Student Blog: Maintaining Motivation

Motivation to start and continue studying is the make and break of all successful students. Finding motivation in small everyday instances and having an overarching motivational goal is what gets you through each session. This motivation can help you find positivity within your work and as such, fundamentally impact learning in a progressive manner.

An overarching motivation may come in many forms, for example, ask yourself why you started studying in the first place? You might come up with an answer like, “I started studying in order to study a course I like at university” or “I started studying so I can have a solid ATAR to use later in life.” Maintaining positivity during this exercise is key, but this can provide a spark of motivation when you seem you find none. You could even write this overarching motivation down and stick it somewhere on your workspace, this will remind you every time you’re not feeling too motivated to crack into your work and get it done.

Motivation can also be derived from small rewarding things, these will help you power through the work you’re doing after your main motivation has kicked in. These can come in many forms:

A productive clean workspace

Small treats to eat while studying (one treat per paragraph etc.)

Challenging yourself to construct a set of neat notes

Small everyday motivation can come in any form that pleases you, as long as you find yourself encouraged to work towards it, it works!

If finding motivation in both of these forms fails, then you need to find the root cause of your inability to find a solid motivation and this most often comes in the form of procrastination. Reflecting on the reason you procrastinate and cutting it completely out or restricting the time you spend doing it will free up the room in order to find motivation. Procrastination can come in the form of friends, video games, tv, social media or just letting the topic of study overwhelm you. Breaking your material down into achievable chunks of work is another method which may make finding motivation a bit easier. Having smaller bits of work to do over a longer period makes a task seem smaller and will prevent you from being overwhelmed, furthermore if you are able to develop this method of breaking your work down into a habit, procrastination will no longer become a part of your daily struggle to study.

Overall, with the differing forms of motivation and personal reflection on what is withholding you from your work, you will eventually be motivated to get your work done. Developing studying into a habit is one of the strongest ways to maintain motivation and make sure procrastination doesn’t control your attitude towards your work.