By Books Author Denise Turney

If you want sustainable success and happiness, you need to learn how to stay motivated during hard times. You need to maintain positive expectations with old projects, classic relationships, mature goals and change. Why?

Being motivated is easy during new starts unless you resist change. When things are new, you can imagine outcomes that suit your desires. Unwanted results have yet to reveal themselves. You can lie to yourself at the start.

It’s tough to stay motivated after small changes enter old routines. Your resistance to what is happening makes experiences hard. If only you felt safe and certain with every bit of change.

Let Go of Control to Stay Motivated

Change puts you outside of the realm of control. After all, it’s hard to control what you know little or nothing about. For instance, new, demanding jobs; out-of-state housing moves; sharp economic swings; unbounded commercial success; fascinating weight loss and new romantic relationships occur absence your experience in knowing how to handle them.

To keep pace with change, particularly unexpected change, you’ll have to enter learning mode. Prepare yourself for a series of mistakes. You’re in new territory. It may be weeks, months, before you start to feel like you know what you’re doing.

Current and Recent Hard Times

Although hard, bitter and tragic, COVID-19 was one such recent event. The event was so shockingly unexpected that, for weeks as it regards a vaccine, there was no one to seek for a certain answer. So much of the process to adapt to the harsh change, called for courage and the sheer motivation to lift your head and keep moving forward.

And, as tempting as it is to insulate yourself from hard times, in this world, be it COVID-19 or another great unprecedented challenge, insulting yourself from hard times may be impossible. Sure. You could motivate yourself by building a wall of routine, fighting hard to keep change from seeping inside your life. But you’d eventually find that boring.

Lifetime of Motivation

A better option is to use your imagination, inner vision and courage to stay motivated during hard times. Fortunately, although it may not be comfortable, it is doable. In fact, you can take a first step forward today. For example, you could read inspirational quotes and perseverance quotes. Furthermore, you could:

• Capture experiences that you are thankful for in a journal
• Pay attention
• Be aware of patterns tucked inside changes, including welcomed and unexpected changes. These patterns may hold clues to future successes.
• Respect yourself by being honest about what you see and experience. Avoid fantasy and illusion.
• Record weight loss and physical fitness achievements to strengthen workout motivation
• Read books about hard times resilient people faced and overcame
• Create a budget and start paying down debt to enter financial freedom

Help to Stay Motivated During Hard Times

• Get outside for walks, a jog or a bike ride. It’s amazing how motivating natural sunlight is
• Do something new each day, something new, fun and exciting
• Make raising your hands toward the ceiling, as if trying to stretch as tall as you can, part of your morning wake-up routine
• Removing yourself from people and routines that lend you to weighty feelings of guilt, shame, confusion and smallness (definitely don’t hang out with people who leave you feeling as if you’re not enough)
• Engage in at least three daily activities that make it easy for you to feel joy and peace
• Help someone else
• Listen to uplifting music

Start Getting Motivated

But don’t wait until you’re facing hard times to start taking the above steps. If you wait, you may find it particularly tough to start incorporating smart actions into your days.

During hard and easy times, connect with healthy people. Yes. It’s tempting to go it alone during hard times. But don’t give into this temptation. Too much time alone could find you feeling isolated and as if you don’t have help, as if you have to push through the hardest experiences by yourself all of the time. Reach out to inwardly healthy people. Talk through what you’re feeling.

Being around inwardly healthy people is healing. In fact, communication may be the best way through change, including hard change. Communication gives you access to direct, firsthand advice, insights and inspiration. When you hear others share their challenges, you feel less alone. You feel a belonging.

Read the fictional story of Mulukan, a six-year-old orphan, to stay encouraged. It is stories like Long Walk Up that can help you stay motivated during hard times. I wish you well!