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How Do You Define Motivation?

The dictionary will define motivation as:

1. The act or an instance of motivating. This could be something you do to motive yourself or others. Perhaps you give someone an encouraging remark that makes them feel good about themselves and what they are doing with their life. Encouragement is very important, whether you are doing it for yourself or for others. Lack of motivation and encouragement is the number one reason people fail to succeed at their goals.

2. The state or condition of being motivated. Society may also define motivation as a noun, as something we’ve already achieved or have been given. If you’ve received motivation from someone, you have been given a great gift. Often it is hard to motivate ourselves, and having the support of others can make a big difference on whether we succeed or not.

3. Something that motivates, induces, and gives incentive. In the next few paragraphs I will talk about how you define motivation. What gives us motivation is such an individual and personal thing. Most of us are driven by different needs and desires, and the incentives we all desire are different as well.

You could look at motivation through another perspective. You could define motivation according to what is important to you. We all have different motivators in our lives. Perhaps you desire to have lots of money so you can travel the world. Or maybe just some extra cash so you can take the kids to the movies every week would be enough for you.

Can you see how those two different desires might lead to different paths of action, all depending on how you define motivation? No path is a wrong path, and each person’s path is unique to them. To define motivation according to your goals is a good trick to keep moving toward your goals. Instead of thinking of it as “the state of being motivated,” define motivation as a vacation, a new wardrobe, or maybe something as special as a new baby. After all, if a mom-to-be is having trouble conceiving, she may need to be motivated to do what it takes to start a family.

If you have a few specific goals you are trying to reach, it may help to sit down and define motivation to yourself. What are your goals? Why do you want to reach them? What positive outcomes will there be if you succeed in making your dreams come true? Those “whys” and “whats” are going to be your definitions of motivation.

Let’s say you desire to get a new job. You want this new job because a) you’re unhappy in your current position, b) you’d like to earn more money, and c) you want to push yourself to do the best you can in your career. You could go a step further with one of those answers and ask yourself “why” you want to earn more money. Perhaps you need to pay off debt, our maybe you just want to stop living paycheck to paycheck. Keeping asking yourself why until you reach a concrete picture or word that you can write down - that is how you define motivation for yourself.

When you are ready to take the steps needed to work toward your goal, put your definitions in a visible place. For instance, if you are looking to lose weight so you can look like you did in high school, you can post a picture of what you looked like in high school in a place you’ll see it often. The front of the refrigerator, the mirror in the bathroom, and on the cupboard doors where you keep your snacks are all good places to post how you define motivation.