Self-Motivation

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Self-motivation is critical to developing as an inspirational leader. Being a leader involves more than just managing people. In order to lead people, a leader must be self-motivated.

A positive attitude has a number of effects:

• it helps you to set and work toward goals
• it helps extend the leadership development process
• it’s a driving factor to work on personal leadership skills
• it sets an example for those you lead

Lead and listen

There are two self-motivation techniques that fall under the general concept of leading and listening. One of the simplest ways you can self-motivate is to challenge yourself to lead by example or to exemplify self-motivation. The other is to try to improve how you communicate with your colleagues.

• The first of these two techniques, exemplifying self-motivation, involves being noticed as a goal setter and someone who follows through on developing strategies to meet them. Make sure to keep on schedule with your goal plan.
• The second technique that falls under leading and listening is communication. You can use communication to create your personal purpose statement. This involves writing down what you aspire to do. It’s a way of articulating what you believe in and strengthening it.

Also try to listen to others more actively. In your interactions, make your influence more effective by ensuring that people understand what you’re saying. If situations arise where it appears others don’t understand you, focus on becoming a more active listener.

Challenge and empower yourself

Challenging and empowering yourself can be very effective self-motivation techniques. Viewing adversity and obstacles as challenges to be overcome and opportunities for self-empowerment is a positive leadership motivation technique. In order to challenge and empower yourself, you have to be willing to question, enable, and educate.

To challenge and self-empower, you need to look for tests that will develop your talent as a leader. This may involve deliberately selecting tasks that involve difficult elements.

Another technique that relates to challenging and empowering yourself is enabling yourself. This is about allowing yourself to accept the next leadership challenge that comes along.

Each time you succeed in a challenge your motivation and self-confidence increase. Your competence levels in various areas improve, as you master more skills.

A third way you can challenge and empower yourself is to educate yourself. There are a number of ways you can increase your motivation levels through educating and coaching yourself. You can consult journals and the Internet, use management books, and learn from your own and others’ experience.

Reward yourself

One of the most important elements of self-motivation is rewarding yourself for achieving your goal. People are built to respond to positive reinforcement. There are three techniques you can use to reward yourself. You can recognize your own achievements, recognize others’ sacrifices for you, and give up time for them, and you can emulate inspiring people by aiming to inspire others yourself.

To maintain your self-motivation, it’s important to acknowledge when you’ve achieved any goal or even reached a stepping stone toward a goal.

Sacrifice can help you to motivate yourself also as it sometimes feels good to focus your efforts on helping others. Remember people in your life who made sacrifices and gave up time for you, and try to give up time for others. One way you can do this is to be a mentor to someone.

The gift of inspiration is the third way you can reward yourself. Think of people who have inspired others to achieve.

 

Certified Leadership Communication Professional

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