Increasing Your Happiness and Motivation

Happiness and Motivation are two very relavant subjects to horse therapy and equine courses because they are both promoted during the therapy sessions. Happiness and Motivation can build confidence and encourage a healthier lifestyle! 

"Have you been feeling unmotivated, stagnant, or bored recently? Is there a sense that your days are repetitive or routine?

These emotions tend to have something in common: passivity. We’re waiting for something to happen, something to change, something to move us forward in our lives or relationships. Life seems to be happening around us, but we can’t seem to get on the forward-moving track we’d like to be on. Therefore, we live day to day in passive repetition.

What keeps us motivated to carry on the daily repetition? Having things to look forward to: vacations, holidays, days off from work, weekends, promotions, a big event coming up, etc. When feeling stagnant, it’s easy to pass off the majority of our days, weeks, months, or even years while looking toward significant “checkpoints.”

Checkpoints are the events that keep us motivated through the repetitive or mundane moments in our lives. For example, how often have we thought along the lines of, “if I can just can through the next few weeks of work, I’ll have a vacation”?

 

Why Checkpoints Are Important

Checkpoints become greatly important in creating satisfaction in our lives and relationships. We need to increase what we look forward to in our years, months, weeks, and days — as individual people, as friends, as couples, as families. Most people have some sort of long-term checkpoint in the back of their minds already (family, career, etc.). But, without short-term checkpoints, long-term checkpoints can essentially shove aside significant chunks of life. We end up pushing precious days –which we won’t get back — behind us in order to achieve a later goal. In order to resolve this, we need to keep one eye on the long-term checkpoints and one eye on the short-term checkpoints.

What can checkpoints be? They can be anything we want them to be: dinner with a friend, family dinners, reading a book, hiking, baking, cooking, going out with friends, playing with your kids, going to the gym, going on a date, watching a movie in bed, etc. It is also possible that these checkpoints can become routine. This is okay. The idea isn’t to avoid repetition as much as it’s to create meaning and satisfaction. So, if one of your checkpoints is meeting a friend for a snack at a set time every week (which is part of your routine that you also look forward to), then it’s good.

One area of caution: keep the checkpoints healthy. If your checkpoints are becoming increasingly isolating, risky or self-harming (e.g., drinking, substance use, gambling, stealing, binge eating, promiscuity), impulsive or compulsive (e.g., over-shopping, overspending frequently), or harmful to others, professional help may be needed. Something more serious likely is the cause of these types of behaviors and urges.

How to Create Checkpoints

Here are some suggestions to help create checkpoints:

1. Make a list. Make a list of things, no matter how seemingly insignificant some of them may seem at first, that you would look forward to. These can be things you already do or have done.

    

2. List your current checkpoints. These are anything coming up in the next several months that you’re feeling motivated for, no matter how small or large. It could be a project at work, a Skype session with a friend or family member later, a date on Friday, vacation in two weeks, etc.
3. Space between. If you have a monthly calendar, put the currently existing checkpoints in, and visually note the space between them to see how far apart they are.
4. Fill in. Fill in the checkpoints you’d like to add, and put in a specific time for each one. Spread them out. If you do them too quickly, you’ll end up back where you are now. Also, if you don’t have enough on your list and see a lot of open calendar space, mark areas where you’d like to add some checkpoints. If scheduling is difficult, aim for simpler checkpoints (which can be equally as satisfying if it’s something meaningful to you).
5. Do them. Hopefully this step takes care of itself. If you have checkpoints set up, then these are things that you’re looking forward to.

Remember, this is purely about creating meaning and satisfaction in our lives that goes beyond a few long-term goals per year. Some less-desired repetitions (e.g., work) will probably always be there, to an extent. We want to create a feeling that says, “I’m looking forward to tomorrow (or whichever day) because of (checkpoint)” as often as we can. The more fulfilling checkpoints we have to look forward to and actively participate in, the more motivated and satisfied we will feel in our lives."

Source: http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2012/08/12/lifes-checkpoints-increasing...

 

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