Motivation and Working from Home

Working from home can be one of the most rewarding ways to develop your business. It can also come with a fair amount of unavoidable challenges. One of the most challenging issues facing work from home professionals is staying motivated! Self discipline and maintaining motivation is one of the most common reasons work at home businesses fail. It is fair to say that it can be quite difficult to maintain self discipline without a boss lurking over your head. It is far to easy to get side-tracked and lose focus when you are on your own. However, understanding the framework behind motivation might make a difference. Bear with the psycho-babble just for a minute., it will shed a new light on motivation. Coming from a psychological point of view, the framework for staying or increasing motivation is meeting your psychological needs of competence; autonomy; relatedness. In a nutshell, autonomy refers to one's ability to make choices for themselves . Competence is the possession of a required skill, knowledge or capacity and relatedness is the process of kinship or being connected to someone with like-minded goals (Reeves, 2009).
Keeping these psychological needs in mind, here are 5 Tips for meeting those needs and increasing your motivation.
1) Structure is important, but so is balance. Make a schedule that works for you, you are in charge. Make sure you schedule time for yourself and those that are important to you. Listen to your favorite music, meditate or just take a walk in the park. Getting in touch with your soul opens up your creative channels and increases energy levels.
2) Don't let daunting tasks overwhelm you. If you break large projects into smaller more "do-able" tasks, the less likely you are to get burnt out. Stepping away from a large project and then returning to it later brings on new perspectives and new ideas. Breaking it down and setting mini deadlines will allow you to complete a quality project while still meeting your final deadline.
3) Keep Learning - You have already proven you have the competence necessary to start your own business, but never stop learning. Take a class in something that interests you, begin a new hobby or check out an educational video from the library on a topic that always interested you. It doesn't have to take much time or cost any money to educate yourself. Learning only increases the capacity for the creative process.
4) Start networking with like-minded people. Find a blog or forum that peaks your interest. Learning from others and bouncing ideas back and forth is a great way to get those creative juices flowing. Networking is not only a great way to enhance creativity but it is also a great way to meet prospective clients. Certainly, money and new business is always a great way to enhance motivation.
5) Think outside the box and expose yourself to new cultures or things that are outside your comfort zone. A culture shock from time to time reinvigorates the senses and often leads to a curiosity of cultural differences. Go to a renaissance fair, volunteer at a homeless shelter or rent a foreign film, whatever you enjoy.