How to Stay Motivated: The Power of Discipline and Consistency

Her response got me thinking. Over the past few days, or maybe 2-3 weeks, my motivation has been low, or I couldn’t find any at all, or I found it very hard to come by. Her words made me reflect on this because she has been in a good mood, feeling motivated to create the next video and keep going with her work because of my encouraging words.

Self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do something you don’t necessarily want to do, to get a result you would really like to have.

Living Forward
by Michael Hyatt & Daniel Har

When we look at athletes who win the Olympic Games, they have been practicing consistently for 4 years or more. Each of them probably has both good and bad days. If you have a goal as significant as the Olympic Games ahead of you, it’s probably easier to keep going. Let’s consider a great tennis player who has achieved so much in their career. They are still fighting through injuries and setbacks. What keeps them practicing every day?

Passion? Love for the sport? Probably, but the question still lingers…

Sometimes in life, we experience periods when things don’t go as planned, or we don’t see immediate results. We audition and fail, compete but don’t reach the final. We’re making progress, but the rewards of hard work aren’t apparent yet. What then? On rainy days when we don’t feel like going through our routine, practicing scales, pieces, excerpts, and difficult passages for the nxt week’s project? Sometimes we feel sick, tired, or simply demotivated by life’s challenges.

I found myself practicing and pondering these challenges instead of focusing on the tasks at hand. Do you remember when I talked about the pre-performance routine? Actions create feelings. We need a routine that positions our body and brain to perform optimally every time. Here, the same principle applies to motivation.

This is the key to success in motivation. If we stick to our schedule regardless of our mood, we’ll succeed. Why? Because action creates feelings.

Imagine waking up feeling tired and not in the best mood. The immediate thought might be ‘I don’t want to.’ But if you ignore that feeling and stick to your plan – wake up, follow your routine, do your warm-up exercises, practice your concerto for an hour, or whatever’s on your schedule – you’ll stop thinking about feeling good or bad. You’re simply following your plan, connecting to the discipline and that’s the key to motivation and success.

Success always has required and always will require sacrifice. If success were easy, it would be common. It is difficult and that is why it is rare. More people have talent than you would think. Few are willing to make the necessary sacrifices.

Off balance
by Matthew Kelly

Discipline means executing your plan consistently, whether you’re feeling good or bad. It doesn’t matter how you feel right now. You can change your feelings through action because routine action brings about feelings as always. If you start playing with happiness, joy, and enjoyment, those feelings will come to you, and the day will turn around.

You’ll feel proud of yourself for pushing through, for turning a potentially bad day into a productive one. Consistent progress leads to success. As they say:

“The winners are the losers who try once again”