7 Steps to Increase Motivation:

1.  Ask yourself what you really want?  Will you be satisfied with passing grades as long as you graduate, and get some sort of job or do you want something more?  Are you willing to make major changes in your life to make sure these things happen? This is decision time. What kind of decisions do you need to make?

Success will never be a big step in the future; success is a small step take just now.
—Jonatan Martensson

2. Begin with a vision of your future. What do you want and plan to achieve?  Set long-term goals for yourself. Find a cause, something you are passionate about, something you are committed to. Define your purpose in life. Have a dream. Get a notebook and describe your vision.

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Visions with action can change the world!                            —  Joel Arthur Barker

3. Think seriously about your vision, cause, purpose or dream. That’s just the beginning. Dreams don’t come true  by themselves. What decisions will you need to make in order to reach your dream, to make your vision a reality?

Don’t let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.  — Author Unknown

4. This entire website will suggest many possible decisions. Learn new Study Skills, Organize your time,  and learn  new strategies. Add to your notebook a list of decisions you make. Do not say “I will try to…” or “I should…”  Decide to do these things. Write “I will…”  Be as specific as you can.

   Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.   — Henri Bergson

5.  Act on your decisions. Create a plan.
Take a calendar and list things you plan to work on, week by week:
Create and follow a study schedule.
Learn how to improve reading skills and begin practicing.
Avoid parties where most people end up drunk. This reduces motivation. Your time is better used for other tasks.
Finish each day writing in your notebook.  Describe the steps you took toward your goal. What will you do tomorrow?

In the dim  background of our mind we know what we ought to be doing but somehow we cannot start.                                                                             — William James

6. Choose friends whose goals are similar to yours, friends who will support and encourage you. They might even offer helpful advice. People who laugh and belittle your efforts are not real friends. Be persistent, even stubborn. Believe in yourself. Keep reminding yourself you really can do this. Never give up

Be who you are and say what you feel because those you mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.                                    —   Dr. Seuss

7.  Jesse Jackson said “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” 
You might use this or other quotes that you find inspirational. Put them on your bulletin board. Write them inside the covers of your notebooks, put them where you will read them often.

We cannot do everything at once, but we can do something at once.   — Calvin Coolidge

Choice Is Motivation

We hear the term "empowerment" a lot these days. For those who need a reminder, empowerment refers to liberty and our ability to achieve what we desire. Motivation, on the other hand, is that what keeps your spirit and enthusiasm high. Your need for self-empowerment or self-motivation in life comes from within. Motivation gives you something to which to look forward, and it makes everything seem attainable – even those goals that may seem impossible.

Mainly what motivates you is the dream of having a better life, career, family or love. Acquiring self-motivation can be a difficult process to start, but it ultimately all comes down to making a choice. Your decision to choose an appropriate motivational tool can be more difficult than you might think.

Personal motivation is a very important skill in this day and age, especially when we have so many distractions to pull us away from tasks at hand. When you can maintain your focus on the tasks at hand, you will begin to see you journey take great, positive strides toward the success you seek. I've talked about and given ideas in previous blog posts regarding your focus, but how do you stay motivated when some days are filled with challenges? Feeling empowered is important, but being a self-starter – a person who can pick herself up and jump right back in – is the foundation of staying motivated.

External motivators are short-lived. Others in your life can act as cheerleaders to help keep you in action, but it all comes down to you and your own personal interest in the game at hand. You are your biggest competitor, and only you can dictate the outcome. In reality you're dealing with more than just one element in life. It's not like you can turn off everything and just solely focus on the one piece on which you want to work. For example, say you really want that promotion at work but need to improve a few of your hard skills first. That means taking a few courses to get up to speed; but your family needs you in the evenings to help out, your significant other wants your time after the children go to bed, and your weekends are filled with soccer, tennis, gymnastics, housework, yard work and God knows what else. All these elements are not just a flip of the switch so you can give 100% to completing the courses and get the promotion.

For most of you who are reading and have already begun to relate to a similar situation in your life or are beginning to pull together potential solutions, great! When we're looking in from the outside, the solutions seems so, well, obvious. But when you're caught in the middle of the challenge, they're hard to see.

It's important to remember that getting motivated in the first place was a choice you made. You chose to set a goal (the promotion), and you chose to seek out information that would allow you to reach that goal, finding out what skills necessary were needed and determining of which one(s) you might be in need. Taking the second step and seeking out more information indicates to you that you're in action and are motivated. With the balancing of all life's challenges that stand before you, your motivation is waning but you're still in choice.
Within making decisions and choices, there are ways you can increase your personal motivation. The key among these is setting a meaningful goal. The actions you complete along the way need to be supportive of your achieving your goal. When you move through your actions, you need to make observations with regard to how they either moved you closer or further away from your goal. Taking time to reflect along the way is important to maintaining your motivation.

Putting this back into our example, having a conversation with those in your family who are also decision-makers with regard to enabling you to take the necessary courses would be an action that's not only supportive of achieving your goal but would be moving you that much closer to the goal.

Self-motivation is a fundamental aspect that leads you to success in life. Being a motivated individual helps you push on through difficulties you encounter. Motivation brings out traits of you to excel in any area of your life – along with, of course, the use of your talents, skills and knowledge.

How to Keep Motivated

Motivation is easy to say, but it's difficult to do. You can easily give someone some word that contain motivation, but can you motivate yourself?

Actually, we can motivate ourselves and discover the secrets to maintain it. To keep passion in our life, the question is, how to motivate ourselves?

Motivation begin with decisiveness, firmness, or in other words this is the first secret of motivation. Do not ever look around you, motivation is no evidence that you can get from your surroundings, not the lessons learned from a book or web site, not the lesson from motivational seminars.

The secret of motivation was in your assertiveness to make your self passionate about living life and achieve what you want. Keep in your mind that you are the one who can motivate yourself and make yourself better in the future.