Motivation in life is a rare commodity
Like other things in life that are precious, motivation is a rare commodity, and that is probably why it is precious.
When you are in the company of someone, whether a friend, a family member, or a person that you just met on the street, depending on their mood at the moment, they will influence you and convey to you their own feelings, thoughts, and ideas.
For example, by sharing a positive experience with you, they will subconsciously affect your mood in a positive way, as they let you see that good things can indeed happen in life.
In fact, good things happen in life all the time; we only need to reveal them by knowing how and where to look for.
Looking for motivation within ourselves
Contrary to general belief, the best place to look for motivation is within ourselves.
Although external motivation can work and bring results, these results will probably only be temporary; once the external factor that motivated us is no longer there to push us to perform at a high level, we may reduce our performance, unless we have learned to look within ourselves for a true and endless source of motivation to get us going in the long run.
My motivation for holding the plank
From a very young age, I learned to set goals both at school and in life, in general.
About 75-80% of the time, I managed to achieve those goals, and I am quite happy with such a performance; reaching a 100% performance was never my goal, and will probably never be, so I let others set such high goals to themselves. I am happy with what I can actually do and achieve.
There are videos on YouTube with people holding the plank for one, three, five, or ten minutes, and for me, this is a feat in itself.
These very people was my original external motivation for setting a goal to hold the plank for God knows how long.
Holding the plank for just ten seconds
I knew that I wouldn’t be able to compete straight away with those people, and hold the plank, let’s say, for ten minutes from day one.
I felt that I needed some sort of internal motivation, and I found this motivation by setting a small target to achieve every time, like taking a small step on my way of reaching the ultimate goal.
This suited me well, and I thought that this type of mindset would help me to keep going in the long run, rather than quitting the effort after just a couple of days.
Could I easily hold the plank for ten seconds?
Yes, I could!
So, this is what I did on day one.
On my way to 180 seconds
After holding the plank for ten seconds, I literally couldn’t wait for day two to come, so that I could try holding it for another ten seconds, that is twenty seconds in total.
Even though this was slightly more difficult than holding it for ten seconds, I smoothly accomplished the task of twenty seconds.
So, I kept adding ten seconds every day.
Within 18 days, I could hold the plank for 180 seconds, that is three minutes.
At this point, I felt that I had reached the 75-80% performance target that I told you about earlier in this post.
Since I didn’t want to become a champion or break any world records, I was quite happy with my end result.
My body felt stronger and healthier, and the same also applied to my mind.
It only took me a few minutes every day to reach this final goal, and I could make it by keeping things simple and feeling happy with setting small, achievable goals every time.