Staying motivated is one of the critical success factors when it comes to completing a course of study.
A motivated student finds it easier to remain committed, to meet deadlines and to ‘burn the midnight oil’. One of your priorities as a learner should therefore be to keep your levels of motivation as high as possible. This is especially important if your course of study is going to stretch over a significant amount of time.
Three of the main techniques that you can use to keep your motivation up are:
- Breaking up difficult problems or tasks into ‘doable’ components.
- Using ‘motivational mementos’.
- Marking and celebrating milestones and successes.
Let us briefly look at these in turn:
‘Divide and rule’
Learners often feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work, or the complexity of the problems, that they are faced with. The old saying that you can only eat an elephant ‘bite by bite’ holds true here! Dividing your learning tasks or research projects into manageable units will do wonders for your motivation.
Motivational mementos
When we are unmotivated it is often because we are unable to see beyond the specific project or problem confronting us. ‘Motivational mementos’ can help us to place the project or problem in perspective by allowing us to see it in terms of the ‘big picture’. The best way to use these mementos is to constantly remind yourself of the following:
- Why you started the course of the study in the first place
- The benefits of completing your studies/gaining a qualification
- The people, or things, that inspires you to complete your goals
- The possible consequences of not completing your course of study
Marking the milestones
Try to see your course of study not merely as on huge mountain to be climbed but rather as a journey with several significant milestones. Make sure that you mark those milestones by celebrating your achievements and rewarding yourself for the effort that it took to get there. You probably have a very good idea of the things that you would regard as a proper reward (a weekend away, a meal in good restaurant, a book you’ve always wanted). What you choose as your rewards is not all that important. What is important is the message they communicate: “
You came this far, you can go all the way!”
It is true that staying motivated is sometimes very difficult. It is therefore all the more important that you use techniques like those mentioned above to help you ‘stay the course’.