- Autonomy: When you realise that you have a choice in life, it motivates you. When you think you don't have a choice, or that you are stuck, that's when you feel demotivated. So whenever you want to motivate yourself, ask yourself, what choices can I make? For example you have a choice to either stay in your miserable job or upgrade your skills and seek new opportunities. You have a choice to either be upset about past mistakes or learn from your mistakes and move on. Simply knowing that you have a choice, can boost your motivation.
- Relatedness: In order to stay motivated, you need to relate the task at hand to your values and purpose. If something is not related to your values and purpose, you'll lose interest and lose motivation. Relating your work, or your family time or anything important to your purpose and values gives you a powerful boost of motivation.
- Competency: We are most motivated when what we do is aligned with our competency (i.e. what we're good at) or something we enjoy learning about. Think about the designer who loves design and is really good at it, he/she won't have trouble spending hours doing design because he/she is motivated by working on something he/she enjoys doing. When we're not good at something and do not want to learn about it, this kills our motivation.
Here are some practical tips to apply the ARC motivational model in your life:
- Whenever you feel demotivated, ask yourself which of the above 3 motivation factors are you lacking. Are you lacking autonomy, or relatedness, or competency?
- Depending which one is missing, do the following:
- If you're missing autonomy: think of all the choices you can make (no matter how absurd or impossible they seem), and think what actions you can take towards exploring these choices. Simply working towards more choices in your life will motivate you (and who knows it might open a door you never imagined before!)
- If you're missing relatedness: ask yourself how you can connect what you're doing to serving Allah SWT, what that means practically to you, and how you can constantly remind yourself of this relatedness.
- If you're missing competency: ask yourself where you can develop the competency you need to be motivated in your field or who else has the same competency and how you can learn from him/her. If you really have no interest, it's best to either change the task and work on something that would be of interest for you to develop your competency in.
Understanding what gets you motivated or demotivated is the first step towards leading a productive lifestyle. Never allow yourself to be demotivated without understanding why or taking action to get yourself out of the demotivation rut.
I pray this helped you.