needs to get done (that you’re struggling to get motivated and/or energized to do) is one of the first steps toward making a plan and moving forward.
It’s important to understand exactly what’s causing you to stagnate. If you can identify the ‘wall’ that’s keeping you from moving forward, then you can make a specific plan for how to climb it and overcome it.
4. Understand Your Goal
Do you understand what you’re overarching goal is (either in regards to a specific task you’re struggling with, and/or even on a life-wide basis)?
Not having a goal can lead to lower energy and motivation because it can make you subconsciously feel like all of your efforts are really for nothing—due to the fact that you’re not associating those efforts with any long-term solutions, successes, and/or victories.
Setting goals for your life is crucial to the process of success. But this is also crucial for giving you hope for the future—which will also serve to energize and motivate you.
5. Make A Plan And Break It Down Into Steps
Sometimes, when we look at a massive to-do list, task, or goal, we tend to get overwhelmed before we even start due to the size and complexity of the goal (and/or due to the sheer huge amount of work that it’ll take to complete).
But as Lao Tzu once said…
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
Sometimes, you have to break larger tasks down into a series of smaller steps in order to help your brain to get energized and motivated to do those tasks.
For example—instead of planning to clean your entire house, just focus on one room (or even one section of a room) at a time.
6. Try To Acknowledge, Face, And Solve Your Problems
Do you have problems in your life that are dragging you down, depressing you, or causing you anxiety?
If so, it’s highly likely that this is contributing to sapping your energy and dissolving your motivation.
Sometimes, we need to do the ‘hard work’ of acknowledging, facing, and solving our life problems before we can truly start to level up our life energy and motivation levels.
This could mean having a difficult conversation with someone, changing jobs, leaving an unhealthy relationship, changing habits that are bringing chaos and destruction into your life, walking away from negative people or situations in your life, etc.
7. Nurture Your Own Mental Health
Listen…
Getting energized and motivated is infinitely more difficult when you’re feeling depressed, anxious, worried, etc.
Sometimes, your mental health plays a larger role in your ability to motivate yourself than you might realize.
Personally, when I get depressed, there’s always a tendency for me to want to lay in bed and sleep all day. And when I get anxious, I tend to want to be a workaholic. Thus, this can lead to me feeling like I need to do everything at once, but then failing to motivate myself to do anything.
By taking the steps we’ve already discussed, I’ve been able to cut out about 95% of this problem in my life. But sometimes, I still have to battle it and face it.
My best piece of advice for this is to seek to cultivate peace, tranquility, and serenity in your life.
You may need to get away from people for a little while, plug some positivity into your ears, meditate, write in your journal, and/or do some praying to really get your mental health back into working order for long enough to motivate yourself to start accomplishing things.
The good news is that once you start to make some progress and get things done, that usually does a lot to boost your energy and motivation levels. For me, this can create a positive snowball of momentum that helps me to get out of my mental health ‘funk’ and get back into ‘high productivity’ mode.
8. Cultivate Hope For Yourself
As humans, we need to have hope for a better future to see a point to the work sitting in front of us in the here and now.
If you don’t feel like the work you’re doing right now is actually going to lead to a better future for you (the future that you really desire), then you’re highly unlikely to feel energized or motivated to do that work.
Thus, it often helps to write down your goals and to draw a parallel between them and what your work today will help you to accomplish for the future you desire.
This makes your work more meaningful and helps you to see how it may be contributing to a ‘bigger picture’ of success in your life.
9. Find An Accountability Partner
Sometimes, being accountable to someone else makes all the difference in the world.
You can accomplice this by telling other people about your goals, asking a loved one, friend, or colleague to hold you accountable, or even by using a service like Focusmate.
When you know that someone is going to check in on you and verify your productivity, this can be a powerful motivator. Sometimes, this is all you really need to kickstart your day and make it awesome.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, staying energized and motivated isn’t easy.
But when I follow these tips, I notice that my life gets filled with a lot more hope, optimism, energy, motivation, inspiration, and productivity.
Try them out and see if they work for you.
Go with grace my friends, and never give up your power.
This is Joshua K. Sigafus, signing off.