Learn and Keep Pushing from These Motivators

Thoughts are powerful, and negative thoughts can prevent you from achieving your goals. The flip side is that positive thoughts can be just as powerful. The next time you feel unmotivated, use any of these 35 positive thoughts to keep pushing and reenergize yourself. Really: They work!

There’s no perfect plan. There are some definite flaws in your plan — but there are in every plan.

Everybody starts somewhere. Nobody is born successful. Everyone starts somewhere, and usually from the bottom.

It can only get better. If it’s hard at first, it can only get easier.

I can do anything. It’s a simple phrase, but it helps to remind yourself — you really can do anything you set your mind to.

This is why I can. Instead of giving yourself reasons why you can’t do something, give yourself reasons why you can.

It’s never too late. No matter how old you are or how many opportunities you’ve passed up before, it’s never too late to make a decision and get a fresh start.

There will always be challenges. No matter what you do in life, there will always be challenges — don’t let one set get the better of you.

There’s no perfect plan. There are some definite flaws in your plan — but there are in every plan.

Everybody starts somewhere. Nobody is born successful. Everyone starts somewhere, and usually from the bottom.

It can only get better. If it’s hard at first, it can only get easier.

Failure is temporary. If you fail, you’re in good company — most successes come only after several rounds of failure.

Mistakes are learning opportunities. If you mess up, you can only become better for it.

Everything has to be earned. You can’t get anything in this life unless you work hard for it.

Action is a better regret than inaction. Making the wrong decision is always preferable to regretting never having done anything at all.

I don’t need anyone’s permission. If people think you’re crazy, so be it.

I’m in control of my own destiny. You can decide whom you want to become.

The risk is worth it. Know that risks are real, but the potential benefits are worth them.

Discipline feels better than regret. Discipline is hard, but it’s easier to deal with than regret.

Many good ideas seem crazy or impossible at first. Yours is no different.

Experience is always valuable. Even if your mission doesn’t turn out the way you’d expected, you’ll walk away with experience.

Every day counts. Today, tomorrow and the next day are all steps toward your end goal.

There is no problem that can’t be overcome. Everything can be solved or worked around.

Everything can be improved. Even if you start out rough, you can always make improvements to your approach.

I can learn whatever I need to know. Free resources are plentiful.

I can master whatever I need to do. Practice can make you good at anything.

I know what I want. Know what your end goals are, and visualize them.

Trying and failing is better than doing nothing. This is universally true.

I can’t win unless I try. Effort is the only way to get results.

I’m better than I was yesterday. You’re older, wiser and more experienced than you’ve ever been before.

Nothing great happens overnight. Work and patience are your friends.

I’ll reward myself when I’m done. Even small rewards can be great motivators.

There are always more chances. If you screw up, you can always try again.

If nothing else, this will make for a good story. You’ll walk away with great memories and interesting anecdotes.

What do you think? Do you have anything to add based on your experience?

Getting the Spark Back: Writing Can Boost Your Productivity and Motivation

I was that nerdy child in the 90s who used to sit down and write while other kids used to do their childish banters. My inclination to writing started by accident and stayed by choice. I was a notorious kid and was a nightmare to my teachers and the caretakers at home. I was made to start writing as a way of getting the spark back.

Soon my family and I realized how addictive this distraction was. It was doing more good than bad. I was more organized and focused compared to other kids my age. I was creative and made stories about mythical Indian demons and gods. Oh, that sparkle I saw in my friend’s eyes when they heard those stories were out of the world!

And then “Life Happened “to me, for obvious reasons. Some good reasons and some not so good. I grew up, went to college for graduation and masters. Meanwhile, the only writing I did was my assignments and essays. And then Job happened, and the writing got limited to just memos and MOMs.

Today I work with a company I had dreamed off during college. Things are good! Like most adults today I am stuck in the monotony of life. I have a sense of disorientation in my soul lately. Not that I am complaining (I am, to myself) but life is indeed a bit dull. I have the job I wanted, and it pays well too. I am traveling places, meeting new people and seeing the guy of my dreams. You might think what’s missing then? I miss that sparkle; I miss that joy of having things sorted and planned out in advance.

I might have missed that Sparkle as an innocent forgetful child. Or did the sparkle leave me because I had taken it for granted? By now you must understand that “Sparkle” means my habit of writing. Probably my sense of disorientation was born from the lost connection with myself. I know that feeling because I compare it to how connected and confident I was as a child. Writing as a habit, made sure that my thoughts were super organized. As a child, I knew what I wanted in life and what my priorities were. Now as an adult, I am confused thinking what my quarterly goals should be about.

I started writing again last summer, for my good. It was a desperate attempt to regain my lost connection to myself. I needed some serious motivation to bring in the right changes in my life. And believe me, when I say this, I already feel so much lighter. All I do now as a habit is write more often in my journal or even on sticky notes. Even these small habits have managed to organize my life and increase my productivity to impressive levels. The habit of writing is a powerful tool; you will have to use it for yourself to feel its gain. Writing is a great way to keep learning about self.

I keep these tips in mind for keeping myself motivated and productive:

Have the right platform to write, as per your convenience

I write in a handcrafted journal; its papers are so beautiful that they make me want to write more often. If you are someone who loves to illustrate while writing, it pays to keep the right pens handy.

Have a comfortable spot, decide on a time and make it a habit

Having a particular spot helped me make my writing feel more private. Every time I see that corner of my house I am reminded to write. Having a particular time allotted for your writing trains your brain to make it a habit. It certainly does take time, but you will love the ritual you make with yourself gradually. I did, and I love it.

Getting the spark back … avoid distractions

Before and after you make your writing ritual, stay away from distractions during it. I turn off my gadgets when I am writing. The spot you select should be comfortable and be devoid of major distractions. In just a couple of months, even my dogs have understood not to bother me when I am in my spot doing my thing.

Be open and transparent when you write

I have realized as adults we judge ourselves too along with the people around us. Stop doing that; it harms you that you can’t imagine. Understand that you are writing for yourself and not to impress an editor here. Write about your goals and thoughts as openly as possible.

Writing down your goals and motivations is a must

Writing on Paper is a strong tool, that more people need to use. There’s a correlation between the brain and eyes. You tend to remember your points more clearly when you see them being written by yourself on a paper.

You are writing to de-stress

As you carry on with your great habit, it becomes important to remember this point. We write down or jot down points that we want to remember. This helps you to clear your mind. It is only with a clear and composed mind that you get new ideas. Try to make yourself a clean slate after every writing session. This will motivate you to try out new things and make new goals.

The bottom line

It is okay if you lost that sparkle for a while, that happens to a lot of us. It’s more important to realize its importance and get it back at the right time. Because losing that sparkle is a lot like losing yourself. It’s high time more people see how powerful writing is in making people productive and motivated in life.

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Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.

Bella Williams

As an academic researcher & private tutor, Bella guides the new age professionals and students with their career. A graduate of Monash University, Bella organizes free coaching workshops and promotes free sharing of knowledge. You can also find her on LinkedIn.

Mind Wandering: Do You Know Why It Creates Better Learners?

Humans spend about half of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they’re doing in the present. A now-famous Harvard study illuminated this reality, using an iPhone app that pinged participants at random times throughout the day and asked them what they were thinking about. Mind wandering?

It found that 50% of the time, their minds were wandering from their current task. Also, they were significantly less happy when their minds were roaming than when they were focused on the present.

This is probably because of most of the time; the mind is just generating noise and gibberish. Gibberish like worries, memories, reenactments of the way things should have been, and projections of the future. It’s easy to get swept up in our thoughts, and sometimes it’s addictive.

Mind-wandering allows one part of the brain to focus on the task at hand, and another part of the brain to keep a higher goal in mind. Christoff (2009) at the University of California, Santa Barbara has evidence that people whose minds wander a lot are more creative and better problem solvers. Their brains have them working on the task at hand but simultaneously processing other information and making connections.

A wandering mind takes more in: good and bad. This leads to new ideas. But it can take you up — and it can take you down.

Focus doesn’t allow the noise in. But the noise is what allows creativity to spark.

You already have rituals that put you into a zone; you just may not realize it. What you want to do is use them deliberately

But it’s not very pleasant, as most of us know and studies have found, and it’s not great for mental health over the long term.

Build a team whose members have diverse backgrounds and mindsets. This broadens the creativity process.

Each person will contribute different thoughts and ideas, which lead to unique conversations when everyone comes together. The education, background, and experience of individual members lead to a creative group.

Team members will learn from one another. Different perspectives lead to new skills and effective innovation strategies. The result is a stronger team equipped to take on new challenges and quickly solve problems of all sizes.

If you feel like your mind is everywhere but in the present, here are some of the methods that both history and science have proved work to pull yourself back into the present.

How do you get focused? How do you unwind? Here is why mind wandering leads to the best learning. Start using these more deliberate techniques, and you can make yourself happier as well as more creative when you need to be.

Wandering is the mind’s natural state

The most common view of the human mind assumes that our normal way of thinking consists of concentrated focus upon immediate tasks at hand. But researchers have found that this is not the case.

Daydreaming is now considered to be the normal state of our minds, with focus appearing as a break from the more common mind wandering. A recent study has found that our mind wanders forty-seven percent of the time we are awake with very few activities not equally peppered with natural periods of daydreaming.

The fact that daydreaming is the natural state of the human brain suggests that those who take most naturally to daydreaming will best exhibit the skills necessary for successfully navigating the human world. Far from representing a lack of discipline, daydreaming is a hallmark of a healthy and active human mind.

Breathe

This is a great method because it’s one that works even if you don’t believe it will. People have used breathing to calm their nervous systems over millennia, and science has recently shown why it works, neurologically.

There’s a cluster of cells in the brainstem that controls different types of breathing—sighing, laughing, gasping, and others. A slow breathing subgroup was identified earlier this year, by researchers who also noted its projections to higher areas of the brain, involved in arousal and wakefulness.

Have a mini-interaction with nature

Lots of evidence spending time out in nature helps mood, well being, and stress levels. But not everyone can jaunt out to the forest when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Interestingly, a new study reported that just a momentary interaction with an item of nature had a big influence on mental health.

Meditate

This is probably one of the hardest things to make yourself do in a moment of anxiety, but it also may be the best. Though meditation has been linked to myriad neurological and psychological benefits over the long term, luckily most experts agree that even a few minutes of sitting and focusing the mind can do a lot to calm it.

Mindfulness training has been shown to quiet the areas of the brain that are responsible for the chattering of the monkey mind—and within seconds. So try sitting and focusing on anything you choose—the breath; a short mantra, either in your head or aloud; the sounds in the room or outside.

Every time your mind wanders, simply note that, and bring it back to what you were focusing on. That’s what the practice is—redirecting our attention, again and again.

Motivation

It’s a truism that our “dreams,” by which we usually mean our goals and desires, motivated in life. What is less recognized, however, is the central role played by the process of daydreaming in envisioning and imaginatively experiencing the lives we wish to lead and people we want to become.

Our goals and desires are what they are because we have spent time freely living through our daydreams what it would be like to achieve them. For these reasons, daydreaming in learners is related to higher levels of ambition and a deeper sense of motivation.

Increased insight

Did you ever wonder what causes that moment of insight when something suddenly clicks, or a solution becomes clear? The answer is a lot of hard work on the part of your brain that goes unnoticed.

Moments of insight, those sudden revelations that seem to come from nowhere, are long prepared for through the brain’s ongoing hidden organizing and processing. Daydreaming, as a mental state activating both the default and executive networks of the brain, plays an important role in that organizing and processing. What you may think is your mind drifting is your mind actively forming connections between information, synthesizing what was previously only chaos, and preparing the ground for the moment when things suddenly fit into place.

Confidence

Freely imagining “what you would do if…” is far from idle. Having envisioned scenarios and played out possible events gives us an increasing sense that we can handle them.

In this way, the imaginative anticipation that often occurs in daydreaming contributes as much to a robust sense of confidence as it does to a healthy motivation.

Think about it this way; daydreaming is a training ground for your mind where it plays through and sometimes struggles with scenarios it has not experienced or wants to react differently to in the future.

Though successful training certainly doesn’t guarantee success during the real event, it does provide a mental preparedness and a firm sense that no matter what may occur we can deal with it.

For this reason, some of the most confident learners are also those with the healthiest daydreaming lives.

Talk to someone

Being stuck in your head can be destructive partly because there’s no real order to the monologue, and no sounding board to help put things in perspective.

And part of the reason that therapy, talking to a friend, and even journaling are all effective in reining in mind is that they provide perspective—the very act of crafting your thoughts into a coherent narrative helps you understand them better.

Critical thinking and intelligence

Creative thinking can be an extension of ordinary mind-wandering, the researchers explained, and a growing body of research has linked daydreaming with creativity.

In highly creative people, psychologists have observed a tendency toward a variation on mind-wandering known as “positive-constructive daydreaming,” in which has also been associated with self-awareness, goal-oriented thinking, and increased compassion.

As this study suggests, a healthy amount of daydreaming is connected to improved critical thinking capabilities, an invaluable characteristic in successful learners.

It has also been shown that daydreaming is dramatically more present in those considered to be of superior intelligence when compared with learners of average intelligence.

Split second thinking

In his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking Malcolm Gladwell discusses the phenomenon of “thin-slicing,” the mind’s jumping to conclusions based on surprisingly little information.

Despite what we tend to assume, Gladwell demonstrates that jumping to conclusions based on limited information is often statistically the most reliable way to arrive at the right decision.

The key point about thin-slicing is that its effectiveness depends upon two factors. Knowledge, especially when derived from experience, and mental integration that allows for swift access to the knowledge and experience we have gained.

If we return to our image of daydreaming as the training ground of the mind, the increased integration it imposes on knowledge and experience we have collected improves our ability to jump to conclusions based on little information successfully.

It makes us more successful thin-slicers and improves our split-second decision making.

Better problem solving

What is problem-solving? From what we have already said we might suggest it is an effective use of the default and executive networks of the brain resulting in increased intelligence, critical thinking, insight, and thin-slicing.

The argument that the integration of default and executive networks results in improved problem solving is offered by the author of Daydreams at Work: Wake Up Your Creative Powers, Amy Fries. In an article in Psychology Today: “…your mind-wandering capacity is like that computer program–it can get to solutions that your conscious mind just can’t see.”

In general, daydreaming makes us better thinkers. Being better thinkers makes us better learners.