Now a household name, Kriss Akabusi has experienced good days and bad days, he’s been at the top of his game and been left wondering where to go next… in short his life has echoes with the lives of most people. Kriss shared his experiences and some of the things he has learned about maintaining motivation to achieve peak performance at a Go MAD Conference earlier this year. Here are 7 tips from Kriss to help you consider how you can increase your personal levels of motivation:
1. Learn from defeat in the arena
Throughout your lives three things will be significant in helping you to be the best in your personal arenas; Passion, Pride and a ‘Can-do’ Attitude. The ‘can-do’ attitude shows through in how you look at your vision, how confident you are when approaching your goals, how you take the experience of ‘defeat’… and more importantly, what you learn from defeat. Defeat can be one of two things. It can be the thing that stops you moving forward to other successes, or it can be the learning curve for your future victories. Allow yourself to learn from your defeats.
2. Be the best you believe you can be
Remember that any arena worth being in has its’ competitors. Firstly do you know who your competitors are? Consider how you view them and the impact they could possibly have on your achievements? It is best to adopt a ’let’s get it on’ mentality with your competition, relishing the fact that they are there to keep you on your toes. In your arena you may find yourself wishing the competition were less successful or were less challenging. It is important to realise that in your own arena you won’t always be the best, but you can always have the mindset of being the best you believe you can be.
3. Seek Excellence in the arena
Those who demonstrate excellence in the arena every day possess the following characteristics. They are: Innovators who consider all the possibilities; They are Team Players who ensure they involve others effectively; They are aware of who they are and are grounded by strong beliefs. To build on your excellence in the arena focus on developing in these three areas.
4. FIT for Success – FOCUS
Focus – determine your focus through goals… outcome goals and performance goals, long term goals and short terms goals, interim goals and daily goals. It’s not what the goal is; it’s what it does. Having a goal enables you to release power, energy and vitality into something that is important in your daily living. It will give you something to centre your passion, pride and 'can do' attitude on. Having goals like these even if not attained will affect not just yourself but also your team mates, your work colleagues, your friends and family, your community… in some way you will affect the world! What differences are you making?
5. FIT for Success – INNOVATION
Innovation is a key element in enabling successful people to adapt to new situations. The path to success in a new arena may not be easy. Some days you may need to really push yourself to keep going. On these days you learn by giving different things a go – by innovating. It is important to recognise that it is not how many times that you fall over that matters, it’s how many times you pick yourself up again that’s important. You can define how you will approach the change – fall over and stay there or pick yourself up and carry on.
6. FIT for Success – TEAMWORK
Teamwork works… something that just about everybody would agree with as common sense… but how often is common sense common practice? When combined with FOCUS and INNOVATION teams can really dare to do something different. If teams have focus through clear goals, are prepared to work as one as opposed to individuals and are prepared to innovate to work in a different way they really are FIT for Success. Increase your personal motivation by being part of a team that is FIT for Success.
7. Echoes in Eternity
To maintain personal motivation, momentum can be gained by reflecting on what you are leaving behind for others and what the legacy of your success will be. Lets draw some inspiration from the Gladiator movie and reflect on a scene, which contained the following lines:
“Ultimately we are all dead men and we cannot choose the how or when. But what we can choose, is how we are remembered, for the things we do in this life leave echoes in eternity.”
A question to ask yourself:
What will be your echoes in eternity?
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