How to Stay Motivated: 7 Actionable Strategies to Boost Motivation

Knowing how to stay motivated can mean the difference between reaching your goals and staying stuck. 

It’s easy to feel excited and motivated when starting something new, but that inspiration begins to fade once the novelty of an experience wears off. 

It’s even more difficult to stay motivated through challenging times, when we’re facing stressful situations we can’t control.

That’s why I’m sharing some of the best strategies to manage motivation – based on psychology, neuroscience, and years of experience coaching people through major challenges and reinventions. 

This article will teach you how to stay motivated so you can overcome obstacles, cope with stress, and stay on track.

Real-World Inspiration for Staying Motivated in Tough Times

The last few years have brought on challenges most of us have never experienced before. With the world in crisis, we can easily feel powerless and discouraged… which is why I want to share a story about James Bond Stockdale, the highest-ranked POW in the Vietnam War. 

During his time in captivity, he suffered through harrowing circumstances and tremendous levels of stress. He endured the loss of his fellow soldiers. He was routinely and horrifically tortured. He was imprisoned for more than seven years.

But despite all of this, Stockdale found ingenious ways to keep morale up and work together with other prisoners to survive. He created a tapping code to send out messages of encouragement to the people captured with him, send messages to his wife, and pass along information to military intelligence. 

After his release, he was interviewed about his experience. People wondered how he could keep going after seven-and-a-half years in a war prison. 

He must have been an optimist, right? 

According to the vice-admiral, the optimists often didn’t survive. They’d say things like, “We’ll be out by Christmas”, and would suffer severe disappointment when they were still captive long after Christmas came and went. 

The vice admiral didn’t put a due date on getting out of prison. He simply promised himself that he would make it. He didn’t know when, but he’d get out. 

Then he took action, to nurture those around him and keep going. 

During difficult times especially, it becomes even more challenging to stay motivated. 

You can’t predict what will happen. But, you can make the promise to yourself: “I’m getting through this.” 

You’re going to be badass. You’re going to take care of yourself. You’re going to take care of your family. You’re going to put the food on the table. 

Take each day at a time knowing that you don’t know when you’ll get there – but you are going to get through it. 

How to Stay Motivated (Science-Backed Techniques)

Everyone struggles to keep going at some point, experiencing dips in motivation and discouraging setbacks. It’s important to understand the science of how to stay motivated, so you can navigate those stressful times and keep moving towards your goals. 

You may have heard of dopamine, a neuromodulator associated with seeking and experiencing pleasure – but it’s so much more than just a “happiness” chemical. 

In an episode of The Huberman Lab Podcast, Stanford neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman, substantiates this: 

“Dopamine has all these incredible properties of increasing the amount of energy in our bodies and minds, and our ability to focus.”

If you’ve ever met someone who is extremely motivated and driven and compared them to someone who is completely indifferent and unmotivated, you’re seeing a difference in the level of dopamine in their systems.

By learning how to manage your dopamine levels, you can dramatically impact your motivation. 

When you add insights from psychology about what makes people more likely to stay motivated and work through challenges – you have powerful fuel for success.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a few strategies you can use to stay motivated. 

1. Challenge yourself (but not too much)

Novel experiences cause a rush of dopamine in your brain. Every time you complete a difficult task and learn something new, your brain rewards you, increasing the motivation to continue learning and embrace increasingly more difficult tasks.

The trick is to set the right level of challenge – and reframe failure as an essential ingredient for growth.

Many people shy away from difficult tasks due to the fear of failing. But by setting the right level of challenge, you can optimize your success and your motivation.

In fact, a 2018 study published in Science Daily observed that students who make mistakes while studying learn the information better, as long as the mistake is a near miss, or close to the actual answer.

Dr. Huberman suggests an 85 percent rule: to set the difficulty of your tasks so that you hit the mark 85 percent of the time. That other 15 percent gives you the “trial and error” factor to learn and grow while still maintaining motivation when goal setting.

What does that look like in practice?

• Set goals that are not easy, but not too difficult either. If you’re a runner who is comfortable running five miles, set a goal of six miles, rather than eight.
• Assign work goals that push you slightly outside of your comfort zone. This could mean taking a course or group coaching program to grow professionally, or taking on a new responsibility to energize your work life.

2. Step outside of the “perfect trap”

If you’re routinely avoiding challenges, consider whether your motivation is hiding behind perfectionism.

Perfectionism can be a great motivator when it’s framed in terms of improving your previous performance rather than comparing yourself to others. 

But when you’re too self-critical and preoccupied with the negative opinions of your peers, perfectionism can drastically reduce motivation. It’s also closely tied to impostor syndrome, in which you don’t feel you deserve success and lack confidence in your abilities. 

Use the following questions to recognize if perfectionism is destroying your motivation:

1. Do you put things off because you feel afraid to fail?
2. Do you resist trying because of fear of criticism or rejection?
3. Do you feel like less of a person if you make a mistake?
4. Do you feel like whatever you do, it’s not good enough?

Noticing these patterns is the first step to getting out of your own way. Then, you can start to break the cycle of self-doubt and release the weight of perfectionism holding you back.

Explore some strategies to overcome perfectionism, including shifting towards self-compassion and allowing yourself the freedom to make mistakes.

Reframe the narrative so you compare yourself to who you were yesterday, rather than to others with entirely different circumstances. By doing so, you motivate yourself to improve you, and carry this momentum forward into everything you do.

3. Embrace meaningful goals

Self motivation is the driving force behind your behavior. It pushes you to take action and keep going because you want to, not because someone told you to.

Before you commit to a goal, first you should ask yourself why you want to achieve it. That means differentiating between intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations.

Intrinsic motivation is more effective for achieving long-term goals. If a goal isn’t meaningful to you, it’s always going to be a struggle to feel motivated. 

So I want you to examine your goals. Ask yourself:

• Does this goal truly matter to me?
• Why do I want to achieve this goal?
• What do I expect to gain from this goal?
• Do I feel pressured by others to pursue this?

You can also train your brain to release dopamine while you’re working hard to achieve a goal, and use this as intrinsic motivation to complete it. Instead of focusing on rewards, focus on the effort itself, and the enjoyment of that effort. 

“Don’t spike dopamine before engaging in effort, and don’t spike dopamine after engaging in effort. Learn to spike dopamine from effort itself.”

~ Dr. Andrew Huberman

To do this, stop focusing only on getting to a destination. Slow down and appreciate all the benefits of the journey itself. This happens naturally when you go after meaningful goals, aligned with your core values and personal strengths.

4. Break up big goals into smaller, achievable targets

You can space out tasks to continuously regulate these hits of dopamine and take advantage of the natural rewards your brain gives you to help maintain motivation.

Use daily planning to create a schedule that lets you break down large goals into smaller, more manageable tasks. 

This lets you know how much time you should be spending on a specific task each day. It also enables you to prioritize the most important work, and create a clear framework for achieving smaller goals.

Then set to work achieving these goals. By consistently hitting your targets for the day or week, you can use these small dopamine bumps to propel you forward towards your next task and sustain motivation to achieve the bigger goal.

5. Build resiliency to stay motivated through times of stress

We can’t control everything. Even when you do your best, sometimes life has other plans. 

Perhaps you worked hard toward a promotion, and it fell through. Or, upsetting world events make it difficult to focus on your day-to-day responsibilities. 

So, how do we keep going after painful setbacks, avoid burnout, and stay motivated during times of stress? 

It starts by learning how to build resiliency.

If you want to build resiliency, you need a strong personal foundation. You need to build, what I call, the Four Pillars of Resilience:

Pillar 1: Know your core values

Your core values define what matters to you. Things like family, career, freedom, or social justice all represent different examples of values. 

Knowing which values matter the most will help make important decisions and stay motivated, especially during tough times. For example, in a financial crisis, you may need to sell your house or put that dream vacation on hold to prioritize providing for your family.

Pillar 2: Build on your strengths

We each have unique strengths. Think of strengths as any aspect of yourself that you can grow and improve upon—those skills or virtues that make you shine. When you learn how to identify your strengths, you can put them into play. You will naturally be more effective in meeting challenges, especially during difficult times.

Pillar 3: Align daily actions with long-term goals

Think of your daily actions as the building blocks of your life. When you plan your day with intention, you’ll create the kind of life you want, little by little. 

During a period of change, you can stay motivated by focusing on what you can do this very day.

Pillar 4: Take care of yourself

Daily health habits play a big part in how you approach life. Getting enough sleep, eating a balanced diet, regular exercise, paying attention to your mental health —if you don’t pay attention to these lifestyle habits, you won’t have enough energy to handle stress.

6. Get a motivation boost from your support system

Having a positive support system is extremely important when it comes to staying motivated and achieving goals. 

Since no one is an island, relying on those in your support system, especially coaches and mentors, to provide you with valuable advice can greatly help you develop and achieve your goals.

And when you do achieve success – no matter how big or small – sharing those wins has a compounding effect on your motivation to continue working.

That’s because receiving (and giving) recognition for achievements releases dopamine in the brain, resulting in feelings of pleasure. Your brain pays attention to this “feel-good” moment and starts to figure out how to repeat that action or behavior to achieve it again. 

Schedule regular meetings with supportive people to share your wins. This will help you build that reward circuit and increase your motivation to achieve even more.

7. Develop mental toughness

What factor plays an even bigger role than family income and test scores when it comes to measuring success in students? 

Mental toughness.

In her TedTalk, Angela Duckworth, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about her study in the Chicago public school district. She asked thousands of junior high school students to take “grit” questionnaires. 

The results found that grittier kids were more likely to graduate. Grit played an even bigger role than things like family income, standardized test scores, and how safe children felt while at school.

Like a muscle, you can strengthen mental toughness and increase your motivation and chances of success. Here’s how:

• Cultivate a growth mindset, in which you work consistently to improve yourself, learn from mistakes, and grow with experience.
• Take ownership of your actions, rather than playing the victim or blaming other people.
• Celebrate the success of others, knowing that their triumphs don’t mean your loss.
• Compete with yourself to get better, rather than compare your life to everyone else’s.

During stressful times, it becomes especially difficult to know how to find motivation. It is natural to feel ups and downs. Pace yourself and know when to take breaks. 

If you need a boost of confidence in your ability to succeed, check out our Online Course: Believing in Yourself. It’s full of actionable strategies and support for anyone struggling with self-doubt.