16 Ways to Motivate yourself

1. Find your soul purpose

How do you know what your true life is? Or what your soul's purpose is? How do you know how to live this purpose? The answers to these questions are yours for the taking, but you must seize the answers and not wait to be given them. No one will give you the answers.

2. Learn visioneering

You won't do anything you can't picture yourself doing. Visioneering is just another word for picturing yourself.

3. Change yourself first

Don't change other people. It doesn't work. You'll waste your life trying. You must be the change you wish to see in others.

By being what you want them to be, you lead by inspiration. Nobody really wants to be taught by lectures and advice. They want to be led through inspiration.

4. Program your bio computer

If you're a regular consumer of the major news programs, you belong to a very persuasive and hypnotic cult. You need to be de-"programmed."

Start by altering how you listen to electronic radio gossip, the news, and shock and schlock TV shows. We passively feed ourselves with stories about serial killers and violent crime without any conscious awareness of the choice we're making. Don't look to the media to tell you what's happening in your life. Be what's happening.

5. Try interactive listening

We all have certain business associates or family members that we think of as we do television sets. As they speak to us, we have a feeling that we already know what they're going to say. This lowers our own consciousness level, and a form of mental laziness sets in.

6. Perform your little rituals

See yourself as a shaman or medicine man who needs to dance and sing to get the healing started. Make up a ritual that is yours and yours alone—a ritual that will be your own shortcut to self-motivation. As you read through these various ways to motivate yourself, you might have noticed that action is often the key. Doing something is what leads to doing something. It's a law of the universe: An object in motion stays in motion.

7. Be your own disciple

When we resist a small temptation, we take on a small power. When we resist a huge temptation, we take on huge power. William James recommended that we do at least two things every day that we don't want to do—for the very reason that we don't want to do them—just to keep will-power alive. By doing this, we maintain our awareness of our own will. Self-discipline, he notes in The Book of Virtues, comes from the word "disciple." When you are self-disciplined, you have simply decided—in matters of the will—to become your own Disciple.

8. Find your inner Einstein

Every human has the capacity for some form of genius. You don't have to be good with math or physics to experience genius level in your thinking. To experience Einstein's creative level of thinking, all you have to do is habitually use your imagination.

This is a difficult recommendation for adults to follow, though, because adults have become accustomed to using their imaginations for only one thing: worrying. Adults visualize worst-case scenarios all day long. All their energy for visualization is channeled into colorful pictures of what they dread.

9. Stay hungry

A major part of living a life of self-motivation is having something to wake up for in the morning—something that you are "up to" in life so that you will stay hungry. The vision can be created right now—better now than later. You can always change it if you want, but don't live a moment longer without one. Watch what being hungry to live that vision does to your ability to motivate yourself.

10. Tell yourself a true lie

Think up some stories about who you would like to be. Your subconscious mind doesn't know you're fantasizing (it either receives pictures or doesn't). Soon you will begin to create the necessary blueprint for stretching your accomplishments. Without a picture of your highest self, you can't live into that self. Fake it till you make it. The lie will become the truth.

11. Learn to sweat in peace

The harder you are on yourself, the easier life is on you. Or, as they say in the Navy Seals, the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war. You can always "stage" a bigger battle than the one you have to face. If you have to make a presentation in front of someone who scares you, you can always rehearse it first in front of someone who scares you more. If you've got something hard to do and you're hesitant to do it, pick out something even harder and do that first. Watch what it does to your motivation going into the "real" challenge.

12. Choose the happy few

Politely walk away from friends who don't support the changes in your life. The people you spend time with will change your life in one way or another. If you associate with cynics, they'll pull you down with them. If you associate with people who support you in being happy and successful, you will have a head start on being happy and successful.

13. Don’t just do something… sit there.

"All of man's troubles," said Blaise Pascal, "stem from his inability to sit alone, quietly, in a room for any length of time." Notice that he did not say some of man's troubles, but all.

14. Kill your television

You can actually change your life by turning off your television. Maybe just one evening a week, to start with. What would happen if you stopped trying to find life in other people's shows and let your own life become the show you got hooked on?

When you are watching television you are watching other people do what they love doing for a living. Those people are on the smart side of the glass, because they are having fun, and you are passively watching them have fun. They are getting money, and you are not.

15. Promise the moon

When President John Kennedy promised that America would put a man on the moon, the power of that thrilling promise alone energized all of NASA for the entire time it took to accomplish the amazing feat. In his book about the Apollo 13 mission, Lost Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell called Kennedy's original promise "outrageous." But it showed how effective being outrageous could be.

16. Make somebody’s day

"You cannot live a perfect day, without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you."

I agree with that. But there's a way to make sure you can't be repaid—and that's doing something for someone who won't even know who did it.

You can create luck for yourself by creating it for someone else. If you know about someone who is hurting financially, and you arrange for a few hundred dollars to arrive at their home, and they don't even know who you are, then you've made them lucky. By making someone lucky, something will then happen in your own life that also feels like pure luck