Have you ever woken up, and just didn’t feel like doing school work no matter how hard you tried? This happens to a lot of our fellow iUP Owls actually, including me. Self-motivation is an important skill to learn so that this feeling won’t happen as often. Self-motivation can be anything from listening to music to just telling yourself “If I finish this, then I can take a break,” which are actually two of my favorite forms of self-motivation while I’m doing school work. While everyone has different techniques to motivate themselves, here are some potential ideas you can use that our fellow Owls have shared.

What Is Self-Motivation?

First off, what is self-motivation? Understanding what exactly this concept means could be the key between you and a better school year. The definition of self-motivation according to BetterUp.com is, “the internal drive that leads us to take action towards a goal.” There are many ways that a person can motivate themselves. From coursera.org, some examples are, “Put your goal on the calendar, make working toward your goal a habit, plan for imperfection, and set small goals to build momentum.” Using this basis of self-motivation, let’s take a look at what some iUP Owls say to further this explanation. 

Owl Responses

To start, I asked our Editor-in-Chief Eve Bamber about what she does to keep herself motivated. She says, “Motivation is sometimes hard to rely on, so I prefer to focus instead on discipline to keep going. This being said, it’s nice to keep a specific motivation in mind and return to my “why.” It’s easy to get caught up in the mundane tasks of moving through school assignments, but I try to remind myself of the end goal. By learning as much as possible and getting high grades, I’ll be on track to earn a college degree and enter a profession I’m passionate about, with the goal of being able to help and aid others as much as possible. In order to not lose sight of this, I try and create reminders around my working space – little things like post-its, to big ones like vision boards!” I completely love this form of motivation/discipline. When asked if she recommends that other people try this, she replied, “Definitely give it a try. Get excited about the future possibilities that your work as a student will bring you! Of course, this is sometimes easier said than done, so always be sure to further develop those studious habits and discipline to keep you going when the going gets tough.” Beautifully said in my opinion.

Our next iUP student is yet another Bamber: Associate Editor Marcus Bamber. He says that he, “Listen to motivational podcasts, just try to get ahead in school as much as I can. It really helps to eliminate all distraction and view schoolwork/education as a medium by which you can improve yourself.” He had something very interesting to say when asked if other students should try this method. He states, “To be honest, once you can eliminate distractions and truly isolate yourself with the learning process for upwards of 8+ hours a day, you will begin to see schoolwork as not only something that you can breeze through, but something that you can gain so much more from.”

The third iUP student who gave his commentary is Staff Writer Will Faulkenberry. His form of self-motivation in his own words is to, “Tell myself I can go outside and walk around with a stick and practice accents after I do.” He thinks this is really relaxing to do; it sure does sound fun, give it a try, and who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with it too.

Adding to the list of iUP students is Sports Section Editor Danny Hall, who states, “I keep myself motivated to work on school by thinking about what I can do after my schoolwork is finished for just a second, and then I start to work specifically to chase that ‘reward’, whatever it is, whether it be for me to go walk around outside or to stay inside to play video games.” This is a great method in my opinion. He also says, “I do recommend this as long as one doesn’t get too distracted with the thought of the ‘reward.’ I feel with my method, moderation is key with the mindset that I have when I do school, just like with anything else in life.” I completely agree with him on this thought.

The fifth and final iUP student to share their opinion was Staff Writer Autumn Friesenhahn. She stated that, “I tell myself that I can play video games afterwards.” Additionally, she said, “It depends how much screen time school took.” I agree with her on this because too much screen time can be an issue for sure.

Conclusion

I loved getting the commentary and being able to both learn and share these different ways that our fellow iUP students stay motivated. So the next time you wake up feeling like you have no motivation, just try a new strategy or maybe even make up your own. See where your creativity takes you and you may actually be amazed by the results!

References:

1. https://www.betterup.com/blog/what-is-self-motivation#:~:text=To%20be%20specific%2C%20self%2Dmotivation,15%20minutes%20you’re%20exhausted.
2. https://www.coursera.org/articles/how-to-motivate-yourself