Ten Ways to Deal With a Lack of Motivation in Your Career

Updated on JANUARY 02, 2020 by JOSEPH MERCER

Being in a career with a lack of motivation is a good way to become stagnant and find yourself in the same place for a long period of time. A lack of motivation can lead to a lack of upward momentum and some people even experience depression. Most people have at least one point in their career where they experience a lack of motivation. The good news is that there are multiple ways you can deal with a lack of motivation.

Know Your Career and Your Career Path

It isn’t uncommon to take a job just to get your foot in the door to an industry. Just being in a career though. You need to determine what career you want to go into.

After you know what career you want to take up, you are going to need to decide what the path to your end goal is. Do you want to end up as a director? Running your own business? Manager? Etc. How are you going to get there? You may want to move from being in your position to being in a senior position doing what you do, to becoming a manager, and so on. Chart out your career path and save this chart, along with all of the other material you use when following these tips so you can reference it later.

Take A Look At All You Have Done

Chances are that if you are starting to lack motivation in your career you have been in the field for a while. No matter what you do for work if you have been in the field a while you have had a chance to leave your mark. Take a look at all of the work you have done. That work is an accomplishment you should be proud of.

Use that accomplishment to motivate you to continue doing well and to exceed your past performance. Challenge yourself to do more.

Set Goals For Yourself

Along the same lines as the first tip, you can use goals that you establish for future work to help as motivation. Create a list of achievable goals that you can use as a reference while you work to achieve them. Without written goals, most people have a hard time following through.

Make sure that your goals have milestones so that your progress can be tracked. Progress helps to build motivation in between the achievement of individual goals. For example, if your goal is to make 50 sales in a month, a milestone might be to be halfway there in the middle of the month.

Take Stock and Be Patient

Sometimes we tend to expect forward momentum consistently throughout our careers. This is rather unfair to ourselves. We can’t move forward until we have thoroughly learned our current position and had the time to demonstrate it as such.

Take a few deep breaths when you are feeling a lack of motivation and remember this is helping you get to where you want to be.

Make Time To Sleep

According to the CDC, only 2 out of every 3 Americans get enough sleep. Per the guidelines that the CDC has set forth, they recommend that an adult get no less than 7 hours of sleep in order to function properly and recuperate every day.

Being emotionally and physically exhausted often stems from a lack of sleep. If either or both happen, you will have a very hard time finding your motivation. For the sake of your career, it is important to make time to sleep.

Many will argue that they are too busy every day to get enough sleep. Sleep is important enough that you need to make time to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep, if not more. With sleep, you will find that you will be energized and ready to work.

Take A Vacation

A good amount of the time when we start to lack motivation it is because we haven’t taken a break from work. Doing the same thing every day can quickly get tiresome and feel repetitive. Take a break away from work and relax.

If your current employer does not offer adequate vacation time, it may be time to move your career to a new place of business.

Find A Mentor

Most businesses do not have a formal membership program, although that is slowly changing. Big companies like Intel, General Electric, Time Warner Cable, Boeing, and Liberty Mutual have high-quality mentorship programs in place. For those of us who work at a company that doesn’t have one of these programs in place, we need to find our own mentor

.

Once you have a mentor they will help you to develop a plan for your career. They can’t tell you what your motivation is or where you should go but they can help you work to discover it.

It May Be Time To Move Up

Sometimes a lack of motivation is a sign that you have been in your position too long and it is time to move up or start learning to take a new position. Start looking into new positions at your employer or studying content that will help you move up.

Consider Moving To A New Company

Not every company is the same to work for. Every company has different benefits packages and different specific niches. Take a look at your company and evaluate if it is where you truly want to work. If the answer is no, it is time to look for a new employer so you can start to find your motivation again.

Change Your Work Environment

It can be pretty difficult to find motivation in a career if the workplace isn’t designed to fuel motivation. Take a look at your environment and determine if it needs a change.

The first thing to do to make an environment motivational is to make it a caring and visually appealing environment. Stock white walls with no decorations and glaring fluorescent lights make a place feel inhuman. A little decoration can go a long way towards motivating employees.

By adding standing desks or desks that can raise, you can get employees off their feet and help to stimulate blood flow. With this ability, they will be better able to find their motivation.

These are just a few tips to change your environment. If you don’t have your own office, talk with your employer to get permission to change your environment. Going into that discussion armed with statistics, facts, information, and sources can help you to demonstrate to an employer how the changes can benefit their business.

Using these tips you can start to overcome a lack of motivation. An important part of that is being committed to success. If you do not commit you will find yourself having trouble discovering your motivation. Get out there now and seize your career.

Thank you for reading — it means a lot to me. I appreciate your sharing as well. Please follow me on Medium, Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn — I’d love to connect and be a part of your network team. On social media I share my own articles, but also those that I find helpful and relevant to business, success, entrepreneurship, leadership, community enhancement, and personal development. You can find out more about us at www.career-moviation.com.