Are you a little bit tired of motivational speakers that tell you; to motivate yourself, you’ve got to have self-drive, push harder, and you can do it? But they don’t tell you exactly what to do to get yourself in that state of mind. Perhaps you’re feeling a little too tired or in too deep to just get up and motivate yourself?
I had a boss who used to tell us to hit ourselves into motivation 
. Many employers seek to have motivated staff but don’t put in an enabling environment. We keep seeking it from external sources: - more salary, better bosses, better employers, and many times that motivation falls short, or is short-lived. So what truly motivates us?
As Miles Muroe put it, you’ll never be satisfied until you find your purpose. When you find your purpose, you don’t need to be reminded and jolted into action as it is when you’re simply earning a salary while pursuing someone else’s purpose. Purpose gives you that much-needed self-drive because you’re working towards a meaning that resonates deep within you. Miles Munroe used to say that the richest places on earth are the graveyards – as it hoards many souls that died without fulfilling their purpose or reaching their full potential.
Many people are living a life they dislike, working in conditions they would really love to change, but feel stuck and there’s a sense of helplessness. We live in a society that has dictated what success should look like and we have conditioned ourselves around those standards even though we’re deeply unhappy. It’s impossible to genuinely motivate someone that feels like a ‘slave’ to their work. So should we quit? Of course not, you need to find your purpose from right where you are. You have a talent that got you there, why not work on it, add so much value that it becomes the driving force for your everyday life, then once it’s matured enough and you’re able to manifest yourself profitably, you can spread your wings and fly.
Various reasons why we do not pursue our purpose could be as below;
- We live in a busy society and no one takes time to pause and recalibrate their lives to check their bearings every now and then. Social media and access to vast information have created so much noise around us, that we can hardly hear our own hearts speaking to us
- Mental Conditioning – those from colonized societies have been taught that they can only be employees and not employers, formal education has been fashioned in a way that teaches us to be followers and not leaders, so being able to run or own an empire seems impossible to us, so we aim for small goals, small businesses, and small entrepreneurship start-ups
- Fear: We fear what society will say when we make some declarations, we fear the economy and feel safer when someone takes the risk for us, we fear that we might fail, we fear being ridiculed, we fear that we’re not good enough, we fear that there’s someone better than you. Please note that the universe has a way of rewarding the courageous who step out in faith.
- Job security. This is a fallacy and we all know that, no need to belabor the point.
- We don’t know where to start. Sometimes you’ll never be 100% sure of your purpose, but you can start with your gut feeling.. Just start somewhere and the rest will follow. There are however several tools designed to help you find your passion and purpose, that you can use to enable you to get a head start on the same.
Whatever is keeping you from finding and or pursuing your purpose, just know that if you want it bad enough, you’ll be able to do something about it. Like Les Brown says;
Anything worth doing is worth doing badly
Whatever you do, don’t be a statistic, start working on yourself, invest in yourself and you’ll live a more meaningful life.
Read the article "What's your life assignment?"
