Motivation and Emotion
There is a strong link between motivation and emotion that runs through our lives. This is link can work either by
being able to motivate ourselves into feeling a different emotion, or by our emotions dictating how much motivation
we have for a specific task. For example, if you are feeling tired, you won’t be feeling motivated to do something,
even if it’s urgent or something you usually enjoy. Alternatively, if you want to do something but are feeling
unwell or unhappy, you can usually convince yourself that you should do it; the motivation pulls you along and
erodes the feeling that you’re “not up to it”.
Once you accept this link that exists between motivation and emotion, you can use it to help you achieve more with
your time as it can help you overcome such things as procrastination or fatigue. Determination could be another
word for motivation in the case of fatigue as it is your determination to do a task or activity even though you
aren’t feeling 100% able to do it – but you want to do it, so you motivate yourself into the right frame of mind
and go do it.
If there’s something that you don’t want to do, then you need to convince yourself that you do want to do it, or
you’ll procrastinate the time available away until there’s no time to do it. Convincing yourself isn’t always an
easy skill, but acknowledging that once you change your frame of mind, then you’ll find it easier to carry out the
task you don’t want to do, then you find ways of being able to tempt yourself into the right mindset – and that’s
basically what combining motivation and emotion is all about.
Offering yourself rewards for doing things you don’t like doing often helps with the motivation and emotion
equation. For example, many women don’t like ironing but they reward themselves by watching a movie on TV as they
work rather then just stand and iron. As they watch, they become more emotionally involved in the movie and the
ironing gets done because the resistance to doing the task is removed by diverting the negative emotion and
motivation to get the job done takes over.
At work, you may have a task you hate doing, such as balancing your mileage or filing some paperwork, but the
thought of bribing yourself with lunch at a favorite restaurant, or a new magazine, can help to change your
attitude towards doing the task and bring together your motivation and emotion so that you can get through the task
in half the time you’d take without the motivation to get it done.
Sometimes you’re just in the wrong frame of mind for doing something, for example if you’ve had bad news just
before you’re due to go to a party, and the last thing you feel like doing is putting on a happy face and
socializing with other people. With motivation and emotion going hand-in-hand you know that once you make the
effort to go out as planned, you will cope with the initial impact of the bad news better as you’ll have to put it
on the back burner for a while then you can take it off later and look at it with a more balanced viewpoint – this
is far better than just staying home and dwelling on the news alone.
Once you understand that there is a link between motivation and emotion it makes find the energy to do things you
don’t like much easier because you know that if you can put yourself into the right frame of mind, that you’ll get
the task done and it won’t be half as bad as you’d thought it was going to be!
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