How to Find Motivational Tips that Work with Your Temperament

Inspiration /

It’s pretty easy to find motivational advice. There are tons of books on the subject, and if you search the internet, there are all sorts of blog posts and articles about it. As with any other topic, there is good motivational advice and bad motivational advice. However, just because the advice is good, it doesn’t mean it is good advice for you. One of the major factors in determining whether or not motivational advice will work for you is to know more about yourself, and why you are struggling with motivation.

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

You want to know two things. The first is which motivational tips will work best for you in general. Then, you’ll want to know which tips will work for you in a specific situation. You can then use this information to weed out advice that will never work for you, and then drill down into the best advice for a particular situation. In order to know what kind of tips work best with your temperament you could start with these general personality questions first:

  1. When faced with a difficult task, what is harder for you?
    • a) getting started
    • b) maintaining motivation until the job is finished
  2. If you are being rewarded for completing a task, what would you rather receive?
    • a) public acknowledgment
    • b) private thanks
  3. If you were to receive something tangible, what would you prefer?
    • a) a gift
    • b) a raise, bonus, or promotion
  4. If somebody helps you with a project, which of the following would make you happier?
    • a) They provide moral support and encouragement
    • b) They find ways to help you be more efficient and more effective
  5. How do you get through a job that you hate?
    • a) tackling it and just getting it done
    • b) breaking it down it chunks and giving myself a break after each piece is complete

At this point, you may be wondering what any of these have to do with your personality. Well, these answers can actually reveal a lot about your personality. Let’s start with question one. If you answered A, you are likely to have a reserved personality and prefer to suss a job out before jumping in. If you answered B, you may be more outgoing and willing to jump right into a task, but then struggle to maintain momentum. For question two, if you answered A, you are probably an extrovert who craves recognition and social interaction. If your answer was B, you’re probably more introverted and prefer to receive praise quietly. For question three, answering A shows that you are motivated by extrinsic rewards. Answering B shows that you desire practical rewards. On question four, the point is to determine if you benefit more from emotional support or practical help. Finally, question five determines whether or not you have a personality that just likes to tear into a task and chisel away at it until it is done, or if you need to take things on a little bit at a time.

Find the best tips and follow themCategorize Motivational Advice

Now that you know more about your personality and how your temperament impacts your work style and motivation, you can categorize the advice that you receive. Most of the advice tends to fall into the following categories:

1. General Advice That Works For Everybody

These are tips that work well regardless of your personality. A great example of this is the advice for improving your time management. For its development, it could be extremely useful to begin improving your traveling skills. It doesn’t matter if you are reserved or outgoing, motivated intrinsically or extrinsically, the ability to plan a trip to somewhere in advance, quickly get things together, and take only the most necessary will surely affect the performance of everyday affairs.

2. Practical Advice on Process Improvement and Efficiency

If your personality is more pragmatic and practical, you probably prefer actionable tips that help you get through tasks quickly and effectively. For example, a practical tip on prioritizing your to-do list based on your energy levels throughout the day would go into this category.

3. Tips That Focus on the Mental and the Emotional

These are tips that help you to stay motivated by giving you techniques to stay upbeat, energized, and focused. One example of this would be advice telling you to feel good about your smaller accomplishments as well as your bigger ones. Another example would be the advice to take breaks as you work to maintain good emotional energy.

4. Tips That Focus on Rewards

These are tips that encourage you to provide yourself with some type of reward for sticking to and completing a particular task. These tips advise you to give yourself something that you desire in turn for doing what you need to do. These awards can be intrinsic or extrinsic.

Depending on your personality type, the tips that fall into some of these categories may be utterly useless to you. Ignore these tips, and stick with the ones the categories that are the best fit. Soon, you will have a collection of great motivational advice that you can choose from, depending on each particular situation.

About the author

Ben Brychta – MBA student from San Jose, CA. He is a big movie classics fan and also a beginner in blogging. He loves to share his opinion on different things happening in the spheres of the film industry, motivation, and lifestyle. Follow him on Twitter.

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