How do mornings start for you?
When your alarm goes off on a Monday, does it fill you with a sense of determination and drive, or leave you with a deep sense of dread? When you prepare for the day ahead, is your mind overflowing with positive affirmations and good feelings about what you might achieve? Or do you start wishing the hours away from the moment you open your eyes?
Morning inspiration is more important to our lives than we realize. After all, your mornings are what set you up for the rest of the day. If they’re filled with negative energy, you’re less likely to push yourself to achieve your goals, and you’re more likely to suffer from constant feelings of stress, anxiety and general overwhelm.
So, how do you rediscover your daily motivation?
Understanding Daily Motivation: What Is Motivation?
Motivation is an incredible thing. It’s essentially the fuel that powers us to achieve new things, unlock opportunities and accomplish our goals. When you’re motivated, you’re compelled to keep pushing forward, overcoming challenges and obstacles in your path. When you lack motivation, even the slightest problem can derail your entire day and hamper your productivity.
Unfortunately, motivation isn’t always easy to cultivate. While your passion for your job, the interest you have in your work and even the support you get from your team can help you to feel more motivated, you also need to work on nurturing that drive from within.
Motivation can drain quickly in any environment. Even if you love your workplace, general tiredness, boredom and other factors can quickly leave you feeling disengaged.
The best way to preserve your daily motivation for work is to come up with a strategy that allows you to start each day in the best possible frame of mind. If you’ve already laid the foundations for motivation, you’re more likely to retain your drive for the rest of the day.
How to Find Your Daily Motivation for Work
The first thing we should note is that there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for generating motivation. Different people are inspired by different things. That’s why so many business leaders experiment with a variety of ways to engage employees, using different team-building exercises, gamification, rewards and feedback.
However, there are a few fundamental steps you can take towards boosting your internal motivation levels each day. Here are our top tips to get you on the right track.
1. Manage Your Sleep Cycle
It’s hard to find good morning inspiration when you feel drained and exhausted. The better you sleep, the more likely you are to feel energetic and ready for action. With this in mind, start thinking about how you can improve your sleep hygiene. Find out how many hours of sleep you need to feel well-rested and build your schedule around that knowledge.
If you’re struggling to fall asleep or wake up on time each day, implementing various strategies, like exercising before bed, following a routine or meditating before sleep can help. It’s also worth eliminating anything which might disrupt your sleep.
For instance, while it might seem like a good idea to sort through your emails and work on your to-do list just before you go to bed, this activates your brain and makes it harder to relax.
2. Nourish Yourself Correctly
Just like your brain can’t thrive without an adequate amount of sleep, your body can’t perform at its best without the right fuel. The food you eat can actually make a huge difference to how motivated you feel. High-fiber foods, as well as vitamin-rich fruit and vegetables are great for feeding your mind and providing your body with consistent energy levels.
Crucially, it’s important to make sure you’re getting enough water into your routine too. Before you start chugging coffee, rehydrate your body with a glass or two of water. A hydrated brain is more capable, so you’ll feel more able to plan for the day ahead.
Choosing the right foods to eat for breakfast will ensure you’re less likely to feel fatigued or weighed down when you approach the office.
3. Wake Up Early
If you’re struggling with Monday morning inspiration, pushing yourself to wake up a little earlier than normal might be a good step. As tempting as it can be to hit snooze on your alarm a couple of times, this just exposes you to more restless, light sleep, which can leave you feeling groggy.
Research shows that waking up early can give you more of a chance to organize your thoughts, plan for the day ahead and prepare yourself for success. In fact, some of the most successful people in the world believe that waking up early has been crucial to their development.
If you do decide to start your morning a little earlier than usual, make sure you’re still getting the right amount of sleep. It’s also worth ensuring that you fill that extra time with productive tasks, like exercising, planning your day or just relaxing.
4. Find Your Morning Mantra
You don’t have to believe in the power of positive affirmations to benefit from a good morning mantra. Even if saying positive things out loud doesn’t actively make you feel more positive straight away, it helps you to reset your mind and focus in time for work.
Feeding your mind with positive images and words from the moment you open your eyes puts you in the right space to achieve excellence. It can help you to banish negative thoughts like “what if”, or “I can’t”, which can drain your motivation.
Try writing down a selection of statements designed to drive you towards your goals, such as “Today I will finish my to-do list, tomorrow I’ll work towards my promotion.”
5. Show Gratitude
Studies from Harvard and other researchers show that saying “thanks” for what you have in life can actually make you feel happier and more motivated.
Showing gratitude reminds you to be thankful for what you have, and it gives you an opportunity to remember what you’ve achieved and accomplished so far. When you’re developing your morning ritual, consider making a list of a few things you’re grateful for each day. You can start simple, by saying you’re thankful to be employed, or to have a great team of collaborative staff members.
You might even end up creating your own gratitude journal, where you keep track of all the positive things in your life, from your workplace accomplishments to your personal achievements.
6. Explore the Power of Morning Exercise
If you’re struggling to find Monday morning inspiration for work, then you might think finding the drive to exercise each day would be almost impossible. However, adding some physical activity to your routine can be a lot more beneficial than you might think.
Various studies have shown that exercising can improve your mood and decrease feelings of stress and anxiety, which can drain your daily motivation. That’s because exercise naturally promotes the production of hormones like serotonin and norepinephrine.
Research also suggests that exercise can help to improve concentration, memory and cognition, so you’re more likely to be able to focus on the tasks you set for yourself.
7. Celebrate Your Achievements
One of the many reasons we often lose our daily motivation is we don’t feel as though we’re being adequately rewarded for the work we put in. While employers and business leaders can help with this, by offering regular feedback and recognition, you can also find ways to reward yourself.
If you’re dreading a specific task in your day, or you’re working towards a particular goal, promise yourself something good when you overcome that obstacle. For instance, you might treat yourself with a few minutes of listening to your favorite song after you finish a tough project.
For bigger and more demanding tasks, you can reward yourself with something more substantial, like your favorite food, or a trip to the movies.
8. Be Adaptable
Another reason many people struggle when finding daily motivation for work, is that they force themselves to follow the same routine or schedule consistently, regardless of whether it works for them or not. Paying attention to which strategies actually help you to achieve your goals, and which hold you back is important in maintaining high levels of engagement.
If something doesn’t feel right, or you’re struggling in the workplace, be ready to make a change. For instance, you could consider asking your team leader if you can work from home if you’re struggling to stay motivated at the office, or you could request more regular feedback if you need guidance.
Don’t just give up if one strategy doesn’t work for you. Keep experimenting until you find a way to stay focused and motivated.
Spread the Motivational Energy
Remember, finding your own good morning inspiration doesn’t just have an impact on you and your performance, it can influence your entire team and workforce too. As a business leader, you could even consider asking members of your team to come together for an all-hands meeting on Monday Mornings, where they can share what’s motivating them that week.
Alternatively, you could consider sending motivational messages to all of your team members, in a business-wide notification sent through a platform like Brosix. Brosix not only supports encrypted messaging and video meetings, it also makes it simple to connect with staff in an instant.
Sharing sources of positive energy and motivation is a great way to make sure that everyone in the workforce can benefit from good vibes. It paves the way for a powerful collaborative culture, where everyone works to motivate and inspire each other.
Motivation can be difficult to maintain, but once you’ve found the strategy that works for you, you’ll find that your motivational energy helps drive you towards your goals.
