6 Outstanding Tips How To Stay Motivated In Business

Let’s face it, creating a business is challenging, maintaining and growing it is difficult. Most people give up and quit half way before they finally reach their destination. And today, we’re going to discuss about how to stay motivated in business.

In fact, it doesn’t really matter whether you are self-employed, employed or are running your own business, these tips will work for you as well.

What I have discovered is that every one is unique and what drives us could be something different. Just like Donald Trump, he is motivated by making money and driven to be number in many things. While other people such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are motivated by their passion in creating amazing software and technology that change lives. Warren Buffett is driven by investment and economy. What about you?

You don’t really have to worry about what drives you because you can try out each and every of these 6 outsanding tips that I’m about to share with you.

Motivation is truly important. Like what Zig Ziglar has to say, “People often say motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing, that’s why we recommend it daily.”

You have to understand that when we talk about creating success, we’re talking about running a marathon, not a sprint. Therefore, motivation will play a very crucial part in determining your success.

Now, let’s dive directly into the meat of today’s topic. Below are the 6 outstanding tips how to stay motivated in business…

1. Expand Your Horizon

Have you ever came across a moment where you feel motivated by something better and you decided that you wanted it as well?

Just like when you were young, all you want was a bicycle, but when you finally get into the working world, you wanted a BMW. And what’s more, after you have started your own business, you aim for owning a private jet or a yacht.

Why did the things that you desired for changed? It is because your horizon has changed. When you were young, you don’t know what’s better out there and what you are capable of achieving.

When you know that you could achieve more and do something better, you will expand your horizon and wanted to accomplish more.

Here’s a great example from the top success coach Tony Robbins from his book Awaken The Giant Within:

I’ll never forget the first time I met architect and hotel magnate Chris Hemmeter. Becky and I had the privilege of being among the first people to be invited to visit Chris’s new home, along with his family, in Hawaii—a $70 million residence that is beyond verbal description. The front door alone cost $1 million to create.

While your rules may say, “That’s an incredible waste of money,” it was also an unbelievably expanding experience of what is possible in terms of business or economic growth.

Suddenly, my $4 million Castle was put in perspective. It barely covered the cost of his front door and marble stairway! Certainly there was room in my life for thinking bigger, pushing limits, imagining the unimaginable.

This is what I mean by expanding your horizon. This why you need to constantly read, improve, talk to others, learn from others, travel the world, innovate, and looking for better ways, to improve your horizon. And like what Tony Robbins in his books said, “To add new references into your life.”

You thought that you are very successful when you made $1 million from your business. Wait until you meet with other successful business people who made $1 billion, then you will fully expand your possibility and makes you dream bigger.

Same thing happened to me before. When I was young, I lived in a small apartment in a small town and felt contented with everything that I have, which is nothing wrong with that.

However, after graduated, I went to Kuala Lumpur, capital city of Malaysia to work there. I felt like I’m a small fish in a huge pond. I started to expand my references and getting to know new things. Suddenly, I’m driven and motivated with bigger dreams and bigger goals, because I know that I can achieve more.

Of course, I haven’t been to New York or any other mega cities around the world, yet.

Well, this is just an example of how expanding your horizon could drive you and motivate you. When you know that you could achieve more and you have the potential, why waste it? Dream bigger and go for more.

If you can make a billion dollar, why would you settle for a million? It has nothing to do with being greedy. I’m using money and wealth as example because money is what resonates best with most people.

So now you know that by expanding your horizon you can find your motivation and drive you to a higher level. Here’s a few suggestions what you can do to grow yourself to a new heights…

1. Read a lot of books. Reading definitely could expand your knowledge and boost your level of motivation. When you read books, you will understand how other successful people think and how you can do better just like they do.

2. Learn from other more successful people. If you are a state tennis player and you wanted to improve your skills, you definitely need to play with other players who are much better than you. Go ahead and play with international players and you will learn from them directly. Thus, get to know other successful people and network with them.

3. Try new things. Yes, keep trying new things. Go to a place that you have never been before and you will see something new. If you always play tennis, you may want to try out playing golf someday. Do something new and you learn something new. And which in turn, gives you new reference in life.

2. Work Out

Do you know that most successful people will work out early in the morning before they start their work? Come to think about it, it is pretty amazing that most successful people actually put working out and exercising as the first thing that they would do each morning.

You should check out this book from Laura Vanderkam, What The Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast.

Great people such as Ursula Burns from Xerox, the GE CEO Jeff Immelt, Richard Branson from Virgin, and Square CEO Jack Dorsey, all of them wake up very early and they work out in the morning.

There are many more successful people who wake up early and work out before work. It is said that when you exercise and work out, your body will release the hormones (dopamines and endorphines) that will make you feel good.

This is why studies after studies have shown that after working out, you feel more relaxed and your stress level will be lowered down. And what’s more, working out actually makes you feel happy. 🙂

Well, I did wake up as early as 6am in the morning. In fact, I don’t have to wake up this early as I’m working on my own business. However, I found that waking up early, I got the chance to do some exercises and I tend to got the time to review my goals. Doing this every morning makes me feel motivated and confident to tackle the world.

To put it simple, when you work out, you will be more healthy. And when you are healthy, you will be able to focus on your business more and are able to drive yourself to go for the extra mile.

Robin Sharma, the author who wrote “The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari”, taught through his courses that exercises and work out are important and he suggested we do it twice a day.

Once in the morning after we wake up and once later in the afternoon around 5pm to 6pm. This is because when we work out, we tend to make our body moves and we refresh our mind through the work out.

If you don’t like to go to the gym, it is alright, you can always exercise in your house. Or better yet, just go for a jogging. Stretch yourself and do something that will make you sweat a little.

So commit yourself for working out each day. Try it and you will feel the difference.

3. Create Your Mastermind Group Or Get A Mentor

Successful people often mixed and network with other successful people. The reason behind is that they got driven and motivated when they talk to other like-minded people.

You do know that you cannot succeed and create outstanding result in life alone right? And as humans, we need to mix with other human beings to interact and to drive us to achieve what we want.

And the group of people that we mix with will determine how successful we are going to be. If you mix around with negative people, they will deplete your energy and you will become very negative as well. However, if you mix with the right people with constructive and positive thoughts, they will lift you up.

Every athlete has a coach. So what makes you think that you can be successful without a coach?

Even the world’s famous philosophers know the importance of getting a mentor or a coach. Socrates mentored Plato. And Plato was the mentor to Aristotle.

Great people such as Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Lin Dan, Serena Williams, etc, have got themselves a coach. They need someone to guide them and show them what to do from time to time. This is because some time we just cannot see through our mistakes and we needed someone to tell us. And this someone could be our mentor and our coach.

In business world, do you know that Henry Ford, the person who mass produced cars has a mentor? And his mentor is Thomas Edison, the person who invented the light bulb?

And if you Google ‘Steve Jobs mentor’, this would come out, “Andy Grove is a science pioneer in the semiconductor industry. He helped Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce start Intel in 1967 and eventually became CEO of Intel in 1987. Steve Jobs met with Grove during his early tenure at Apple in the late 1970s, and held him as a business mentor and a friend.”

If you want to consistently stay motivated in your business, you need to get yourself a mentor or join a mastermind group.

The members in your mastermind group will hold you accountable and make sure you grow and stay motivated all the time. When you are down, they are always there to help and guide you.

It is very difficult to create breakthrough all on your own. We need a hand, someone who can guide us, someone who will support us, and someone who will tell us, “You can do it” once in awhile.

So now, commit yourself to look for a mentor that could guide you in your business. And in the same time, join a few mastermind group or create one.

4. Psych Up Yourself

Like what I have mentioned above, every morning after I wake up, I would read my goals and do my declarations. I feel motivated and psych up after doing it.

There are many ways how you can psych up yourself. Here are some tips that can psych up yourself:

Reviewing your goals and reading them aloud. Easy to do and everyone should do this. If you are seriously serious about your goals, you must do this. Not only doing this will consistently reminding yourself about your aim in life, your goals will drive you into taking action.

Affirmation. Harv Eker of Secrets of The Millionaire Mind prefers to call it declaration. I found this extremely uplifting especially if follow through Harv’s method of doing it. After you have read out your declarations, point your finger at your head and says, “I have a millionaire mind.”

Visualization. This may take some practice before you can finally master it. It may be difficult to do at first as you need to control your thoughts. Some times you will get distracted and think about other stuff instead of visualizing on the things that you want to achieve in your life.

Music. This is my favorite technique to psych myself get driven. Even when I’m writing this post right now, I’m actually listening to uplifting music. There are a ton of motivational music in YouTube. You should check them out and make good use of them. I’m using music most of the time rather than songs. Yes, songs such as It’s My Life from Bonjovi did help, but I don’t prefer to listen to songs when I’m writing articles.

High energy posture. This is another great strategy used by a lot of athletes out there. What did Tiger Woods did after every swing? He would do a fist pump to celebrate his successes. Such act is called an anchor, or to me, a high energy posture. You can stand up, move around, pumping your fist or punching the air to psych up yourself. Remember, if you want it to be effective, it has to be high energy and moving fast.

5. Get Recharge

We are human beings and human beings will feel tired after we used up all our energy. So sometimes, we just need to recharge ourselves.

“People who do a job that claims to be creative have to be alone to recharge their batteries. You can’t live 24 hours a day in the spotlight and remain creative. For people like me, solitude is a victory.” – Karl Lagerfeld

Travelling is a very good way to replenish your energy and recharge yourself. Especially if you are travelling to other countries that you have never been before, you will see something new and learn something new. It opens up your mind to check out new things.

So what you can do to constantly motivate yourself is by scheduling time for travel. You can schedule to visit other countries that you have never been before at least once or twice a year. Life is short, so we should go out and check out new things, don’t you think? 🙂

And on and off you can also plan for a short getaway trip such as a 1-day or a 2-day trip in your country. Getting away from work and business allow you to refocus your energy and help you to release your stress.

Like what Jack Ma did, whenever he encounter a difficult problem and don’t know what to do, he would take a nap and get himself totally out of the picture. After the nap, he would feel fresh and the solution will just come to him. You could do the same.

You can also recharge yourself through spas, body massage, take a walk in the woods, visit the museum, stop for a coffee, go for sports, play computer games, bake a cake, take a swim, take a walk by the beach, etc.

Whatever you do, you must do something that has nothing to do with your current task that is bugging you. You need to get away from the task in order to get yourself recharge and refocus again.

There are times where you will feel overwhelm with things to handle in your work and business, and order to get things right again, you need to seek the balance by recharging yourself. This is why most people are working 5 days and get 2 days off in the weekend.

I would do the same thing. Sometimes I will just feel so overwhelm with what to write and totally run out of ideas to blog. What I will do is that I will walk away from my computer, grab a book and read, play games, take a nap, or do something that has totally not related to my work.

And after that, I will feel motivated again and start my work.

“The sun would be better than a flashlight, except it doesn’t work at night. It probably needs to recharge its batteries from running all day.” – Jarod Kintz

6. Automate Through Habits

This is the most important key to your success. If you want to stay motivated all the time and achieve the success you want, this is what you need to do. You need to automate your motivation through habits.

Things may be difficult when you first started out. You need a lot of motivation to get it work and to put yourself into action. However, after some time, things will become easier for you and it takes less motivation and your self-drive. This is because whatever you do, it has slowly becomes your habit.

Successful people know that they cannot have unlimited motivation and drive to do what they wanted to do. Hence, they turn their actions into habit.

For example, if you need to go to the gym every morning, the first few days will seem very difficult to do it. You need a lot of willpower to wake up early and it takes you a lot of motivation to get change and hit the gym.

However, if you do it consistently at the same time and the same way, you will eventually turn this into your habit. And soon enough, you will never need to have your alarm to wake you up. You will automatically get up and fully awake. You will then get change and get to the gym to work out. All on autopilot mode because you have turned it into your habit.

People who lost weight through the weight loss pill usually will gain weight again after they stop taking the pill. Mainly because they never change their bad habit such as overeating and no exercise.

And people who find it difficult to get motivated may suffer the same issue. You have to change your habits. You need to get rid of the old destructive habits that are not going to help you in your life, and replace them with constructive habits that will make you successful.

If you’re in sales and making cold calls is one of your main activities to generate sales, you need to turn this activity into a habit. It is true that you will need to have a lot of willpower and drive to do make the calls at first, but once it has become your habit, it will be effortless.

What you need to do is to do cold calls at the same time everyday. If possible, do it in the same place and same environment so that the habit can be formed faster and easier.

These are my 6 tips how to stay motivated in business. Tell me what you think… 🙂