Motivating yourself

Picture credit: sasint

Good day...

As a project manager it is inevitable that you are the center of the project you are running. In other words, all lights on you. If you are enthusiastic then the team you are leading will be energized with your enthusiasm. On the other hand, once you loose heart about your project, you will set a negative atmosphere to your project.

With this in mind, it is critical to keep yourself well motivated and highly optimistic of the project you are running. Is it easy? Of course not, especially when the project is running for a longer duration, say more than 1 year. As a human you will find that your mood and emotion might undergo ups and downs. Nevertheless, you must try your best to continuously release positive energy to your surrounding.

In this posting, I will try to share some tips with regard to maintaining your positive energy at an optimum level:

1. Keep your professional and personal life balance. It is important to have a healthy personal life outside of your professional career. Managing a warm family, allocating your time to do your hobby, going for vacation and reading more books are examples of things you might to do outside of your working time. Many studies have evidenced that a healthy personal life is well reflected to your professional achievement.

2. When commencing a project, begins with the end goal in mind. Keeping a clear vision what you are going to achieve once the project goes live will keep you moving forward toward your goal. It is also helpful to visualize over and over again the rewarding experience you will get once you announce a successful go live, including cheers from your team, congratulations from your leaders, or even publicity in internal and external media to the organization.

3. Build a positive alliance with your team, key stakeholders, project sponsors, vendors and customers. I found that it is always helpful to build a team with positive mindset and attitude. Surrounded by positive people will keep the positive energy within you. As a normal human being, we always need someone or a group of people to cheer for us and help us up whenever we go down an emotional valley.

4. It is also particularly important to have your team backing you up whenever you are facing a roadblock or a challenging situation. In my experience, we were faced to challenging key stakeholders and high pressure from the management in delivering the digital project. It is the support from each team member and the sense of togetherness that kept us going in delivering the project into its final state.

5. Lastly but very important is to keep your spiritual healthy. Maintaining a close relationship with GOD by taking your personal time with HIM and worshiping HIM in accordance to your personal belief is truly essential to keep your performance and motivation high.

I'm sure you can share more on this topic. Please feel free to share your own tips and experience for others to also learn from you.

Edwin