Set Your Motivation On Fire
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What about obstacles and challenges?

Throughout life, people face all kinds of obstacles and challenges. You experience stress daily and as a normal individual, you use a variety of behaviors and mechanisms to overcome the stress and continue to function and grow as a human being.

Without the capacity to deal with stress, you will break down and suffer psychological and emotional trauma in different levels. The degree and duration of the stress will also determine your ability to withstand it.

For example, you are in a classroom setting and the teacher asks all of you to write a composition. If all of your classmates got an ‘A’ and you got a ‘B’, you may consider this occasion a stressor. You will feel some disappointment and sadness about the situation and it is up to you whether you plan to write a better composition next time or give up thinking you’re never really good at writing.

A more severe example would be psychiatric patients who used to be normally functioning young individuals but experienced child abuse or home violence resulting in their present condition.

How does motivation fit into the picture?

Motivation allows you to maintain the drive and tenacity to overcome stress by hanging on to the needed mental and emotional state. For every kind of stress, a certain kind of behavior and manner of thinking are also required to overcome it, which is why motivation is essential in order to maintain that behavior and manner of thinking. Motivation is not about the emotion you are feeling but rather how long you can stick to that emotion.

Motivation is also not the same thing as personality but it is the factor that brings out the needed emotion to accomplish any given task.

Are motivation and the obstacles and challenges related?

Yes. Motivation and the obstacles and challenges in life are very much related since these are the triggers that will make you grow as a human being and do something good with your life. One way or another, you will set goals for yourself and only by facing and overcoming the different stresses in life and staying motivated will you be able to emerge victorious.

At some point, you will definitely be in a situation when problems seem too big and become apparently insurmountable. Only by developing your strategies and applying some techniques will you be able to boost your motivation into a fiery one, thus overcoming all the odds. Most people remain unyielding to stress only to surrender when the obstacles and challenges reach a higher level because motivation can also falter based on the degree and duration of stress.

If you learn how to set your motivation on fire, especially during the toughest times, you will realize how much stronger and persevering you have become to face all other trials in life.