The word encouragement emanates from the Latin word ‘Cor’, meaning ‘heart’. It means to give courage, confidence or hope. Having courage is having the ability

to disregard fear and to be brave. The easiest way to be brave and fearless is

to listen to and follow your heart. To further your level of success you must

establish a system for self-encouragement.

Pursue activities that you feel passionate about.

Performing activities that you enjoy and that are fulfilling will help you to build momentum toward your life of EASE. As mentioned in Step Three of the Creating Your Ideal Body and Life of EASE chapter, in the Activate Your Weight Loss Book, it is the feelings that achieving your goals will give you that make them fulfilling in the first place. The most important aspect of establishing your system for encouragement is to focus your attention on the feelings that achieving your ideal life will give you. There is no point performing activities that do not make you feel compelled to perform them. You will know if the activity is

correct for you by instinct and by the feelings you get when you perform them.

Before setting any goal or performing any activity, ask yourself the following

questions:

Why do I want to achieve this goal?

What is the underlying feeling it will give me?

What does this mean to me?

Is this feeling compelling enough to maintain my motivation in the long term?

Self-acknowledgement

An excellent way

to encourage yourself, and to become more aware of your progress, is to

acknowledge yourself for your achievements. Often we get caught up in the

things that we haven’t achieved in our lives, which take our focus away from

what is really happening.

If you are struggling to see any personal progress I recommend writing a list of

everything you have achieved in your life. This will very quickly give you a

different perspective on your life and the progress you are making toward your

goals.

Perhaps the best way to acknowledge yourself is to reward yourself every time you achieve a significant goal. Rewarding yourself builds motivation and confidence. Each time you achieve a goal, CELEBRATE!  You deserve it! 

Rewards also close-off the energy that was created while moving toward the goal. If you don’t acknowledge yourself for achieving a goal, it will actually become unfinished business and, even though you have achieved it, some past energy will be stored thus not making 100% of your energy available in the present.

Design a list of rewards that you can give yourself for achieving your goals. These could be tangible rewards such as a dinner out with friends, a new piece of clothing, a pampering day at the spa or a well-earned holiday, or intangible rewards such as feelings. You will notice, as you begin to achieve your goals, that the feelings of achieving the goal are often the greatest rewards. The feelings of

strong self-confidence, self-belief and heightened self-worth that come with

achieving your goals are priceless.

Self-appreciation

Another excellent way of encouraging yourself is to have gratitude for all of the things you have in your life. Often we get caught up in the negative things or the things that we don’t have or don’t want in our lives, and this takes our focus away from all the positive things that we do have.

If you are struggling to find the positives about yourself, I recommend keeping a pen and paper beside your bed, and each night before you go to sleep writing down everything that happened during the day that you are grateful for. Within no time you will have a very different perspective on yourself, your life and the things and people in it. 

Accountability and support group

Identifying key people in your life that you can share your vision of an ideal life with and asking them for their encouragement and support to help you to achieve it is a great way to encourage yourself. Even better, why not all support each other and form an EASE creation group, where you meet regularly to discuss your goals and vision for your life of EASE. In doing this you will not only encourage each other and feel supported, but you will also keep each other accountable to follow through on your plans.

List the people you would like to have in your EASE creation group below.

Well that brings us to the end of this three part article series on Activating Your Motivation. If you follow just one or two of the suggestions in the articles I guarantee you will start to build a greater sense of internal motivation which can only lead to you achieving all of your goals in a lot easier fashion.