How to stay motivated

• By: Ready2invest: Jonty Crossick
• On: 13/03/2009 14:08:35
• In: Personal Development
• Comments: 0

The economic storm clouds started to assemble in the late summer of 2007. We are now a season away from entering summer 2009. And we have yet to reach the bottom. This is a long, uncertain storm. And it is often hard to predict the path. The only certainty is uncertainty. So it is crucial to keep ourselves and our teams motivated. 

We had a great team meeting the other day. We focused on the concept that “nothing is inevitable” and how, if you want a great life you need to keep a window of consciousness open for opportunity all the time. Being a football fan I couldn’t help but refer to Manchester United’s European Cup wins in 1999 and 2008. The first one happened due to two goals in injury time as the Man U team overcame a 1-0 deficit in the 89th minute. And then, even more remarkably in 2008, Chelsea were a penalty away from winning when their captain, John Terry, hit the post and then Manchester United won the shoot out from there. This winning attitude is remarkable and impossible to bottle. 

There are three principles that we try to work from at Ready2invest – (a) Generating energy (b) Gratitude and (c) Clearing doubts. Start with gratitude. Because gratitude creates energy. If we moan and complain we suck up energy. But if we can focus on something, anything, that we are grateful for and really mean it then this creates a positivity that transfers into other things. And it can be unrelated gratitude. You could be having a tough time at work. But you could be developing a really nurturing friendship with someone. If you express gratitude from your heart for this friendship this creates a sublime feeling which can then be used in your work.  Or it could work the other way round where work is going well but personal issues are crowding in. Gratitude creates space in our hearts into which opportunity, positivism, love, prosperity and happiness flows. 

Generating energy is all about applying intensity to your day. It is so easy to stagnate. It is easy to accept that what is around you cannot change. But it can. It can change if you think it can. That twentieth lunge in the gym makes all the difference when you are on eighteen and are convinced you cannot do any more. If you sell, it is always when you are about to give up on the day but you carry on regardless that something happens. If we can remain grateful, we can retain a sense of hope and if we have hope we have purpose. With purpose we can generate intensity and from intensity things change and life can improve.

The bedfellow of generating energy is clearing doubts. There is nothing worse than generating optimism on top of a festering doubt and not dealing with that doubt. Sometimes doubts can be useful because they help us analyse and think through an issue so that we can shape it and improve it. What a lot of us are not good at (especially blokes!) is talking issues through with other people. I find that if I have an issue and I am not sure how to resolve it then I ask for help. I call someone, or call a meeting for some creative input. I then lay the cards out and ask for input. It is amazing how generous people can be when you let them in. 

So, whatever the economic circumstances, there is opportunity and a lot of hope out there and it is down to each one of us to “have a good recession”.  Change can be good if we embrace it and use it for our growth. Gratitude, creating energy and clearing doubts ease that process.