Motivation isn’t something I think about on a daily basis because I know that motivation isn’t everything, ACTION IS EVERYTHING.

Any ‘extra motivation’ is unnecessary because I follow a set of 5 proven effective strategies that people either don’t know about or don’t actually do. Furthermore, the most successful people I know do these 5 strategies either consciously or unconsciously.

The fact is, most people, are not using these strategies on a daily basis.

Unbeknownst to most, motivation didn’t come naturally for me, I had to consciously change my mindset to become a successful High Performance Health & Mindset Coach to celebrities and entrepreneurs in the Hollywood Hills. Now, my team and I teach these techniques and strategies to young aspiring entrepreneurs all over the world who want to be at their optimal health, both physically & mentally, while making an impact through WarriorTransformations.com

So what are the strategic steps?

Remember, reading these 5 strategies is not enough, YOU MUST DO THEM TO GET RESULTS!

“Within you right now is the power to do things you never dreamed possible….” – Maxwell Maltz

1. Visualize Your Wins

You can ask anyone from a personal development guru to an elite athlete, and each will tell you that visualizing your performance is the key to motivation and success.

Conscious Visualisation is underutilized to say the least. As popularized by Maxwell Maltz’s book, Psycho-Cybernetics, Maltz describes how visualizing what you want to achieve literally re-programs your ‘Reticular Activating System” (RAS) otherwise known as your subconscious mind to seek out opportunities to take you in that direction.

‘This power becomes available to you just as you can change your beliefs.” – Maxwell Maltz

Every human feat started out with an idea, a vision. It was the relentless pursuit of the vision that brought it forth on to existence. Everything begins with the vision, the dream, and the goal.

Getting clear on what you want and then visualizing it – DAILY – builds belief and certainty that you can achieve the goal. This belief not only provides motivation, but aligns your actions towards the goal as well.

Sports psychologists have known this for a long time. The first time I was introduced to visualization was in college while pursuing my degree in Sports Science and Physiology. My professor explained why athletes are advised to visualize a successful performance before they begin because it leads to a more successful outcome.

This visual preparation proves true, and a multitude of research evidence attests to the role of psychological factors as determinants of elite performance. Orlick and Partington (1998), for example, identified that psychological “success factors” such as visualisation as a hallmark of successful athletes. Additionally, Olympic athletes engage in more visualization than less successful performers (Gould, Diffenbach, & Moffett, 2002).

Olympic and World champions have high self-confidence and motivation because they employ visualization and self-talk to both prepare for competition and to remain focused during high-level performances (Durand-Bush & Salmela, 2002).

You too can use visualization to keep motivated and perform at your best. When visualizing, you’re re-confirming to your own mind that you are capable, you are willing, and are motivated to achieve success. Daily visualization of your goals builds clarity and certainty.

When you become certain that you will achieve such a goal, motivation becomes you. You no longer feel like you need motivation because you are motivated – you are unstoppable.

For successful visualization, set time aside at least  5-10 minutes each day to really visualize what you want and imagine yourself achieving it over and over again.

Attach positive emotions to the actions needed to achieve. This has helped me immensely in my efforts to achieve financial, physical, and goals as a mentor many times.

2. Mentors Are a Must

Most people realize the importance of mentors but do they actually go out and get one?

I have many mentors in my life. Three of my biggest personal mentors have kept me motivated and molded who I am today. Dr. John Berardi in health & fitness, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Positive Psychology and Tai Lopez in business.

Tai lopez is a major proponent of mentors and credits almost all of his success to them.

Find a mentor and spend as much time with them as possible. You must find someone who is where you want to be in life or has a particular skill you desire. For example, if you want to have a terrific athletic looking body, find someone who has that and learn from them. If you want a successful restaurant, find someone who owns a chain of successful restaurants and learn from them. I wanted to know how to reach millions of people and influence them positively so I found Tai Lopez and Joel Brown to mentor me.

A good mentor is someone who you truly look up to and respect.

A good mentor is somebody who you don’t want to let down.

Mentors help with motivation in 3 ways:

1) You get to see what they do and become motivated as you practice your own version.

2) You don’t want to disappoint your mentor so you’re motivated to get results.

3) A good mentor may challenge you to step up and be your best – which can be extremely motivating.

Do you have a quality mentor?

If not, get one ASAP.

3. Track your progress

Tracking your progress is a fantastic way to stay motivated. Most people already know this, but are you currently doing it?

17 years ago when I first started working out I used to write down every exercise I did: how many repetitions and the number of sets. Each time I would work out I would compare my progress with what I did the week before. If I could progress 1 or 2 reps each week it was deeply satisfying and helped me to stay motivated over the long run.

I remember people would often ask me how I stayed motivated. It was an awkward question for me to answer because I didn’t feel like it took any effort to stay motivated. I was in competition with myself and I could always check in on how I was doing. Seeing observable progress is motivating in whatever you do.

Give yourself specific dates to stop and monitor progress. Daily, weekly, monthly & yearly check in dates are all useful. Find out what works best for you and keep yourself accountable.

A trick I use as a trainer is to cut new clients carbohydrates immediately so that they lose a lot of water weight in the first week. This allows them to see rapid progress and provides them with a boost of motivation to continue.

Tracking your results whether it is in fitness, business, or relationships is crucial for motivation. It makes the goal or challenge a game. Set yourself up for success by tracking and defining how you will see progress early on. Look for progress and make it easy on yourself.

What you focus on grows!

What you track improves!

In order to stay motivated by tracking progress first get clear on your goal and then identify your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), the items that if you focus on will take you towards your goal.

When I started working out, my KPI’s were how much weight I lifted, how many reps and sets I did, how many workouts per week I performed and how much water I drank per day.

What are the most important things for you to track?

What are the best progress indicators you could track in your health, mindset and business?

Dr. Berardi would encourage me to set outcome goals, like put on 10lbs of muscle, but focus on the behavioural goals like eating every 2-3 hours. The outcome goal is the result you want but you get there by focusing on the daily actions that will take you to your goals.

Figure out your outcome and bag your goals and then…….TAKE ACTION NOW!

4. Celebrate small wins

High achievers like you and I have big ambitions, which is great but you know what, it can also hold us back IF we allow it to cause frustration.

“Frustration can lead to stagnation!” – Mark Dhamma

If things are not coming as fast as we like we may lose patience, give up, or distract ourselves with other things. In order to keep momentum place a high value on celebrating small wins.

When you accomplish mini goals or small achievements celebrate and savour the moment. We know from positive psychology research that accomplishments are a pillar of wellbeing. Robbing ourselves of accomplishment by not celebrating the small wins can rob you of momentum.

Dr. Fred Bryant is the lead positive psychology researcher on savoring. Savoring is the use of thoughts and actions to increase the intensity, duration, and appreciation of positive experiences and emotions. The concept of savoring can be used as a way to maximize the potential benefits that positive experiences and emotions can have on your life.

Savoring small wins and allowing yourself to feel good about them helps to build positive emotions and momentum. When you reward yourself with positive emotions for completing a task my research shows that you’re more likely to feel motivated to complete another task.

We also know from positive psychology studies that positive emotions build psychological assets like creativity and allow you to spot more opportunities in your environment. Savoring produces positive emotions, reinforces positive actions and can give you the emotional juice to keep you motivated on achieving your goal.

5. Spend more time around people who are more successful than you

Most people understand this one too but, again, do they actually do it?

From reading over 300 books about success and personal development I thought I knew the importance of spending time with people more successful than yourself.

Jim Rohn is famous for saying:

“Show me the 5 people you hang around with and I will show you your future.”

I have known about this phenomenon for many years. Being a trainer for celebrities and entrepreneurs, I’m very familiar with the study of Framingham, MA by Christakis and Fowler that show what happens to a Framingham resident when they became obese – his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese too.

I’ve told my clients for years that if they want a quick shortcut to getting the body and health they want, then hang out with people who already have it and reduce the time spent with their unhealthy friends.

One of my mentors, Bill Walsh, the famous business speaker told me:

“If you hang around with your 4 poor friends Mark, you will be the 5th.”

Likewise, if you hang around with 4 successful friends, you’ll be the 5th.

Christakis and Fowler also found that a Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese.

“People are connected, and so their health is connected”, Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Drinking and smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increases your chance of smoking by 36 percent.

From studying high performance I knew of the 2,000 study of dorm mates at Dartmouth College by economist Bruce Sacerdote. He found that they appeared to influence each other with good and bad study habits — such that a roommate with a high grade-point average would drag upward the G.P.A. of his lower-scoring roommate, and vice versa.

One thing’s for sure, your friends have a huge influence over you, so you can choose to hang around with unmotivated, unsuccessful people and become unsuccessful yourself or you can spend time with motivated successful people and become successful yourself.

I only really grasped the importance of this when I moved to Hollywood and started hanging around with people like Tai Lopez, James Swanwick, Eli Wilhide, RSD Tyler, Brandon Carter, Michael Morelli Jr and all of the celebrities and entrepreneurs I train. It completely changed my reality and motivation.

When you’re the most successful person in your peer group it’s difficult to get motivated, because you’re already King of the Hill. That’s why they say in athletics that it’s easy to get to the top but difficult to stay there. When you know you’re number 1, how do you stay motivated?

However, if you’re the runt of the litter and all of your friends are way more successful than you thats an UNCOMFORTABLE place to be. And what motivated humans even more than pleasure? PAIN!

You will be more motivated to move away from pain than you will be to move toward pleasure. Being the least successful person in your network is painful, it motivates you, but also it inspires you because you know if your friends can do it you can do it too.

It’s funny, the incident that really proved to me the effects of the people you spend time with and motivation happened when I was working for Tai Lopez as part of my mentorship. He asked me to call all of his business coaching clients, because I’m a qualified Executive Performance Coach, to check up on them to see how they’re doing. I spoke to hundreds of Tai’s clients and very quickly I started to notice a pattern.

It got to the point that within 3 minutes of the call I knew if the person I was speaking to took the 5 people rule seriously. It was laughably easy. If the person answered and I asked them if they completed their tasks and I could hear energy, motivation and determination in their voice I would simply ask, who are the people you spend the most time with? 9 out of 10 times it was people more successful than they. If the person was noncommittal in their answers, wishy washy, hadn’t really got anything done I knew that they spent the most time with people who are at their level of success or less successful people. They were too comfortable.

The Enemy Of SUCCESS Is COMFORT! – Mark Dhamma

P.S. Work like crazy to get into a more successful social circle. Find a mastermind group of winners, or go to events and network like crazy with like minded people.

Remember, motivation is just the starting point, it’s habits and the right environment that carry you through.

The above 5 secrets are excellent habits to have that will keep you focused and motivated.

P.P.S. For reading this article to the end, you qualify to get instant access to my free video training – a special gift for readers of Addicted2Success – where you’ll discover the truth about success and my proven secrets to how you can always feel motivated to take massive action, starting today.

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