Self-motivation comes in handy every day of your life — whether you’re trying to check tasks off your to-do list or working toward a more long-term goal like a job promotion, graduating from school or taking up a new hobby. The ability to motivate yourself gives you the power to keep pushing forward, even in the face of adversity. As professional pilots, we use this skill to our advantage at Inflight Pilot Training — so, we thought we’d share our 10 favorite reasons to improve your self motivation.
1) Improves Your Reaction to Stress
When we’re in stressful situations, chemicals in our brain take over and affect our decision making skills. Recognizing stress, the source of it and how you react can do wonders for your success both personally and professionally. With a strong sense of self-motivation, we can work on our internal voice and take control of our defense mechanisms.
How to do it: Take a deep breath, count backwards from ten and focus on the present. Practice mindfulness and consider taking up a relaxing hobby like yoga or meditation, both of which have been proven to reduce stress.
2) Opens New Opportunities
“You never know until you try.” Maybe your parents told you this as a child and you wrote it off as nothing more than a vague, common saying. However, a simple fact is that self-motivated people tend to open up new and more opportunities for themselves.
How to do it: Try linking the task at hand to something that motivates you in your life — from family to financial reward to happiness. By assigning end value to the action you’re participating now, you can keep focused on the pay off.
3) You’re More Likely to Finish What You Start
When you’re self motivated, you’re much more likely to face a challenge head on. Experiencing adversity only fuels the fire of success. You’ll be better at managing time, avoiding distractions, reaching important milestones, and feeling that much better when you’ve completed your task the right way.
How to do it: Simplify your to-do list. Many motivated people want to do too much at once, which actually splits your focus and causes the quality of work to deteriorate. Working on a single task at a time can have a dramatic effect on the way you approach it.
Searching for more great motivational help? Read: Your Guide to Living Your Best Life in 2021
4) Self-Motivation is an Internal Force
Sure there are external factors that affect our motivation — money, a big house or fame, for instance — but those have a diminishing return. Self-motivation comes entirely from within yourself. An intrinsic sense of a strong mentality will never stop being there in the face of difficulty.
How to do it: Use short term goals to boost your self-motivation in the near future. Look for easy wins, like getting into a regular exercise routine, setting time aside every night for your schoolwork or practicing your hobby every weekend for a month. Give yourself something to look back on in order to remind yourself what you’re capable of.
5) Makes You More Gracious
A person with a strong sense of self-motivation understands the work it took to get them where they are. As such, they tend to be more gracious to others facing hardship. It’s important to remember the good aspects of your personal or professional endeavors, and all you have. This, in turn, improves your outlook on life, which feeds your motivation even further.
How to do it: Find a group of philanthropists or a volunteer organization to join. By surrounding yourself with people who also believe in giving more than taking, you’ll benefit from the energy that comes with being around a gracious set of people.
6) Promotes Good Habits
Even a small sense of self-motivation can create big shifts in your day-to-day actions and thinking. Following good habits means a sense of consistency, whether that means going to the gym everyday, getting ahead of your work week or regularly practicing for a big presentation.
How to do it: When getting into a new habit, repetition is key. The more you do something over and over again, the more your brain will rely on that activity. If you want to start a new morning routine, for example, getting up and doing the same actions repeatedly will help craft new neural pathways as you make incremental improvements.
Find a new passion — sign up for flight lessons today
Self-motivation is challenging, there’s no doubt about it. Much of it stems from your internal ability to keep going in the face of adversity, while focusing on intrinsic rather than extrinsic factors. To do this, you may want to try finding something new that you can sink your energy into. If you’re a motivated person, then learning to fly may be the ideal hobby for you. Inflight Pilot Training is the Twin Cities’ premier flight school, dedicated to helping students reach their dream of taking to the skies. You’ll be challenged in new ways, but the reward of passing your certification test is unbeatable.
If you’re interested in learning more about Inflight training programs, contact us today or call (952) 698-3000.